Former V.P. Joe Biden talks about free speech and the First Amendment during a conference at the University of Delaware.
Archive for the ‘Whys & wherefores’ Category
The rise of victimhood on campus
March 8, 2017Here’s an interesting excerpt from a presentation given by Jonathon Haidt last October at Duke University.
The full, hour-long presentation was called “Two incompatible sacred values in American universities“, if you care to watch it.
Haidt’s comments reminded me of ones by Thomas Sowell in this clip from an C-SPAN interview in 1990. This clip is a 13-minute excerpt (also by YouTuber Gravitahn).
Here’s the full, hour-long C-SPAN interview.
Update: And here’s a third excerpt; this one’s from Nadine Strossen’s keynote address at a conference held by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). Ms. Strossen was formerly the president of the ACLU.
Strossen’s full presentation (42 minutes).
Since I don’t spend any time on college campuses, nor much time around college students, I can’t say how accurate these assessments and recommendations are from first-hand knowledge.
But I find these interesting because they seem to agree with so much of what I read in the daily news. It’s always possible that the news is full of hyperbole, of course, but there seems to be a lot of reports on this topic and they tend to agree with one another, regardless of their sources.
Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it
February 24, 2017Recently I came across a clip by Dave Rubin (via Carpe Diem), which led me to watching other videos on his YouTube channel.
Here’s a very recent clip of Dave talking about something I’ve been wondering about myself: how the current political turmoil will resolve itself into something more like normal.
This clip is one of his monologues. He may be better known for his dialogues: one-on-one interviews and there are many of those.
I was thrilled to find somebody making a go at talking up the Classical Liberalism array of thought. I hope he continues doing that.
As for this clip, the call for people to study history and to develop their own ideas for the role of government is one I certainly agree with. The last presidential election left me with a very strong feeling that we may be headed for the days of Bread and Circuses.
But on second thought, I’m encouraged by recalling one of my favorite quotes from Margaret Thatcher:
Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.
We’ve done it before.
Why speech must be free
February 19, 2017Here’s Jordan Peterson speaking late last month* about why free speech is a necessity.
I think he made several very good points (a) about how people think by talking, (b) that suppressing that talk is never a good idea, and (c) about the limits of the U.S. Constitution, which is intended to limit bad players in government.
* From the YouTube notes:
On January 23, 2017, the Runnymede Society at Queen’s University law school hosted a mock debate between Jordan Peterson and Bruce Pardy (playing devil’s advocate) on the subject of Bill C-16, specifically on gender pronoun usage, and broadly on speech legislation. This video is an excerpt from the Q&A portion that followed.
The full video is available on both Runnymede Society’s channel and Jordan Peterson’s channel.
On Peterson’s channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAQlleqDgbI
On Runnymede Society channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzkNHpiJ7AE
Just shut up and president
January 23, 2017My late mother-in-law (may she rest in peace) was a big fan of the British royal family. She even subscribed to magazines about them. ‘Struth. As you might imagine, the Windsor family was a topic we didn’t talk about often. But we got on extremely well otherwise.
Once, while touring Britain with my in-laws, we stopped for the night at a pretty cool old English inn called the Wheatsheaf hotel. I think it was this place in Lincolnshire but I’m not certain. (‘Wheatsheaf’ is the name of several inns and hotels in the UK.)
Since we’d arrived late in the day, we headed for the public room to find a cool glass of and to meet the locals. We succeeded. And before long, I heard MIL telling some of those locals that she thought the U.S. needed a royal family too. Sigh…
So I liked this post by Warren Meyer at Coyoteblog. Plus, it’s a three-fer: Meyer, Boudreaux, and Williamson all make good points on this topic.
I have been watching the Crown as well as the new PBS Victoria series, and it got me to thinking. Wow, it sure does seem useful to have a single figurehead into which the public can pour all the sorts of adulation and voyeurism that they seem to crave. That way, the people get folks who can look great at parties and make heart-felt speeches and be charismatic and set fashion trends and sound empathetic and even scold us on minor things. All without giving up an ounce of liberty. The problem in the US is we use the Presidency today to fulfill this societal need, but in the process can’t help but imbue the office with more and more arbitrary power. Let’s split the two roles.
