Author: VD

Free trade reduces US income

As I have repeatedly shown, the Rising Tide school of economic thought always leaves out the fact that the rising tide must inevitably come at the expense of workers in the wealthier societies:

Branko Milanovic, a visiting professor at CUNY who once served as a senior economist at the World Bank, has tracked worldwide changes in income growth from 1998 to 2008. Milanovic calculates that the middle class in China and India experienced 60 to 70 percent income growth from 1998 to 2008, while growth stalled for the middle and working classes in the United States.

The question then becomes, in Milanovic’s words, “Does the growth of China and India take place on the back of the middle class in rich countries,” especially the United States? Milanovic does not claim a direct causal relationship, but contends that the two “may not be unrelated.”…

Entering the fray, three economists – David Autor of M.I.T., David Dorn of the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies in Spain, and Gordon Hanson of the University of California, San Diego – have analyzed the employment consequences of globalized trade and technological advance.

In a series of papers they wrote together – “Trade Adjustment: Worker Level Evidence,” “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” and “Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets” — Autor, Dorn and Hanson find that in the case of trade with China, there are very painful consequences for specific categories of American workers.

Their findings show why voters are wary of free trade agreements.

Relative to the average employee in manufacturing, workers in industries that face stronger competition from imports “garner lower cumulative earnings and are at elevated risk of exiting the labor force and obtaining public disability benefits,” Autor, Dorn and Hanson write.
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And if manufacturers are ranked on a scale of 1 to 100 for exposure to import competition from China, between 1992 and 2007, workers in firms high on the exposure scale lost nearly half a year’s pay, compared to workers in firms at the low end of the scale.

And this doesn’t even begin to get into the fact that the expansion of domestic free trade into the international arena would INEVITABLY RESULT in the same sort of labor movement that one sees in the USA. Don’t like the fact that your kids live in a different state? Well, in a true free trade regime, they might have to go to Bangladesh or Peru to find employment.

Free trade is logically incompatible with national sovereignty, the Constitution, and the maximization of human liberty. This should be obvious, as it is an aspect of globalism and a major objective of those who advocate global government.

Mailvox: the disqualification game

Stuck in the 1990s, Truth seems to think that successfully tarring someone with “raciss” is still a form of effective disqualification as he attempts to convince Tom Kratman to denounce me for my crimes of BadThink:

And how about if the claim of “ignorant half-savage” is based on
Vox’s tribe-to-society ratio or whatever it is he calls it? Would you
consider that genetic and therefore racist? Because as I recall, he
professes that blacks haven’t had enough time to adapt from savage to
social, generationally speaking. Which, is to say, he believes savagery
runs too thick in their genes. Would you consider that racist Mr.
Kratman?

I feel like your character is a higher quality than that. Of course, I have only the slightest evidence for that feeling. But I’d like it to be true. I’d love to be able to read a local sci-fi author who’s published through a major outlet. The only other I know of in this area code is Rod Belcher and I enjoyed his work. I’d probably enjoy yours. I’m just not one of those folks who can separate art and artist.

Disqualify… disqualify… disqualify. I find it amusing that Truth appears to think Tom
is sufficiently naive to fall for the rabbiting. But neither Tom nor I care what a Random Internet Rabbit defines as “racist”. By Truth’s lights, Tom is already disqualified because he admitted to being scientifically literate about genetic science.

Truth then addressed me:

I notice Mr. Kratman didn’t include, “calling black people ignorant half-savages is not racist.” What say you, Vox? Cultural or genetic marker? In the past you’ve said genetic. If not, correct me.

I will first ask a question of my own, which Truth will answer if he wishes to participate in the discussion: Truth, do you assert that there is not a single black individual in the U.S.A. who is an ignorant half-savage?

Now, in answer to Truth’s question, and contra Tom’s position, my observation is that you cannot possibly separate culture and genetics. It is logical to conclude, and it has been repeatedly observed, that cultural differences are derived from genetics. A society with an average 85 IQ will inevitably feature a very different culture than a society with an average 115 IQ. Among other things, the lower IQ culture will have shorter time preferences and its social mores will feature less consideration of the logical consequences of an individual’s actions. This is why secular progressives tend to equate intelligence with higher forms of civilization.

But it is also logical to conclude, and it has been also been observed, that genetic differences are derived from culture. A society where women have children at an average age of 18 will have genetically superior children to those produced in a society in which women have children at an average age of 35. Even something as purely cultural as the average number of children a woman bears will have tremendous genetic implications; there is reason to believe that some of the differences between r/selected and K/selected are genetic, and those genetic differences are, in part, derived from the culture that produces them.

