Author: VD

Mailvox: the key to civilization

RB poses a question:

Your blog rocks! Anyways, I have a question I think you may know the answer to: Why is it that in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, people developed into advanced civilizations? Yet, when you look at the American Indians, [most] tribes in Central and South America, and Africa, these people were ages behind everyone else? I figure that commerce and perhaps the conquering of other peoples and their technologies had something to do with it, but when you look at the folks who did not advance, it’s like they decided to work harder and not smarter. I mean, look at the regions these people came from. They were resource rich, yet no one got off their butts to make life easier.

There are rival theories that attempt to explain the variance in technological advancement across various societies and cultures. For example, Jared Diamond’s famous hypothesis encapsulated in Guns, Germs, and Steel is little more than an attempt to blame anything but human evolution and racial differences. He’d rather hypothesize causal differences between horizontal and vertical continental geographies than observe the simple fact that the cultures that are known to have produced relatively advanced civilizations also happen to feature populations that presently posses higher intelligences. One can certainly argue that smarter populations are the result of advanced civilization rather than its cause, but logic suggests that the relationship between civilization and intelligence is unlikely to run in that direction due to the way in which civilization and technology are known to increase the survival and breeding rates of the less intelligent portions of the population.

However, the mere advantage of higher intelligence possessed by the European, Semitic and Asian peoples is simply not enough to account for the vast difference between different civilizations such as the tribal cultures of Papua New Guinea and Western European culture circa 1800. Keep in mind that the technological advancement of the Egyptians came to a halt long before Alexander the Great. Europe may not have experienced any Dark Ages, but its southern civilization certainly took a step or two backward during the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and similar periods of arrested and even retarded development is known to have taken place in China and Japan as well.

So, the more informative question probably does not surround what advantage permits technological and societal advancement towards civilization, but rather, what are the factors that are capable of retarding them. It’s a complicated question; for example, while matriarchy clearly retards civilization, patriarchy doesn’t necessarily advance it. Christianity helped in Europe, but played no similar role in the Levant. So, I don’t have an answer, except to say that when it is figured out it will likely involve a complicated mixture of factors that don’t easily permit pointing to any two or three of them and declaring that they are the magic key.

Mailvox: No greenhouse effect

Dominic updates us on the latest AGW/CC-related science:

Here’s a pair of physicists reviewing the issue. Don’t know if you’re aware of this particular paper yet, but it’s certainly blogworthy, at least. They basically prove, using straightforward physics, that there is no such thing as The Greenhouse Effect(TM). Heating in greenhouses is from trapped air, not trapped radiation, thus the idea that trace of amounts of CO2 reflecting solar energy back to the Earth rather than letting it escape the atmosphere causes a rise in temperature is unfounded. The Greenhouse Effect(TM) is a myth.

The physicists couldn’t be much more clear: “There are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse eff ect, which explains the relevant physical phenomena. The terms “greenhouse e ffect” and “greenhouse gases” are deliberate misnomers.”

I can’t say I’m surprised. Since global warming isn’t happening, the mechanisms that supposedly underlie it are presumably false. Notice the charge of “deliberate misnomers”. As with most lies, it’s seldom possible to stop with just one, which is why the truth will usually come out in time. And that’s exactly what is happening with the AGW/CC deception and all of the faux scientific falsehoods that have been used to sustain it.

It’s not worth it, gamma males

Stay away from strong, independentpsycho women:

A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.

Oh, the irony… anyhow, sexbots are not only better than middle-aged feminists, they’re safer.

When science is no longer science

Or, at least, finds itself directly contradicted by the basic scientific method:

The problem now is that we’re rapidly expanding our ability to do tests. Various speakers pointed to data sources as diverse as gene expression chips and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which provide tens of thousands of individual data points to analyze. At the same time, the growth of computing power has meant that we can ask many questions of these large data sets at once, and each one of these tests increases the prospects than an error will occur in a study; as Shaffer put it, “every decision increases your error prospects.” She pointed out that dividing data into subgroups, which can often identify susceptible subpopulations, is also a decision, and increases the chances of a spurious error….

It’s pretty obvious that these factors create a host of potential problems, but Young provided the best measure of where the field stands. In a survey of the recent literature, he found that 95 percent of the results of observational studies on human health had failed replication when tested using a rigorous, double blind trial. So, how do we fix this?