Update: Don Boudreaux writes:
A Trump presidency comes along with awful risks for Americans. Yet one very real silver-lining is that Trump’s over-the-top buffoonery and manic barking like a dog at every little thing that goes bump in his sight, along with his chronic inability even to appear to be thoughtful and philosophical and reflective and aware that he is not the center of the universe, might – just might – scrub off some of the ridiculous luster that has built up on on the U.S. Presidency over the course of the past 90 or so years. Let us hope.
He also links a good article from Kevin Williamson on the cult of the Presidency
In this vein, I recommend Gene Healey’s book The Cult of the Presidency. You can read it for free.
Here’s an interesting anecdote that I read recently: many Swiss people can’t tell you who their president is. It turns out that the Swiss president is simply the presiding member of the seven-member Swiss Federal Council.
Wouldn’t that be a nice change? A president who does the job in quiet anonymity? A servant of the people who doesn’t think of the job as director of a reality TV show?
The cost of political correctness?
November 11, 2016These are a few interesting items I came across in the last two days about how the current atmosphere of political correctness may have affected Tuesday’s election.
What occasionally strikes me is that many organizations, including our government, are so invested in regulating diversity of race, sex, and gender that they’re doing so at the expense of diversity of opinion. The antidote to free speech you don’t like is more free speech, not less. Let speakers open their mouths and show themselves to be fools*.
Likewise, the antidote to those who break laws to harm people (or to damage property) is to prosecute them for those crimes. Allowing your government to increase penalties for hate crimes is just giving it power that it might someday use it against you — when a later set or governors decides to redefine "hate".
Robby Soave writes at Reason (my emphasis):
Trump Won Because Leftist Political Correctness Inspired a Terrifying Backlash
What every liberal who didn’t see this coming needs to understandMany will say Trump won because he successfully capitalized on blue collar workers’ anxieties about immigration and globalization. Others will say he won because America rejected a deeply unpopular alternative. Still others will say the country is simply racist to its core.
But there’s another major piece of the puzzle, and it would be a profound mistake to overlook it. Overlooking it was largely the problem, in the first place.
Trump won because of a cultural issue that flies under the radar and remains stubbornly difficult to define, but is nevertheless hugely important to a great number of Americans: political correctness.
More specifically, Trump won because he convinced a great number of Americans that he would destroy political correctness. […]
Katherine Timpf at National Review had this to say:
Classes Being Canceled Because Trump Won Is Why Trump Won
So, Donald Trump won the presidential election, and colleges and universities around the country are predictably canceling classes and exams because students are predictably too devastated to be able to do their schoolwork.
It’s everywhere. […]
Reading all of these stories, I really have to wonder: Do any of these people realize that this kind of behavior is exactly why Donald Trump won? The initial appeal of Donald Trump was that he served as a long-awaited contrast to the infantilization and absurd demands for political correctness and "safe spaces" sweeping our society, and the way these people are responding is only reminding Trump voters why they did what they did. […]
The headline of Ms. Timpf’s article reminds me of the headline of Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone about Brexit: The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened.
Here’s Jonathon Pie (British comedian Tom Walker) with a hilarious rant about why he thinks Trump got elected – and why Brexit happened and why the Tories rule England. Mind the volume: the language gets a little salty.
The only comment I’ll add to this monologue is that in addition to being shamed by the dominant media stories of their opponents, potential Trump voters may also have been shamed by things Trump himself said or did. I’m guessing it got a little complicated for some of them.
Jonah Goldberg (also at NR) writes about priorities in the Democrat party:
The party of obsession with diversity forgot about bread-and-butter issues
[…] Liberals want to claim that racism explains it all. That’s a hard claim to square with the fact that a great many of the blue-collar counties that favored Barack Obama — the first black president, in case you hadn’t heard — by double digits also favored Trump by double digits.
