Author: VD

The magic number matters

At least, it does insofar as a man is interested in lowering his probability of not getting divorced and asset-raped when marrying:

“The results presented in this article replicate findings from previous research: Women who cohabit prior to marriage or who have premarital sex have an increased likelihood of marital disruption. Considering the joint effects of premarital cohabitation and premarital sex, as well as histories of premarital relationships, extends previous research. The most salient finding from this analysis is that women whose intimate premarital relationships are limited to their husbands—either premarital sex alone or premarital cohabitation—do not experience an increased risk of divorce. It is only women who have more than one intimate premarital relationship who have an elevated risk of marital disruption. This effect is strongest for women who have multiple premarital coresidental unions. These findings are consistent with the notion that premarital sex and cohabitation have become part of the normal courtship pattern in the United States. They do not indicate selectivity on characteristics linked to the risk of divorce and do not provide couples with experiences that lessen the stability of marriage.”

Players and traditionalists, take a close look at that graph. When a woman has had 16 or more past lovers, the odds that a marriage to her will end in divorce rise to over 80%! Even “average” women with “only” five past lovers — women that few men would admit in public qualify as sluts — see an increase in odds of divorce to 70%.

I have to admit, that’s a more significant factor than I’d ever imagined. No wonder men value Chaste Janes more than Slutty Barbies! While numerous female writers advocate evasion, if not outright deception, it would appear that men would do well to make sure they have an accurate numerical history in order to determine which category a woman to whom they are attracted happens to fall, high divorce risk or low divorce risk. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing the former, just dont be surprised with the results when not only the odds, but the statistical evidence is stacked against you.

The evictions continue

If the multiculturalists are upset over the ongoing French Roma expulsions, just think how apocalyptic they’ll sound once Sarkozi or his eventual successor begins to tackle the challenge of the banlieus.

The truth is that there is a long tradition of open hostility towards Roma, one with uncomfortable echoes of the open hostility shown towards another ostracised minority in the past. Right across Europe, including in Britain, casual anti-Gypsy remarks are simply not taboo in the way that slights on other ethnicities mostly are today. Some of this, it is true, can be explained by distinctive facets of Roma culture, which do not fit comfortably within contemporary capitalist societies. Rolling caravans do not lend themselves to rooted integration, and especially when they are decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights. The latest French crackdown followed on from rioting that was sparked by the shooting of a young Roma man, and with dire school drop-out rates Gypsy communities tend to rub up against authority more often than most.

I like that. The Roma aren’t dirty and useless thieves, they’re just “decoupled from standard western ideas about property rights”. Actually, that would explain a lot about Goldman Sachs and the Supreme Court’s Kelo decision, come to think about it. It’s fascinating to see how conflicted eurofascists are already calling for France to be kicked out of the European Union over these racial expulsions; the EU is certainly showing stress fractures in some interesting and unexpected places.

Government efficiency

$2 million per job:

DPW has received $70.65 million and created or retained 45.46 jobs, though they are expected to create 238 jobs overall (the fraction of a job created or retained correlates to the number of actual hours works). LADOT has been awarded $40.8 million and created or retained 9 jobs, though they are expected to create 26 jobs overall. Overall, the Departments have received $111 million in federal stimulus funds out of the $594 million the City has been awarded so far and created or retained 54.46 jobs.

I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million in ARRA funds.

At that price, one wonders what these jobs involve. NFL quarterbacking? Jobs programs don’t work. They’d be better off just cutting a direct check to people.

Mailvox: defending free trade

EJ takes exception to my previous post critiquing Ricardian comparative advantage:

I have to disagree with you regarding free trade.

You write: “This example assumes that there is something that the old man can do that is of value to the young man. But that’s not necessarily true. What if instead of 2 people, there are 20 and all the old man can usefully do is gather 5 coconuts a day when two young girls with no other useful skills can gather 100, more than the castaway society needs, in the same time? Yes, total production will increase +5, but so what? No one is going to give him anything for his worthless coconuts because there is already a coconut glut thanks to the highly productive young girls. Austrian-savvy individuals should be able to see the seeds of an Austrian critique of Ricardo here.”

Your example fails to take into account that there are always other needs to be satisfied, needs which require other goods beside coconuts. Either the old man or the young girls can, for instance, gather berries, help build a hut, etc. Ricardo is right in that, by shifting the old man’s production into that which he does comparatively best, society benefits. The only time this isn’t true is if every need has already been satisfied and there is absolutely no other task that the old man can do. Your assumption strikes me as an unwarranted; it is certainly not true that all needs have been met in the world we live in.

Ricardo’s discovery has astounding consequences for libertarians. I’ve noticed in your writings that your libertarianism seems to stem from an understanding that men is fallen, and that, therefore, it makes little sense to allow a fallen man to lord it over his fellow creatures. This was largely my take, too, but thanks to Voxiversity, I’ve been reading my Rothbard. Since voluntary exchange benefits both parties, free trade between two people is a good which should be extended as far and wide as possible.