The consensus seems to be that we simply can’t rely on the researchers to do it. As Shaffer noted, experimentalists who produce the raw data want it to generate results, and the statisticians do what they can to help them find them. The problems with this are well recognized within the statistics community, but they’re loath to engage in the sort of self-criticism that could make a difference. (The attitude, as Young described it, is “We’re both living in glass houses, we both have bricks.”)

To me, the central problem appears to be that few scientists understand statistics and probability well enough to be permitted to make use of them in a manner which merits any credibility. The widening gap between econometric models and the performance of the real economy, combined with situations like the recent revelation that many, if not most genetic studies purporting to show natural selection were based entirely upon false positives, highlights the importance of performing actual science according to the scientific method rather than substituting a derivative and passing it off as science.

Like logic and philosophy, statistical analysis is informative and useful, but it is not intrinsically science.

Mailvox: Smith vs Ricardo

LS emails a 2003 essay by R.B. Calco published in the American Conservative. Here’s an excerpt:

The Father of free trade was no globalist.

Adam Smith is commonly regarded as the father of modern economics. Free traders claim he is also the father of free trade and credit him with the first systematic attack on government regulation of trade ever written. This is true as far as it goes. This is not to say, however, that Adam Smith was a free trader in the same sense that the term is promoted today. Since David Ricardo and the Austrians took hold of it, the term has acquired a dimension and a purpose that was, to paraphrase Smith, no part of his intention. Or, in any event, it was no part of his definition. Smith’s argument for trade was rooted in what economists today refer to as “Absolute Advantage”; it was left to the crafty mind of David Ricardo half a century later to invent a justification for trade on the basis of the far more subjective “Comparative Advantage” that today the economists tell us we need to consider instead.

While the dull, pencil-headed, pocket calculator logic of Comparative Advantage works fine for the textbook laboratory example f two nations and two products, it falls apart entirely the minute real-world constraints or considerations are introduced. It becomes absurd when you attempt to factor “comparative advantage” across three nations and three products, let alone the hundreds of nations and millions of products of the real world. Try it – you will lose your mind.

All Comparative Advantage amounts to, reduced to its essential components, is a sophistic argument for international division of labor — for global economic union — without dealing with any issues of political union. It is the economic equivalent of living in sin, so to speak. For whatever intuitive sense it claims to have, this argument relies on a fundamental confusion between trade — economic activity between economic systems — and division of labor — economic activity between individuals in a single economic system.

At bottom, this argument is a bait-and-switch for a global system, not a plan for any one nation to become wealthy, least of all the United States, which, according to the law of equilibrium, would be forced under a free-trade regime to sustain massive losses of jobs and wealth to pull all other nations up in the new global wage and price structure.

There is little question that global free trade tends to raise the overall level of global wealth. But what consequence-blind Ricardians stubbornly refuse to understand is that Comparative Advantage simply does not work on a macroeconomic level. The falsity of their assumptions is easily determined both logically and empirically; in RGD, for example, I show how the historical trade statistics prove that the Smoot-Hawley tariff could not possibly have played a major role, let alone a causal one, in causing the Great Depression.

The important logical question that the Ricardians have to answer is this: Does the level of rising global wealth come at the benefit or the expense of the wealthiest nations? The important empirical question is this: What is the rate of increase in U.S. national wealth per capita compared to the rate of increase in global wealth per capita? Those who are intellectually honest enough to contemplate answering those straightforward questions of applied theory instead of retreating to the safety of the abstract will soon recognize that the Comparative Advantage is a fundamentally incorrect doctrine and the Ricardian case for free trade is strictly dependent upon circumstances that do not apply to many situations, presently including that of the United States.

Those who disagree are certainly welcome to answer those two questions so long as they provide an amount of reason and evidence in support of their answers. And it is worth keeping in mind, as Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, that David Ricardo was first and foremost a political creature and an ideologue, he was not an intellectual driven by a natural interest in the truth of the matter. This is not to argue that what is known as the Ricardian theory of Comparative Advantage is incorrect on an ad hominem basis, I am merely pointing out the historical fact that his case was a political one with a specific policy objective in mind. It is also worth noting that the this case was not even original to him, as the idea of Comparative Advantage was first introduced by Robert Torrens in An Essay on the External Corn Trade two years before Ricardo published On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation.

Turnabout is fair play

I’m on the other end of the interview for a change:

Mr. B.A.D.: Does your greater intelligence give you grace for dealing with people less capable than you, or do you spend most of the day sighing and irritated?