The fact that so many liberals went straight to this explanation gives you a sense of why the Democrats lost the white working class in the first place. The Democratic party went crazy for issues that appeal to the new Democratic base: campus leftists, affluent cosmopolitan whites, and racial minorities.
One obvious example is diversity. There’s nothing wrong with placing a high value on racial, sexual, and gender inclusion. But Democrats have earned the reputation of being obsessed with it to the exclusion of bread-and-butter issues.
Moreover, by constantly invoking the primacy of identity politics for minorities and immigrants, they encouraged many whites to see themselves as an aggrieved racial or religious constituency. That genie will be hard to get back into the bottle. […]
*IMO, we’re all ‘Children of Eve’ and I don’t care whether you take that to mean the Evolutionary Eve, the Biblical Eve, or a figurative Eve of Enlightened Self-Interest on a global scale. Treat your cousins well.
Who’s against electricity?
October 22, 2016In this snippet, Jay Nordlinger is talking with Ojars Kalnins, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Latvian parliament. This exchange appeared in an article Nordlinger wrote for National Review. (‘I’ refers to Nordlinger and ‘he’ to Kalnins.)
He and I talk about America’s connectedness to the rest of the world. “Globalization is here to stay,” he says. “Being anti-globalist is sort of like being anti-electricity. The question is not globalization but how we use it. What we do with it. We can’t get rid of the Internet,” etc.
I loved the comparison of globalization to electricity. Well said, Mr. Kalnins.
What song the sirens sang
September 16, 2016I’d heard about this forum at Cato and was curious about it. So I’m glad Ron Bailey wrote this summary article for Reason’s blog. It’s hard to excerpt so I’ve just included a few snippets from it. RTWT though.
Why Is Socialism So Damned Attractive?
What is the attraction of socialism?The Cato Institute held a policy forum Wednesday to consider that question, featuring talks from the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt and the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.
One problem they quickly encountered was how to define socialism in the first place. Is it pervasive, state-directed central planning? A Scandinavian-style safety net? Something else? Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who pursued the Democratic presidential nomination while describing himself as a socialist, attracted a big following among voters under age 30. But most of those voters actually rejected the idea of the government running businesses or owning the means of production; they tended to be safety-net redistributionists who want to tax the rich to pay for health care and college education. And this was, in fact, the platform Sanders was running on.
Cosmides then turned to a fascinating 2014 study in The Journal of Politics by the Danish political scientists Lene Aarøe and Michael Bang Petersen. Aarøe and Petersen found that certain cues could turn supposedly individualistic Americans into purportedly welfare-state loving Danes, and vice versa. […]
In that experiment, researchers asked 2,000 Danes and Americans to react to three cases involving a person on welfare. In one, they had no background information on the welfare client. In the second, he lost his job due to an injury and was actively looking for new work. In the third, he has never looked for a job at all. The Danes turned out to be slightly more likely than the Americans to assume that the person they knew nothing about was on welfare because of bad luck. But both Americans and Danes were no different in opposing welfare for the lazy guy and strongly favoring it for the unlucky worker. “When we assess people on welfare, we use certain [evolved] psychological mechanisms to spot anyone who might be cheating,” Michael Bang Petersen explained in press release about the study. “We ask ourselves whether they are motivated to give something back to me and society. And these mechanisms are more powerful than cultural differences.”
The next panelist, John Tooby, turned to those counterproductive attitudes. Tooby has long been puzzled that so many of his colleagues are not struck by facts like Hong Kong’s amazing economic success. (Its GDP increased 180-fold between 1961 and 1996 while per capita GDP increased 87-fold and inequality fell.) […]
The chief problem, he suggested, is that many people are beguiled by “romantic socialism”—that is, they imagine what their personal lives would be like if everyone shared and treated one another like family. We evolved in small bands that were an individual’s only protection from starvation, victimization, and inter-group aggression. People feel vulnerable if their band does not exist. Such sentiments are more or less appropriate when people lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers composed mostly of kin, but they fail spectacularly when navigating a world of strangers cooperating in global markets.
