Author: VD

Notes on the European economy

Three observations from conversations I had over the last few days.

Spain: The sort of clean-cut pretty college-age girls who a few years ago would be seen working at Estee Lauder counters, at high-end restaurants, and as models or shot girls can now be seen working the suburban streets as prostitutes during the day. According to my Spanish taxi driver, the basic hourly rates haven’t changed, but both the quality and the quantity of the labor available has significantly increased. This suggests that the rates for the previous supply of street hookers have dropped dramatically.

Switzerland: In speaking to a Swiss friend, I learned that car examinations, which are required every two years for older cars, now have a waiting list of up to eighteen months. This waiting list was nonexistent two years ago. The delay indicates that increasing numbers of Swiss are keeping their old cars rather than turning them in as soon as the lease is expired, as had been their previous custom.

Germany: A police acquaintance from the gym returned from Oktoberfest in Stuttgart last week. After hastening to assure me that his interest in such matters was purely professional, he told me that he was astonished by the youth, beauty, and low rates of the nightclub girls, who apparently now go for 30 Euros, down from 70 Euros for less attractive women two years ago.

Lest the obvious escape one, these are all very bad economic signals. In a growing economy, the street whores are toothless old crack addicts working the bus stops at night and the few pretty young girls who aren’t working in some easy retail job are very expensive escorts.

WND column

The Magic Negro, Part II: Republican edition

It is completely understandable why Republicans are increasingly enthusiastic about Herman Cain. First and foremost, he isn’t Mitt Romney. The Republican Party elite has been trying to force the mercurial Mormon down the throats of the party’s grass roots for two election cycles, but despite his elegant coiffure and vast money-raising capacity, the average Republican voter wants nothing to do with the man. They quite rightly regard him as less trustworthy and more slippery than Bill Clinton.

UPDATE: I note that Cain’s comments, as highlighted on the Drudge Report, are particularly ironic in light of the government bailouts of Wall Street and General Motors.

Republican presidential contender Herman Cain amplified his criticism Sunday of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement, calling the protesters “jealous’ Americans who “play the victim card” and want to “take somebody else’s” Cadillac.

Mailvox: too much negativity

I found Felix’s ode to the blog to be more than a little amusing. I will, however, correct his mistaken assumption that the comments are unmoderated here. They have always been subject to moderation. I have never pretended otherwise.

I check back here for the first in months, sick of the negativity and the thinly-veiled attempts at conceiling post-moderation behind subjective “rules”. And what do I find? Still, 9 out of 10 posts are negative, and nearly that many are self-congratulatory. “Thousands come to hear what I have to say”. Oh, please. Your writing is so terrible, serving only to assuage your own insecurities, that some of us visit only periodically to see if you’re still on the internet. Your blog has became so played, so utterly formulaic and predictable (1. find some person enjoying their 15 minutues of fame 2. mock them and point out that they will never be successful, never be president, etc, 3. lather rinse repeat). The only thing you could write that would be interesting and uplifting for most of us is a suicide note!

His statistical infelicities notwithstanding, I can’t honestly say Felix is all wrong. The vast majority of the blog posts are negative in some way, but then, I am a reasonably sophisticated economics observer and we are in the early stages of a very large scale economic contraction. I’m still pointing out pretty much the same thing I’ve been pointing out since the spring of 2008, the difference is that now people like the Governor of the Bank of England are saying exactly what I’ve been saying, even if their prescriptions are very different than the ones I would suggest and are doomed to failure. Drat, there’s that negativity again!

But what else can I say? Either economic policies will work or they won’t work, and in the case of the UK’s latest quantitative easing, it won’t work, just as all the other proposed fixes didn’t work, and for much the same reason. What, I wonder, is there to be positive about in the world these days? The so-called Arab Spring? The woeful collection of Republican presidential candidates who won’t even talk about the real issues at hand? The death of Steve Jobs? I suppose I could write long and cheerful posts about how my soccer team won its last game, how good the salmon that Spacebunny made last night was, how the Vikings are going to turn it around, or how pretty the long-legged young girl who was selling her services on the suburban street in broad daylight at noon in Spain was – bloody hell, that’s a negative economic indicator too – but happy substance-free pop culture isn’t my idiom.

The main reason this blog is predictable is because I am a) consistent and b) usually correct. And the reason I am usually correct is because the behavior of human beings tends to fall within a small and relatively predictable range. Most people are not only idiots, but the particular form their idiocy takes tends to be predictable. Look, the moment a powerful banker or politician proposes something that is actually viable, I’ll be pleased to say so. But until one does, I will continue to be negative and subsequently proven correct.

VPFL Week 4

102 Moundsview Meerkats (3-1-0)
64 Bane Sidhe (1-3-0)

79 Greenfield Grizzlies (3-1-0)
60 MS Swamp Spartans (2-2-0)

79 RR Redbeards (2-1-1)
79 Macau Marauders (1-2-1)

73 GroverBeach Quixotes (2-2-0)
42 Bailout Banksters (1-2-1)

66 Green Reverends (2-1-1)
59 Cranberry Rhyneauxs (1-3-0)

Arian Foster is back! And with Michael Turner and Beanie Wells performing at a high level, the Meerkats now have an effective running game to go with the lethal passing of Aaron Rodgers. The matchups predict wins for both the Meerkats and the Grizzlies; a pair of 4-1 starts would put both old school teams in position to make playoff runs. The defending champion, meanwhile, appear to be struggling and Andre Johnson’s injury isn’t going to help.