(It must be made clear that this is NOT related to TENS in any way. We’re not dealing with the differences between species here, but intra-species differences for the most part and partial sub-species differences at most. Nor is most of the selection naturally imposed.)

In any event, the trivial thinkers who look at my time-to-civilization hypothesis and focus on its racial implications aren’t seeing its true scope, much less grasping the potential horror of it. The much more serious aspect of the hypothesis is its implication that civilization is the consequence of a centuries-long eugenic program that eventually, and inevitably, transforms itself into a dysgenic program. If the hypothesis holds, this would not only explode, once and for all, the secular conceit of linear progress, but would provide an elegant explanation for the cyclical rise and fall of civilizations as well as the observed inability of Africans to collectively reach a self-sustainable civilized standard despite the best efforts of well-intentioned individuals of various races for more than 150 years.

And if the fact that I occasionally contemplate such things offends you to the point that you don’t wish to read anything that I write or edit or publish, well, that leads to the obvious question: what in the name of the 1,200 sister-wives of Shaka Zulu are you doing here? Especially in light of Truth’s self-admitted anti-intellectual outlook:

I can deal with the economics, military policies, and other right wing stuff, but dismissing an entire race of humans as ignorant half-savages is beyond my threshold. The history of such thought has given rise to countless atrocities.

First, Truth’s personal thresholds do not dictate objective reality. The only thing that matters is if the observation is true or not. In this particular case, there is a considerable quantity of evidence supporting both the singular example provided, as well as the current state of civilizational progress of the human sub-species concerned. Second, we are discussing the collective mean here. In any group with more than two individuals there will obviously be those who exceed the mean, but that is totally irrelevant in this context.

As for the appeal to historical atrocity, has it never occurred to Truth that it is reality that dictated those atrocities and not the mere observation of the reality? He is assigning causal value to a consequence. If the savage behavior of a group of savages leads another group to wipe them out, it is not the second group’s belief that the first group was savage that was the causal factor, but rather, the fact that first group was a) savage, and b) aggressive.

To give one example, Julius Caesar would never have killed one million Gauls and enslaved another million had Gaius Marius not been forced to defend Rome from repeated invasions from the north 50 years prior.

The easiest boycott

It would be hard to recommend a boycott of OK Cupid given that I have no need of it an I don’t know anyone who is so unfortunate as to require using:

Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience.

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid:

This is possibly one of the dumbest business stunts that I have seen in a long time. But, on the off chance that you are a Christian or even a secular person who doesn’t believe in the politicization of business, I would encourage you to consider using a different web site for the purposes of meeting members of the opposite sex.

An appeal to false consciousness

Such is Naomi Wolf’s dedication to the Unreality Principle that she can’t even consider the possibility that the increasing appeal of traditional nationalism and to women in the West is neither fascist nor false.

Many lower-income women in Western Europe today – often single parents working pink-collar ghetto jobs that leave them exhausted and without realistic hope of advancement – can reasonably enough feel a sense of nostalgia for past values and certainties. For them, the idealized vision of an earlier age, one in which social roles were intact and women’s traditional contribution supposedly valued, can be highly compelling.

And, of course, parties that promote such a vision promise women – including those habituated to second-class status at work and the bulk of the labor at home – that they are not just faceless atoms in the postmodern mass. Rather, you, the lowly clerical worker, are a “true” Danish, Norwegian, or French woman. You are an heiress to a noble heritage, and thus not only better than the mass of immigrants, but also part of something larger and more compelling than is implied by the cog status that a multiracial, secular society offers you.

The attraction of right-wing parties to women should be examined, not merely condemned. If a society does not offer individuals a community life that takes them beyond themselves, values only production and the bottom line, and opens itself to immigrants without asserting and cherishing what is special and valuable about Danish, Norwegian, or French culture, it is asking for trouble. For example, upholding the heritage of the Enlightenment and progressive social ideals does not require racism or pejorative treatment of other cultures; but politically correct curricula no longer even make the attempt to do so.

There are numerous errors in her essay. The first, and most important, is her failure to recognize that it is the multiculturalists who are both anti-democratic and fascist. It is the eurofascists of the EU and their corporatist allies in the USA who forcibly installed unelected governments in Greece and Italy, who attempted to deny the Russian nationalists in the Crimea their right to self-determination and they are now turning against the Ukrainian nationalists who supported their anti-democratic coup in Ukraine.

The second is her denial of the fact that there are, materially, true Danes, Norwegians, and French. She obviously subscribes to the bureaucratic myth of geographic relocation, where the simple act of traveling by plane magically transforms an individual into something he is not. As an expat myself, I continually find it amazing that people who would absolutely insist that I am an American will turn around and claim that Moroccans who happen to be in Holland or Turks who happen to be in Germany are actually Dutch or German simply because they have a piece of paper granting them state citizenship.