The third speaker was Jonathan Haidt, whose research explores the intuitive ethics that undergird the psychological foundations of morality. His goal is to reconcile the universal human behavior identified by evolutionary psychology with the cultural variations highlighted by anthropology. He and his colleagues have identified six moral foundations, but he focused on just three during the session. Those three were care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression.
In contemporary politics, liberals are chiefly concerned about care and harm. They see fairness mostly as equality of outcomes. He illustrated this with photos taken during the Occupy Wall Street episode in Zuccotti Park. (One Occupy sign, for instance, read “Tax the Rich Fair and Square.”) On the other hand, conservatives see fairness has proportionality; if you work hard, you get to keep the rewards. Haidt showed a Tea Party sign that read, “Stop Punishing Success—Stop Rewarding Failure.” […]
Another Occupy Wall Street placard shown in Haidt’s presentation said “Equality Now! Liberty Later.” In response to that sentiment, Haidt quoted Milton Friedman: “A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but it will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed.”
How the cosmos knows itself
September 10, 2016Amanda Gefter writes an interesting column about how we got here from there… whatever ‘there’ means.
It’s fairly lengthy but interesting if you like efforts to unite philosophy and physics. I enjoyed it, at any event.
The Bridge From Nowhere
How is it possible to get something from nothing?“The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.” So concluded William James in thinking about that most basic of riddles: how did something come from nothing? The question infuriates, James realized, because it demands an explanation while denying the very possibility of explanation. “From nothing to being there is no logical bridge,” he wrote.
In science, explanations are built of cause and effect. But if nothing is truly nothing, it lacks the power to cause. It’s not simply that we can’t find the right explanation—it’s that explanation itself fails in the face of nothing. […]
If you recognized the title of this post, you’ll know it reminded me of something Carl Sagan said.
A few interesting essays
August 8, 2016I found all three of these to be pretty interesting reads. They’re loosely related. Since they’re too long to excerpt in a way that does them justice, I suppose you’ll have to take on faith my recommendation that your read them. (Then again, you can stop reading at any time, right?)
From The Breakthrough, a forecast for world population:
The Politics and Ecology of Zero Population Growth
Having calmed down from the overblown twentieth-century fears of overpopulation, the world has yet to grapple with the end of population growth–and even de-population–that will occur this century. As Paul Robbins observes, global population growth rates peaked in the 1970s, and if current trends continue, some countries could see their citizenries substantially depleted in the coming decades. As native populations in Germany and the United Kingdom dwindle, replaced by immigrants from rapidly growing countries in Africa and Asia, a surge in nationalism and cultural upheaval is already apparent. What comes next depends on how governments and civil society this radical new order of things. […]
At The American Interest, Jonathon Haidt writes about nationalist movements. It reminded me a little of what Matt Taibbi said about Brexit: “The reaction to Brexit is the reason Brexit happened.”
When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism
And how moral psychology can help explain and reduce tensions between the two.What on earth is going on in the Western democracies? From the rise of Donald Trump in the United States and an assortment of right-wing parties across Europe through the June 23 Brexit vote, many on the Left have the sense that something dangerous and ugly is spreading: right-wing populism, seen as the Zika virus of politics. Something has gotten into “those people” that makes them vote in ways that seem—to their critics—likely to harm their own material interests, at least if their leaders follow through in implementing isolationist policies that slow economic growth. […]
Finally, Jonathon Rauch writes at The Atlantic:
How American Politics Went Insane
It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.It’s 2020, four years from now. The campaign is under way to succeed the president, who is retiring after a single wretched term. Voters are angrier than ever—at politicians, at compromisers, at the establishment. Congress and the White House seem incapable of working together on anything, even when their interests align. With lawmaking at a standstill, the president’s use of executive orders and regulatory discretion has reached a level that Congress views as dictatorial—not that Congress can do anything about it, except file lawsuits that the divided Supreme Court, its three vacancies unfilled, has been unable to resolve.