This is not to say tariffs are always wrong. As Ilana Mercer pointed out in last week’s column, a revenue tariff on all goods would be a reasonable way to fund a minimal state. But free trade itself remains sound.

There are two significant errors here that render EJ’s criticism invalid. The first flaw is this erroneous simplification. “The only time this isn’t true is if every need has already been satisfied and there is absolutely no other task that the old man can do.”

The proper formulation would have been as follows: “It isn’t true whenever there is no other need that the old man is not only capable of satisfying, but willing to satisfy in return for the compensation that he is offered in return.” It is irrelevant to argue that all needs have not been met in the world; the old man on his desert island has no ability to meet the needs of a hungry child in Somalia and the meager compensation he is offered for collecting sea shells may be insufficient to move him to collect them.

Furthermore, there may be no demand for the services he can supply. The bankruptcy of Say’s Law can be seen in the way the old man’s ability to donate sperm to his nubile female castaways in no way creates any demand for the product. In much the same way, the international market for American workers whose only skills concern filling out paperwork for regulatory compliance and creating Powerpoint demonstrations is extremely limited.

The second and much more serious error is in the statement that “voluntary exchange benefits both parties”. This is both logically and empirically false because it posits a non-existent human rationalism without temporal limits. While it is true that value is subjective, thereby allowing the possibility to defend totally irrational actions as at least nominally rational, this still doesn’t avoid the problem of how the subjective values that the Misean acting man assigns are necessarily momentary in nature. What the acting man defines as a beneficial exchange at one moment he may very well not define as beneficial in the very next moment for a wide variety of reasons. And it is this fatal flaw in the logical foundation that causes the entire edifice in support of free trade to collapse.

Eat, pray, die

Best stick to the cats, ladies

A British grandmother was strangled and beaten to death by her Tunisian boyfriend, an inquest heard today. Pauline Richardson, 64, had travelled with a friend to the resort of Port El Kantaoui in Tunisia in June 2008. She was due to fly back on June 29 and on that day visited Qabeel Jabir Al-Wardani, who was then in his 20s. Mrs Richardson missed her flight home and her body was discovered the next day.

There is a tremendous black comedy waiting to be written regarding the growing practice of post-menopausal women desperately chasing sex in the third world. The absurd thing is that they’re uniformly convinced the young con artists who prey upon them have fallen in love with them and genuinely wish to pursue a committed romantic relationship with them, presumably because of their superior if wrinkled white skins. Between the instaslut behavior of the 15-19 year-old on an airplane crowd – only a recent divorcee in her thirties is easier – and this geriatric imperial cougarism, one wonders if it is women’s suffrage or women’s travel that is the worse idea. It is customary to scoff at the Victorians who insisted that women travel with a guardian of some sort, but this sort of thing reminds one that such societal customs usually arise from necessity.

Never be nice

I’m totally serious, men.  Never, ever be nice to a woman to whom you are not related by blood or are not married.  Be polite, gracious, and civil, by all means, just as you would to but don’t ever be nice in search of female approval or make the mistake of thinking that they have a mindset that is anything but completely alien to your own.  They can not only rationalize anything that they perceive to be in their own interest, but will quite readily resort to the use of third party force to do so.  Roissy provides an informative example of this.
 

45 minutes per day

That’s all the time it took to allow a supposedly dyslexic girl to not only keep pace with her public-schooled peers, but make up all the ground she’d lost while in school.

I was assessed by my local home education division within the council and was surprised to discover I had to spend only 45 minutes a day teaching Georgia to give her the same level of attention as a full day in a class of 35 pupils.

Of course, the irony is that after having homeschooled her daughter long enough to make sure she had caught up, the mother promptly stuck her back in school again. I don’t recommend limiting homeschool to only 45 minutes a day, but given that pace, consider how fast even children of average intelligence can advance simply by spending three hours a day on their academic education.

RINO rage

Lest one think for even a fraction of one second that the professional Republican class, also known as “the Republican leadership”, has any genuine commitment to any ideological principles beyond maintaining its own power and influence:

Party fractures on full display, Republican aides told Fox News Tuesday that O’Donnell would not be getting national fundraising support. State party leaders had warned that O’Donnell cannot compete against Democrat Chris Coons and vigorously backed Castle, a nine-term congressman and former governor…. Party leaders no doubt were looking at midterm polls that showed Castle leading Coons in November but O’Donnell trailing. The seat could be critical for Republicans hoping to gain control of the Senate. They need to pick up 10 seats to do so.

The point, which both the Republican establishment and a significant portion of the conservative media either does not understand after the eight-year Bush administration debacle or simply will not accept, is that it doesn’t matter if your party is in power if the representatives of that party are not ideologically reliable. If elected Republicans are simply going to behave like Democrats Lite in office, there is no reason for conservatives to elect them. None.

Lenin was correct in ascertaining that sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. The conservative movement is in much stronger shape due to Barack Obama-Soetoro-Sobarkah’s election that it would have been if the RINO McCain had been elected; McCain would have moved things about 50 percent as far to the left as Obama has, but would have ensured that more Democrats were elected to the House and Senate this fall rather than the incipient Democratic drubbing that is in the making. The reason they would rather lose to a Democrat than see a genuinely conservative Republican get elected is because the former doesn’t threaten their long-term dominance over the party.

