Category: Uncategorized

Don’t worry, we will

Let the record show that we all have permission from the 2013 Best Novel Winner to, and I quote: “talk as much crap as they want about my Hugo”.

Anyone can talk as much crap as they want about my Hugo. Why? Because I had this moment, and it can’t be taken away. 

I don’t get it. What is so special about being kissed by your wife? Anyhow, as I noted, John Scalzi’s defensiveness about his Best Novel award indicates that he knows John Ringo, Larry Correia, and the other observers are correct and he simply did not merit the award. Even many of those who like the guy have been relatively quiet about it; they all know he didn’t deserve it either.

It won’t be long until the 2013 Best Novel Winner finds the award to be downright embarrassing to him.  Notice that no one ever says anything negative about his other Hugo awards, to which he had as good a claim as anyone.  But Best Novel for a derivative, mediocre light SF work such as Redshirts? It’s so laughable that it degrades the award, just as the Best Novel award for The Quantum Rose devalued the Nebula and Obama’s Peace Prize devalued the Nobel. Scalzi’s Best Novel Hugo makes Paul Krugman’s Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences look almost reasonable by comparison.

If the 2013 Best Novel Winner had any self-respect, or even sufficient awareness of his place in SF history, he would have refused to accept the award.  But he didn’t, and in doing so, he gave all of his many critics something with which to club him over the head for the rest of his life.

And we will. Because charity.

UPDATE:The following is from a past award nominee:

“Here’s the thing.  Scalzi entirely deserved his past fan writer Hugos.  Entirely.  His blog is his magnum opus, and he knows it.  He’s said it himself: Whatever is his biggest, most visible legacy in the world.  If he died tomorrow, he’d be known for Whatever more than his books; even OMW.  But it’s precisely *because* he knows this, that he’s insecure about the Best Novel win.  Because he knows that even his *allies* know that it’s not really a Best Novel win.  It’s a best fan writer in another form win.  Basically, a raw popularity win, which has little or nothing to do with how the book measures up against the work of KSR or anyone else.

“Scalzi is well-read.  He knows there were at least 25 other books that never even made the short list which are technically and artistically better than Red Shirts.  He has mewled apologia to this effect, while staunchly brandishing his phallic silver dildo trophy at his detractors and yelling, “My dildo is bigger than your dicks!”  

“So, as long as Scalzi (and his supporters) know in their hearts that Scalzi’s award is not, in fact, based on the merits of the book proper, there will be visible defensiveness on his part, and noticeably quiet reactions on the part of his buddies and hangers on.  Only the true mindless sycophants will declare Red Shirts a winner for its pure merit.  Having read neither Red Shirts nor any of the competitors.  Because Scalzi farts rainbows that smell like honey nut cheerios.”

The Moral Landscape revisited

A number of you have sent me this public challenge by Sam Harris:

It has been nearly three years since The Moral Landscape was
first published in English, and in that time it has been attacked by
readers and nonreaders alike. Many seem to have judged from the
resulting cacophony that the book’s central thesis was easily refuted.
However, I have yet to encounter a substantial criticism that I feel was
not adequately answered in the book itself (and in subsequent talks).

So I would like to issue a public challenge. Anyone who believes that
my case for a scientific understanding of morality is mistaken is
invited to prove it in 1,000 words or less. (You must address the
central argument of the book—not peripheral issues.) The best response
will be published on this website, and its author will receive $2,000.
If any essay actually persuades me, however, its author will receive
$20,000,* and I will publicly recant my view.

Submissions will be accepted here the week of February 2-9, 2014.

Needless to say, I will be submitting an entry. I’ve read the book and I’m very familiar with his approach. Sam Harris makes a regular habit of claiming he has answered his critics by way of anticipating them; he did the same in The End of Faith.  Let’s just say I don’t anticipate any trouble convincing anyone else that his thesis has been refuted, although convincing Mr. Harris himself may be considerably more difficult, especially considering the way he tried to weasel out of his perfectly straightforward statement on his belief in the ethical nature of killing people who subscribe to propositions considered to be sufficiently dangerous.

For those who are interested, here were my initial impressions after reading The Moral Landscape; my subsequent review of it, published on WorldNetDaily in November 2010, was as follows:

The Moral Landscape
Vox Day reviews Sam Harris’ case for using science to define morality

Sam Harris’ first two books were commercial successes and
intellectual failures. Riddled with basic factual and logical errors,
“The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” served as little
more than godless red meat snapped up by unthinking atheists around the
English-speaking world. His third book, “The Moral Landscape,” is also a
challenge to established wisdom, but it is a much more sober, serious
and interesting book than its predecessors.