On Capitol Hill, Speaker Paul Ryan resigned after proving unable to pass a budget, or much else. The House burned through two more speakers and one “acting” speaker, a job invented following four speakerless months. The Senate, meanwhile, is tied in knots by wannabe presidents and aspiring talk-show hosts, who use the chamber as a social-media platform to build their brands by obstructing—well, everything. The Defense Department is among hundreds of agencies that have not been reauthorized, the government has shut down three times, and, yes, it finally happened: The United States briefly defaulted on the national debt, precipitating a market collapse and an economic downturn. No one wanted that outcome, but no one was able to prevent it.
As the presidential primaries unfold, Kanye West is leading a fractured field of Democrats. The Republican front-runner is Phil Robertson, of Duck Dynasty fame. Elected governor of Louisiana only a few months ago, he is promising to defy the Washington establishment by never trimming his beard. Party elders have given up all pretense of being more than spectators, and most of the candidates have given up all pretense of party loyalty. On the debate stages, and everywhere else, anything goes. […]
Are you fated to read this?
July 11, 2016Several weeks ago, I came across this article at The Atlantic.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will
But we’re better off believing in it anyway.
"Another report about fMRI," I thought and, sure enough, that’s what it turned out to be. I assumed it would be another exercise in jumping to a conclusion. But see for yourself.
What really piqued my interest was this paragraph from that article:
In another study, for instance, Vohs and colleagues measured the extent to which a group of day laborers believed in free will, then examined their performance on the job by looking at their supervisor’s ratings. Those who believed more strongly that they were in control of their own actions showed up on time for work more frequently and were rated by supervisors as more capable. In fact, belief in free will turned out to be a better predictor of job performance than established measures such as self-professed work ethic.
I’m not sure why the author (or the researchers) think this demonstrates that free will is illusory. I’d say it shows the contrary. Want to be well-regarded at work? Get yer ass outta bed and get ‘er done, son. And who cares how belief in free will correlates to belief in "self-professed work ethic"? Those could be two facets of the same character trait, IMO.
I’ve always had some fundamental problems with reports that fMRI studies show that free will doesn’t exist based on the timing of events in the brain.
I’ve never studied neuroscience. But I have debugged any number of race conditions in software. My take-away from those is that it’s usually very difficult to tell what’s cause and what’s effect until you’ve solved the problem completely: that is, until you can describe all the states and their interactions in sufficient detail to prove your point. Just modeling those things can be a difficult first step.
I was pretty sure (and still am) that the fMRI guys couldn’t do that for human brains.
But back to the news… Last week, I came across this article at The Register (a U.K.-based geek site).
fMRI bugs could upend years of research
This is what your brain looks like on bad dataA whole pile of “this is how your brain looks like” fMRI-based science has been potentially invalidated because someone finally got around to checking the data.
The problem is simple: to get from a high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging scan of the brain to a scientific conclusion, the brain is divided into tiny “voxels”. Software, rather than humans, then scans the voxels looking for clusters.
When you see a claim that “scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it”, they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software.
Now, boffins from Sweden and the UK have cast doubt on the quality of the science, because of problems with the statistical software: it produces way too many false positives. […]
"Oh ho," I thought. "Let’s google this one more time…" And that search turned up this very interesting article.
Neuroscience and Free Will Are Rethinking Their Divorce
Back in the 1980s, the American scientist Benjamin Libet made a surprising discovery that appeared to rock the foundations of what it means to be human. He recorded people’s brain waves as they made spontaneous finger movements while looking at a clock, with the participants telling researchers the time at which they decided to waggle their fingers. Libet’s revolutionary finding was that the timing of these conscious decisions was consistently preceded by several hundred milliseconds of background preparatory brain activity (known technically as “the readiness potential”).
The implication was that the decision to move was made nonconsciously, and that the subjective feeling of having made this decision is tagged on afterward. In other words, the results implied that free will as we know it is an illusion — after all, how can our conscious decisions be truly free if they come after the brain has already started preparing for them? […]
It’s all science. And science is rarely as "settled" as non-technical people think it should be.