This is your weekly open NFL thread.

RIP Al Davis

“Raiders owner Al Davis, whose NFL legend as a pioneering rebel began 60 years ago as an assistant with the Baltimore Colts and was punctuated with a 1992 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction in Canton, has died at 82.”

Mailvox: No True Scientist?

A hard scientist casts a skeptical eye on those outside her discipline:

You’ll find this quite interesting. It’s in line with your assertions about corruption in the sciences. However, you’re making an error to apply charges of significant corruption and professional laziness to all of science. Perhaps you are in possession of evidence of which I’m not aware*, but based on what I know you’re committing the same error as atheists when they make blanket assertions about atheists vs. religious people. As you have pointed out many times, there are important distinctions within these groups. Likewise, there are important distinctions within the sciences. No field of science is free of flaws, but I have good evidence that corruption is significantly lower in physics and its sub-fields, and that research proceeds as well as can be expected for any human endeavor. I strongly suspect the increase in retractions noted by Nature traces the increased and alarming politicization of some specific fields, namely biology, medicine (including psychiatry/psychology), and climate science.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the different sciences, because developments in physics and even chemistry actually demonstrate that these fields are relatively healthy. Several discoveries in this year alone show that physicists are quite willing to abandon cherished ideas (after only a modest degree of initial resistance) in the face of new data. Also, look at the Nobel prizes announced for physics and chemistry. Both were for experiments that overturned accepted ideas, and in both cases it was only a few years to go from discovery to implementation. That’s unprecedented in other sciences.

There is no question that physics has been the gold standard of science since Isaac Newton. And I’m under no illusion that all science is created equally or that fraud pervades all of it to an equal degree. It hasn’t escaped me, after all, that Daniel Dennett and others have attempted to justify their belief in the predictions of biologists by appealing to the accuracy of predictions by physicists, which is about as sensible as claiming that one should believe psychics due to the accuracy of predictions by economists.

And the response of the physics community to the news of the superluminal neutrinos has been encouraging to those who are accustomed to witnessing very different behavior from scientists in other, softer fields. Moderate skepticism and an expectation that the experiment will be independently replicated before the existing theories are considered to be overturned is entirely reasonable and very different than the way biologists and climatologists have regarded theoretical upheavals in their scientific fields.

The division between hard science and soft science is perhaps better described as the difference between actual science and non-science designed to look like the real thing.

A Libertarian on the Wall Street protests

From the Market Ticker:

You know what the “Occupy Wall Street” movement is?

It is all the things that were in the original Tea Party, but were steadily ignored as the TP became a Republican booster club.

The Tea Party is a contradiction. They want a balanced budget, but they also want the US military to intervene everywhere. Obamacare is a dirty word, but don’t dare touch social security or medicare. Individual rights are important too, but don’t push it too far. After all, republicans came up with today’s policies.

The most intriguing thing about these protests is the instinctive reaction of horror from the conservative media who still confuse corrupt big government corporatism for free market capitalism. If the Tea Party hadn’t already revealed itself to be little more than a joke, they’d be protesting side by side with the left-wing hipsters.

Both Republicans and Democrats are the problem. And that’s understandably something few Republicans or Democrats want to admit.

Herman Cain: banker’s whore or bankster?

It has been interesting to see how feeble a defense those who support Magic Negro Part II: The Republican have been able to make on his behalf. When faced with the fact that he was not only a corrupt Federal Reserve executive, but is still defending the Federal Reserve, the giant zombie banks, and Wall Street despite the economic depression they caused, their only – and I do mean ONLY – response is to cry raciss.

This demonstrates that Herman Cain has little more to offer as a presidential candidate but his race. But, in the immortal words of the French castle guard, the American people already got one, you see. The grand Republican dream of finally being able to accuse Democrats of racism is based on an erroneous assumption that Democrats care about such things; it would appear that Republicans have learned nothing from Clinton presidential scandal when it was learned that feminists didn’t mind being legitimately accused of supporting sexism.

Democrats are the modern equivalent of the medieval religious heretics who demonstrated their moral ascension beyond good and evil by their ability to indulge in the latter without harming their immortal soul. Thus, while others are tainted by the mere accusation of sexiss or raciss, actual acts of what would otherwise be considered sexism or racism on the part of a Democrat only proves his ideological saintliness.

As we’ve seen already with regards to Rick Perry, Cain is more than willing to cry raciss himself. But that’s almost irrelevant. The real question is whether Cain is a banker’s whore or a bankster proper. While his Federal Reserve history suggests the latter, his astonishing remarks about the central bank and apparent ignorance about the U.S. financial system strongly indicate that his role at the Federal Reserve was little more than affirmative action PR. So, I conclude that Cain is merely a banker’s whore like McCain and Obama rather than a genuine bankster like Bernanke.