There are two flaws with the pragmatic approach. First, its analysis is always static and fails to recognize that the electorate responds to political dynamism. Second, it is an inept strategy that by its very nature prevents reaching the nominal objectives.

As the Instapundit reader commented: “It’s not enough, seemingly, to vote these people out. We have to stomp on them for them to get the message.”

2010 is gone

2010 is gone for Democrats. “He cannot save 2010,” the big-time Democrat is saying of Barack Obama. “It is gone. He must now concentrate on saving 2012. But the biggest fear of some of those close to him is that he might not really want to go on in 2012, that he might not really care.”

I chortled a bit. You may recall that I have predicted three things here a while back. House lost. Senate lost. Obama doesn’t even make it to the general election in 2012. Suddenly, all three are looking a little less crazy then they were back then.

Mailvox: praxeology and free trade

S asks about reconciling trade barriers with distrust of government:

as always, great work with the blog. I’m a big fan of your writing on economics, especially when applying Austrian theory to show how badly Keynesians misunderstand the subject. As such, I was hoping to ask you for some clarification regarding free trade. I read your book, The Return of the Great Depression, and found your comments on free trade rather interesting. (It’s been 9 months since I read the book so I apologise if I misrepresent any of your arguments.)

If I understand what you write correctly, it seems that the paradigm of comparative advantage espoused by Ricardo and his intellectual descendants doesn’t really make sense because of what you characterise as “the n-body problem”. In other words comparative advantage might work when dealing with two isolated counterparties, but what works for two entities does not necessarily work for three or more because of the exponentially increasing complexities introduced by additional trading entities. On this basis, you argue that a policy of unrestricted free trade doesn’t make any sense from a theoretical or practical perspective.

Here’s my question: given that the conclusions of praxeology generally argue that government intervention is a bad idea, how can this be consistent with a policy of government intervention in trade using tariffs to support specific industries or the general economy?

I’ve been trying to figure this out for a while. The articles at Mises.org generally reference Ricardo’s theory to support their arguments even though Ricardo wasn’t an Austrian theorist. Then there’s this article which makes a lot of interesting points in favour of protectionism, even though it’s written by a guy who is a Keynesian (as far as I can tell). What are your thoughts on the “correct” policy regarding trade?

There are three ways to consider the problem. We can look at it logically, we can look at it empirically, and we can look at it historically. The Ricardian position fails by all three metrics, in part because there is an inherent fallacy in your observed dichotomy. To observe that government is always inefficient and to mistrust its application of power is not synonymous with saying that there is absolutely no role for national governments. Libertarian minarchy is neither anarchy nor the U.S. Constitution, but I think it is worthwhile to note that protecting the borders and funding itself through tariffs are two of the very few genuine powers that the U.S. Constitution grants the federal government.

It is a very odd and perverted form of American conservatism that supports democracy-building on the other side of the globe, but argues against American industry-protecting import duties.

But that’s a tangent. Getting back to the logical angle, the Ricardian notion of comparative advantage completely fails because it is too focused on the TOTAL production rather than the nation-specific production or the effects on a nation of being forced to exchange its manufacturing from one set of goods to another. But the biggest problem is that because it relies on a labor theory of value, it fails to take demand, much less the limits of demand, into account. Furthermore, being a pre-industrial concept, comaprative advantage simply does not envision that a nation could possibly have nothing to physically produce that is considered worthy of trade. Consider the Wikipedia example.

Two men live alone on an isolated island. To survive they must undertake a few basic economic activities like water carrying, fishing, cooking and shelter construction and maintenance. The first man is young, strong, and educated. He is also faster, better, and more productive at everything. He has an absolute advantage in all activities. The second man is old, weak, and uneducated. He has an absolute disadvantage in all economic activities. In some activities the difference between the two is great; in others it is small.

Despite the fact that the younger man has absolute advantage in all activities, it is not in the interest of either of them to work in isolation since they both can benefit from specialization and exchange. If the two men divide the work according to comparative advantage then the young man will specialize in tasks at which he is most productive, while the older man will concentrate on tasks where his productivity is only a little less than that of the young man. Such an arrangement will increase total production for a given amount of labor supplied by both men and it will benefit both of them.

This example assumes that there is something that the old man can do that is of value to the young man. But that’s not necessarily true. What if instead of 2 people, there are 20 and all the old man can usefully do is gather 5 coconuts a day when two young girls with no other useful skills can gather 100, more than the castaway society needs, in the same time? Yes, total production will increase +5, but so what? No one is going to give him anything for his worthless coconuts because there is already a coconut glut thanks to the highly productive young girls. Austrian-savvy individuals should be able to see the seeds of an Austrian critique of Ricardo here.

Anyhow, that’s just a superficial first pass at the intrinsic logical flaw of Ricardian comparative advantage. More on the empirical and historical flaws as well as the government question in future posts.