Anyone need the services of a former MEP?
June 24, 2016Daniel Hannan argued that voters should fire him from his job as MEP by voting for Brexit. He got his wish.
Can this cat talk or what? What an orator! His closing lines here are by Tennyson:
“Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are”
I don’t know whether Brexit was a good move or not. I hope it was because Mr. Hannan makes such good sense on other, related topics. ‘Twould be a pity if he were wrong about this one.
Update 2: The headline of Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone piece says it all:
The Reaction to Brexit Is the Reason Brexit Happened
If you believe there’s such a thing as “too much democracy,” you probably don’t believe in democracy at allIn 1934, at the dawn of the Stalinist Terror, the great Russian writer Isaac Babel offered a daring quip at the International Writers Conference in Moscow:
“Everything is given to us by the party and the government. Only one right is taken away: the right to write badly.”
As a rule, people resent being saved from themselves. And if you think depriving people of their right to make mistakes makes sense, you probably never had respect for their right to make decisions at all.
This is all relevant in the wake of the Brexit referendum, in which British citizens narrowly voted to exit the European Union. […]
Update: Here’s an interesting column about Brexit at Hit & Run.
‘Who Rules Over You?’ Is Democracy’s Most Important Question
If there shouldn’t have been a Brexit referendum, should there even be elections?The Washington Post headline bluntly declares “Brexit is a reminder that some things just shouldn’t be decided by referendum.” [Sounds like Mr. Hannan quoting Jean-Claude Juncker, doesn’t it? Ed.]
Writer Emily Badger, whose focus is generally on urban policy, brings up American ballot initiatives—particularly those in California — as an example of how referendums can lead to bad outcomes, or rather outcomes that certain people don’t like.
After talking about a handful of Brits who publicly regret their vote (keep in mind that millions of people voted to leave), Badger points out correctly that public referendums can be used to undermine democratic institutions, both purposefully by special interest groups ranging from public sector unions to private corporations by directing taxes and government programs in their directions and by simple and not-so-simple unintended (or unpublicized) consequences.
Still, even when making this point, Badger commits some possibly unconscious biases to print when she writes about California, “Back in 1978, California voters generously decided in a ballot measure to cap their own property taxes in a way — amending the state constitution — that has hobbled ever since California’s ability to generate revenue and create reasonable housing policy.” The bold emphasis is mine to point out that her idea of a problematic referendum seems to inherently be anything that restrains the authority of the state. California’s ability to generate revenue has most assuredly not been hobbled even with this one restriction. It’s got some of the highest taxes and fees in the country. She uses “hobbled” to describe the idea that there are limits to what the state of California can afford to do, assuming that these are things that should be done.
But what should also be obvious during this entire “populist” vs. “elites” political battle happening both in the United States and Europe is that representative democracy under legislators has also led to taxes and government programs being directed to interest groups and all sorts of unintended or unpublicized consequences. And it’s an issue that some these same people do not want to seem to deal with. Instead, we get the “uneducated poor people voting against their own self-interest” arguments, like we see about Wales.
These responses are of the “These communities get more money from the European Union than they pay in” vein. We have seen similar arguments about American states who get more “money” from the federal government than they pay in taxes. Such an argument ignores the fact that these targeted communities don’t actually get more “money” than what they pay into the pool; what they get is more government administration and programs put together by various interest groups that tend to direct these subsidies to those with the right connections (in other words—”elites”). […]
The question of who rules over you is an elemental, central component of having a democratic republic. Treating Brexit like it’s just some complicated but very broad referendum is ignoring the nature of the question behind it. If British citizens shouldn’t get to vote whether to be in the European Union because they don’t “understand” all the issues involved, then why should they even get to vote on their legislators? Indeed, why have them vote at all?
Markets know how to handle peaks
May 16, 2016Here’s the opening of an interesting article by Ronald Bailey at Reason.