But the nation is not the state. In fact, the nation-state is generally considered to date back to about 1700 and the Treaty of Westphalia, so it should be obvious that making a national the citizen of a state belonging to a different nation does not change anything intrinsic about the national.

The third is that it is objectively obvious that the nationals of a state being invaded by hordes of immigrants are heirs to a materially better heritage than the invaders. The invaders want to live in the society created by that heritage; the national does not want to go and live in society created by the invaders’ heritage.

The fourth error is the failure to grasp that mass immigration will end. It is mathematically doomed. The secular advocates of The Invaded Society don’t seem to grasp that all of these various nations did not come into existence ex nihilo. They were created by the same force of natural human preferences that will soon bring a violent end to The Invaded Society.

It’s all very simple. British people want to remain British. They don’t want to be African, or Pakistani, or some sort of Afro-Britistani melange. The Dutch want to remain Dutch, they don’t want to become Moroccan. And neither black nor white Americans want to become Mexican. And they will not, even if that means wars will be fought and national borders will be redrawn.

Right-wing Racism: 20 rules

Tom Kratman explains the 20 rules of racism from the Right perspective:

1. Anyone responsible for three hundred years of slavery would have to be a lot older than you and me.

2. There has to be some genetics in “racism’s” DNA, some DNA in its gene pool, or it just isn’t racism.

3. Racism could be eliminated in the United States if we could just eliminate the white liberals who so plainly depend on it so much and do so much to keep it going.

4. Reality isn’t racist: The reality is that there are pond-scummy gallows bait in every group. Some of those will be more of a problem to their own group than to you (see Rule 14, below). Some will be more of a problem to you precisely because you’re not a member of their group. It is wise, not racist, to avoid the latter. In Boston, this may be referred to as the “Evelyn Wagler-George Pratt Rule,” and that’s not code. Odd exception to half of Rule 4: Jesse Jackson would much rather be followed by a white on the streets of DC, at night, than a black.

5. There have been two instances in recent history where the concept of “honorary white” held sway. One was in apartheid South Africa where, for example, Japanese were considered “honorary white.” The other was when, in relation to the Trayvon Martin shooting, the American mainstream media made Hispanic George Zimmerman an “honorary white.” This is not entirely coincidence since (see Rule 18) the very liberal American media is as racist in their way as ever the Afrikaner Broederbond was in its.

6. Nobody really thinks whites are as evil as portrayed by white liberals and black demagogues. If they really thought so, they’d be too afraid to ever leave the house, since a) there are a lot more whites, b) those whites are much better armed, c) they’re more likely to be veterans of the Army’s and Marine Corps’ ground gaining combat arms, and d) they have an historically demonstrated cultural aptitude for mass, organized violence.

7. People who insist you’re speaking in code insist on it because they believe it’s true. They believe it’s true because they really do speak in code and can’t imagine anyone who does not speak in code. It’s not racist to think those people are idiots, nor to note that they’re mostly white. (Exception to rule: When conservatives talk about guns and zombies? Especially in terms of using the former to kill the latter? Yeah; “zombie” is code for “liberals of any color.” See Rule 6, above.)

8. It’s not racist to note that white liberalism managed to do in about thirty years something that three hundred years of slavery could not, seriously damage the black family, generally though not universally, and ruin it completely over wide swaths.

9. Speaking of slavery, the bulk of slave raiding and trading in Africa was black, usually Islamic black (see Rule 16, below), on black. The Arabic word for black and slave is the same, “Abd.” And the first registered slave owner in Virginia was black. Pointing this out to liberals, white and black, is always fun.

10. It’s not racist to wish that our first black president had been Thomas Sowell.

Read the rest at his site. Of the ten listed here, I disagree only with point 3. My observations as a Person of Color who can seamlessly pass for a) American, b) English, c) Hispanic, and d) Italian at will have led me to conclude is that if there were not various human subspecies and people did not disfavor the other subspecies and distinct population groups on the basis of massive genetic differences, they would disfavor other population groups on the basis of minor genetic differences.

I grew up in an area where a mixed marriage was considered to be a Norwegian married to a Swede. The idea that Ibo and Zhuang are going to mingle happily with Bavarians and Dutch, in the USA or anywhere, is observably antiscientific,  ahistorical, and illogical.

Structuring a society on the basis of the myth of human equality is about as intelligent as building a plane without taking either gravity or aerodynamics into account. The only question is when it will crash and kill a statistically significant percentage of the occupants, not if.