Vox Day: Absolutely not. Unfortunately, it took me a very long time to learn to regard people of relatively normal intelligence with sympathy and amusement rather than simple contempt. What still remains annoying are the people of moderate intelligence, say the 110 to 120 range, who simply don’t understand that they are closer to the normal people to whom they condescend than I am to them. So it’s annoying when they assume I’m talking gibberish just because they aren’t capable of understanding something.

This was for Facebook or Myspace or something. I’m not entirely clear on why, but I have to admit that it was the first time I have ever thought about fictional characters and with whom I might identify.

Productivity and deflation

Karl Denninger reaches a conclusion:

The Labor Department reported Thursday that productivity jumped at an annual rate of 6.9 percent in the fourth quarter, even better than an initial estimate of a 6.2 percent growth rate. Unit labor costs fell at a rate of 5.9 percent, a bigger drop than the 4.4 percent decline initially estimated.

In the real world this means:

Work harder and get more done. Get paid less. Suck it up, don’t complain, or you’re fired. That’s all.

And by the way, reduced pay per unit of work spells DEFLATION.

That’s not necessarily so. Inflation and an increase in the supply of labor can lead to reduced pay per unit of work; real weekly wages haven’t increased in the USA since 1973. But in general, declining labor costs do tend to point towards deflation, especially if they are nominal as well as real. Productivity up and costs down is a good thing for corporations; whether that is good for the smaller number of workers working and the reduced pay they are receiving may not turn out to be good for an economy already facing widespread defaults. Especially if those corporations happen to be foreign corporations sending those profits overseas.

Exploding government debt

Carlton has a nice series of charts providing a graphic representation of the rapid growth of U.S. debt over at the RGD blog:

Even more striking is the annual percentage change in the debt. Between 2002 and 2006 there is a surge in growth, presumably to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, peaking in 2003 at around 9%, but the growth begins to slow down again until 2008, when it surges over 11%, and then in 2009 it jumps to almost 19%.

Needless to say, the recent post-2007 surge is in direct contradiction to the 10% contraction in private debt that has taken place over the same period.

It’s never enough

Once more, a woman attempts to shame men into not responding rationally to consequences of female actions:

There is a message to be delivered to men, and it may not be popular. We hear a lot about the injustices visited on fathers over divorce and access: for the record, I am largely on their side and dislike the thoughtless and sentimental favouring of mothers in residency disputes. We also hear a bit about the flailing ineffectiveness of the former Child Support Agency. What we do not often hear is the bald, uncompromising truth that if you father a child, you set up a non-negotiable duty.

Sorry, men, but it really is so. We may live in a shag-happy porno culture, where flings and “hotties” and zipless one-nighters are seen as the norm; we may be liberal about divorce, stepfamilies and serial cohabitation. Some of this is good, some of it bad. But none of it negates biology, or the entry-level ethical fact that when a sexual act creates a human child, that child is as much of a moral burden to its father as to its mother. Unless it is a matter of sperm donation or formal adoption with a clear contract, the man has, at the very least, a duty to monitor the child’s physical safety.

This is absolutely and utterly false under the current legal regime. It is totally unconscionable to claim that men who have been forcibly stripped of their paternal rights by the unilateral decision of the mother supported by the anti-paternal legal system have any duty whatsoever to the children that have been taken away from them. If it is the man’s decision to leave the family, then yes, his paternal responsibilities remain intact. If he fathers a child unintentionally his paternal responsibilities remain, barring the commission of intentional fraud on the part of the mother.

But if his paternal responsibilities have been stripped from him by the unholy alliance of ex-spouse and state, if he has been threatened with the full force of the law if he so much as attempts to contact them without the permission of the mother, then the onus for the children’s well-being lies with those who have assumed the full responsibility for it. It is absurd to write, as this woman does, that “men who turn aside from this duty should be looked at askance, stigmatised as dishonest weaklings.” The fact is that men who do not turn aside from this “duty” under these circumstances and this system are doing nothing more than enabling it. The writer’s real agenda is revealed in this sentence.

“Most mothers do their best but some are weak, depressed, drugged, or just lovelorn and intimidated by violent boyfriends.”

In other words, it’s the same old line that is based upon the underlying assumption that because women are children who can’t be held responsible for their actions, every female failing must ultimately be blamed on men. Clearly the logical solution is beyond her, which is to stop permitting mothers to unilaterally exclude fathers from the lives of their children. The concept is really not that hard to understand. Assuming that one considers the rule of law to be legitimate, once a man has been stripped of his status as a father by other parties, he no longer has any paternal responsibilities. They have been assumed by the parties that stripped it from him.