Sliding Down the Super-Cycle: Resource Doom Postponed Indefinitely
Legendary investor Jeremy Grantham admits he was wrong about “peak everything.”
“Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever” was the title of an urgent report written by the legendary asset manager Jeremy Grantham in 2011. Grantham proclaimed the advent of a resource scarcity “paradigm shift” that was “perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.” […]
Grantham also pointed to a slowdown in crop productivity, suggesting that it would be impossible to feed the world’s burgeoning population. “How we deal with this unsustainable surge in demand and not just ‘peak oil,’ but ‘peak everything,’ is going to be the greatest challenge facing our species,” he wrote.
This week, Grantham took almost all of that back. Grantham, like a whole raft of professional doomsters, was declaring Peak Everything just as the latest economic super-cycle was cresting; many commodities’ prices peaked the very year of his report and have been drifting downward ever since. […]
In their 2012 study “Super-Cycles of Commodity Prices Since the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” economists Bilge Erten and José Antonio Ocampo — from Northeastern University and Columbia University, respectively – confirm that the commodity price increases in the first decade of this century were the result of a super-cycle upswing. Parsing real price data for nonfuel commodities such as food and metals from 1865 to 2009, they find evidence of four past super-cycles ranging in length from 30 to 40 years. […]
What he said (10)
May 16, 2016This comes from Overlawyered, riffing on a post by Paul Horwitz:
One incidental impact of a Trump presidency: mainstream law professors would develop a sudden, strange new respect for constitutional law concepts such as separation of powers and federalism, which tend to serve as checks on the power and ambition of the President and his backers. [Paul Horwitz, PrawfsBlawg]
Via CoyoteBlog
What he said (9)
January 16, 2016From Frederic Bastiat, The Law (1850), p. 22:
Socialism, like the old policy from which it emanates, confounds Government and society. And so, every time we object to a thing being done by Government, it [i.e., socialism and socialists] concludes that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of education by the State — then we are against education altogether. We object to a State religion — then we would have no religion at all. We object to an equality which is brought about by the State then we are against equality, etc., etc. They might as well accuse us of wishing men not to eat because we object to the cultivation of corn by the State.
You can read The Law here.
Los taxistas y los médicos
November 9, 2015
In the general sense, this applies equally well to Venezuela. (Even though I don’t know the salary comparisons for cabbies and doctors there.)
What I want to know
October 25, 2015Here’s a pretty grim report about what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodians.
Wikipedia has this to say about the Khmer Rouge:
The organization is remembered especially for orchestrating the Cambodian genocide, which resulted from the enforcement of its social engineering policies.[1] Its attempts at agricultural reform led to widespread famine, while its insistence on absolute self-sufficiency, even in the supply of medicine, led to the death of thousands from treatable diseases such as malaria. Arbitrary executions and torture carried out by its cadres against perceived subversive elements, or during purges of its own ranks between 1975 and 1978, are considered to have constituted genocide.[2]
It was all the usual communist agrarian nonsense again, as though the world hasn’t seen that tragedy played out enough yet.
The narrator wonders whether Hitler or Pol Pot would have pursued their policies had they witnessed the results first-hand.
But the question that interests me is this: Where do all the eager gunmen and thugs come from? Murderous dictators don’t kill people personally – instead they always have lots of other people who’re ready to kill and torture at their command.
I want to know why there are always so many people willing to do that. Why is there never a lack of people who enable murderous sociopaths by doing their dirty work? Are many of our fellow citizens ready to do the same, given the chance?
Could Hitler have pursued his racial purity nonsense without the assistance of many Germans? Could Stalin have waged his war against the Ukranian kulaks without the active help of a lot of Russians? Could the Kim family have impoverished North Korea in its pursuit of Juche without all the North Koreans who enforce its policies? Could Pol Pot have committed the Cambodian genocide without a group of Cambodians ready to smash babies against trees?
And why do the people never collectively say, "F**k a bunch of this nonsense!"? Are we collectively suicidal?
Sometimes I think humanity deserves to suffer – for its sins against itself.
No Truce With Kings 