“A threat to the UK”

In yet another strike against democracy, nearly four in ten British voters demonstrate that they are nothing but media lapdogs by agreeing that the only British party leader who ISN’T an enemy of the British people is “a threat to the UK“.

Ahead of the BBC debate tomorrow night, pollsters ComRes asked voters to consider several statements and say whether they applied more to Mr Farage or Mr Clegg. The results reveal weaknesses in both camps

In the poll, 38 per cent of people said Mr Farage ’is a danger to Britain’, compared to just 23 per cent who said the same of Mr Clegg. Despite UKIP drawing much of its support from older voters, 44 per cent of people aged 55-64 said Mr Farage posed a threat to the UK. Half of people working in the public sector, and 44 per cent of people in Scotland and the South West also agreed Mr Farage was a danger to the country.

Mr. Farage is a threat to the imperial neofascist European Union. And that is why its lackeys are trying to convince the British that he is a threat to the UK. These people are simply addicted to the Big Lie.

The only way in which UKIP’s Farage can be considered a threat to the UK is if its people are afraid of their own sovereignty.

Still bailing

It’s going to be fascinating to learn how long the great game of Let’s Pretend can continue:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, easing investor concern that interest rates may rise earlier than previously forecast, said the world’s biggest economy will need Fed stimulus for “some time.”

Yellen said today the Fed hasn’t done enough to combat unemployment even after holding interest rates near zero for more than five years and pumping up its balance sheet to $4.23 trillion with bond purchases.

“This extraordinary commitment is still needed and will be for some time, and I believe that view is widely shared by my fellow policy makers,” Yellen said at a community development conference in Chicago. “The scars from the Great Recession remain, and reaching our goals will take time.”

The amusing thing is that if you take the GDP numbers seriously, the Great Recession was actually a very minor one. Of course, it’s all fiction at this point, and poorly written fiction at that.

Remember, the Fed always talks about the general economy, but all it actually cares about is keeping the giant banks from collapsing.

Dumbing down tech

An old school programmer points out the way in which even programmers are being taught to be glorified power users rather than actual computer engineers:

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn’t handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I’ve seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they’re usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it’s just a necessary culling of the people who aren’t going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

The other hard course for many young CS students was the course where you learned functional programming, including recursive programming. MIT set the bar very high for these courses, creating a required course (6.001) and a textbook (Abelson & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) which were used at dozens or even hundreds of top CS schools as the de facto introduction to computer science. (You can, and should, watch an older version of the lectures online.)

The difficulty of these courses is astonishing. In the first lecture you’ve learned pretty much all of Scheme, and you’re already being introduced to a fixed-point function that takes another function as its input. When I struggled through such a course, CSE121 at Penn, I watched as many if not most of the students just didn’t make it. The material was too hard. I wrote a long sob email to the professor saying It Just Wasn’t Fair. Somebody at Penn must have listened to me (or one of the other complainers), because that course is now taught in Java.

I wish they hadn’t listened.

The real reason the courses are being dumbed down, of course, is so that women can pass them. But they’re not only being dumbed down, they are being prettied-up and sparkle-ponied in an attempt to make the girls feel as if they’re actually able to do something meaningful. This isn’t the case, of course, but the programs are being designed in such a way that the young women won’t figure out that they’ve been sold a very expensive course in self-esteem until after they graduate and realize they can’t actually do any real programming.

This isn’t good for anyone, not for the girls who should be majoring in something else, the girls who could handle the traditional programming curriculum, or the young men who would be better off teaching themselves to program instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars to not learn the more rigorous aspects of the discipline.

I started out as a CompSci Engineering major myself. In the first semester, I realized that I didn’t enjoy the level of detail required to succeed and immediately switched to Economics. I am very, very glad that my university didn’t make the course more to my liking, as I now know that I would not have made for a good programmer, much less a great one. This isn’t a case of old school guys rhapsodizing about the good old days either, the situation is materially detrimental to practically everyone concerned except the universities and the banks profiting from the student loan system.

As an employer, I’ve seen that the 100% Java schools have started churning out quite a few CS graduates who are simply not smart enough to work as programmers on anything more sophisticated than Yet Another Java Accounting Application, although they did manage to squeak through the newly-dumbed-down coursework. These students would never survive 6.001 at MIT, or CS 323 at Yale, and frankly, that is one reason why, as an employer, a CS degree from MIT or Yale carries more weight than a CS degree from Duke, which recently went All-Java, or U. Penn, which replaced Scheme and ML with Java in trying to teach the class that nearly killed me and my friends, CSE121. Not that I don’t want to hire smart kids from Duke and Penn — I do — it’s just a lot harder for me to figure out who they are.

Universities should be making the entry STEM courses harder, not easier, but as it stands, both their financial and their PR incentives run in precisely the opposite direction.

Not on your side

Kevin Williamson appears to think that a pragmatic appeal to the lesser evil is going to work again after six years of the Obama adminstration:

Republicans
now have the opportunity to effectively bring the Obama
administration’s legislative program to an early end this November by
eliminating the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, which would also give
them a much stronger hand in keeping the worst of his appointees out of
office, safely quarantined in whatever dank recesses of academia
currently housing them. And while one should never underestimate the
Republicans’ ability to blunder their way into missing a political
opportunity or the fickleness of our bread-and-circuses electorate,
there is a very good chance that that will happen. (Knock wood, salt
over the shoulder — pick your own prophylactic.) But conservatives all
too often seem to have failed to learn the lesson of the heavy losses we
have suffered during the Obama years: The differences among us are
minor compared with the differences between us and them, which are
fundamental.

Conservatives had an opportunity to put
the Obama administration not to an effective end but a literal one in
2012, but we blew it. Mitt Romney improved on John McCain’s vote total
(barely), fared better in every battleground state save Ohio, and even
won independents. The election in the end was decided by 334,000 votes
in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and New Hampshire. Even with Barack Obama’s
edge among newly registered minority voters and an unusually high
turnout among overwhelmingly Democratic black voters, only 57.5 percent
of eligible voters actually showed up. That left a lot of room for
conservatives to make a difference. But we did not take the opportunity.

The
three most important words in politics are: “Compared with what?” And I
am more than a little sympathetic to conservatives’ complaints about
the failures of elected Republicans in Washington, who consistently
disappoint us even when they are in the majority. I am also sympathetic
to the view that our situation may have deteriorated to the point that
even a unified Republican government under the leadership of principled
conservatives may not be enough to turn things around. And though I
reject the notion that Mitt Romney wasn’t good enough for true-believing
conservatives, let’s say, arguendo, that that was the case. Unless you
are ready to give up entirely on the notion of advancing conservative
principles through the ballot box, you might consider looking at things
this way: Even if you do not think that it matters much whether
Republicans win, it matters a great deal that Democrats lose.

No,
no, and no again. A thousand times no.  Mitt Romney wasn’t good enough.
John McCain would have actually been worse than Obama. Failing a little
more slowly, destroying the country a little less spectacularly, is not
and will never be a solution. It cannot be a solution.

At
this point, the die is cast. There is no one in American politics, now
that Ron Paul is retired, who is even potentially interested in the
policies that need to be implemented to salvage what is observably a
failing empire. There is not a single candidate in either party who will
even attempt to fix the financial system, deport the millions of
invaders, and end the foreign wars.

It is better to be
openly attacked by confirmed enemies than repeatedly betrayed by false
friends. The Republicans have proven that they are no friends to
freedom, small government, or traditional America and it is a
fundamental error for anyone who values freedom or small government or
traditional America to support them.

Mr. Williamson says: “I am coming around to the view that I’d rather be disappointed by
Republicans who periodically fail live up to their principles than have
my country pillaged and hobbled by Democrats who consistently live up to
theirs.”

That’s a false choice. Mr. Williamson should
know better. The Republicans don’t “periodically fail to live up to
their principles”. They predictably, and reliably, fail to live up to
their pretended principles.

White liberal racism

It’s fascinating to see how white liberals the way in which make a habit of denying the undeniable whenever it contradicts their narrative. From the woman who calls herself “Pox Vay” on Twitter:

You’re not a person of color. You’re a white guy who shares genes with people of color. But you don’t share the life experience.

It’s hard to argue with this. After all, there are so few People of Color who are NCAA Division One 100-meter sprinters, right? Or study economics in Tokyo, neh?

She’s not the only one. Carrie Cuinn, a white racist who is one of SFWA’s extremist pinkshirts, specifically rejected my inclusion on her list of Hispanic science fiction writers, never mind the fact that I am probably one of the best-selling Hispanic science fiction writers after Larry Correia and Sarah Hoyt. Interestingly enough, neither of them were on her list either, although I suspect their omission was more out of ignorance than white liberal racism.

Surely this woman is a reliable expert on who is, and who is not, Hispanic….

This is a longtime pattern with the Left. I remember a feminist professor at my university openly declaring “Margaret Thatcher is not a woman” due to her ideology. The Left not only arrogates to itself the right to disqualify anyone as it sees fit, but observably believes that its narrative supersedes science, sex, and human genetics.