The basis for the book is Harris’ own neuroscience experiments, in
which he tested his hypothesis that when hooked up to an fMRI scanner,
the human brain would produce an observable difference in its activity
when contemplating non-religious beliefs than when considering religious
beliefs. As it happens, the hypothesis was found to be incorrect, as
the same responses were elicited from both the believing group and the
non-believing group for religious and nonreligious stimuli alike. (Full
disclosure: I was one of the Christians asked by Mr. Harris to review
the religious stimuli to ensure their theological verisimilitude. In my
opinion, the questions utilized were both reasonable and fair.)

In “The Moral Landscape,” Sam Harris courageously attempts to address
the Problem of Morality that has plagued atheist philosophers since
Jean Meslier failed to realize the obvious consequences of his
declaration that every rational man could imagine better moral precepts
than Christianity possessed. As Harris notes, in the absence of a
morality derived from a religion, scientists and other secularists have
concluded that all morals are relative and there is therefore no
objective basis for preferring the moral precepts asserted by one
individual to those put forth by another, regardless of how monstrous
they might appear to a third party. This is why, aside from few
irrelevant rhetorical flourishes and one inexplicable personal jihad,
Harris’ arguments in the book are predominantly directed against his
fellow non-believers rather than theistic targets.

To his credit, Harris explicitly recognizes that he is making a
philosophical case, not a scientific one. This is a significant
improvement upon the first wave of New Atheist books, including Harris’
own pair, in which the various authors presented their intrinsically
philosophical cases in pseudo-scientific guise. However, there are three
argumentative flaws that pervade the book. Unfortunately, Harris
appears to have adopted Richard Dawkins’ favorite device of presenting a
bait-and-switch definition in lieu of a logically substantive argument.
He repeatedly utilizes the following technique:

1) Admittedly, X is not Y.

2) But can’t we say that X could be considered Z?

3) And Z is Y.

4) Therefore, X can be Y.

For example, in an attempt to get around Hume’s is/ought dichotomy,
Harris readily admits that “good” in the sense of “morally correct” is
not objectively definable and that what one individual perceives as good
can differ substantially from that which another person declares to be
“good.” So, he suggests the substitution of “well-being” for “good”
because there are numerous measures of “well-being,” such as life
expectancy, GDP per capita and daily caloric intake, that can be reduced
to numbers and are therefore measurable. After all, everyone
understands what it means to be in good health despite the fact that
“health” is not perfectly defined in an objective and scientific manner.
Right?

However, even if we set aside the obvious fact that the proposed
measures of well-being are of dubious utility – life expectancy does not
account for quality of life, GDP does not account for debt and more
calories are not always desirable – the problem is that Harris simply
ignores the way in which his case falls completely apart when it is
answered in the negative. No, we cannot simply accept that “moral” can
reasonably be considered “well-being” because it is not true to say that
which is “of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules
of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong” is more
than remotely synonymous with “that which fosters well-being in one or
more human beings.”

Harris’ second habitual flaw is one that was seen in his previous
books. That is to act as if admitting that a problem with his reasoning
exists is somehow tantamount to resolving the problem in his favor. He
appears to grasp that his philosophical consequentialism suffers from
the same democratic problem that caused philosophers to abandon
Benthamite utilitarianism as a prospective substitute for morality –
nine out of 10 individuals agree that gang rape enhances their
well-being – but he simply chooses to ignore the problem. In the notes,
he justifies this gaping hole in his argument by declaring that the
conceptual developments that have taken place since John Stuart Mill
died in 1873 “are generally of interest only to academic philosophers.”
That’s likely true, but it doesn’t excuse such a blatant evasion of a
known criticism nor does it help the self-confessed consequentialist
deal with the potentially nightmarish consequences of utilitarian
totalitarianism.

The third pervasive flaw is what after three books has become
recognizable as Harris’ customary intellectual carelessness. Time and
time again, he makes statements of fact that are easily disproved by the
first page of a Google search. For example, in an attempt to explain
that all opinions need not be equally respected and that not all
competing responses to moral dilemmas are equally valid, he brings up
the subject of corporal punishment:

“There are, for instance, twenty-one U.S. states that
still allow corporal punishment in their schools. … However, if we are
actually concerned about human well-being, and would treat children in
such a way as to promote it, we wonder whether it is generally wise to
subject little boys and girls to pain, terror, and public humiliation as
a means of encouraging their cognitive and emotional development. Is
there any doubt that this question has an answer? Is there any doubt
that it matters that we get it right? In fact, all the research
indicates that corporal punishment is a disastrous practice, leading to
more violence and social pathology – and, perversely, to greater support
for corporal punishment.”

– Sam Harris, “The Moral Landscape”

But “all the research” shows nothing of the kind. Sweden’s rate of
child abuse increased nearly 500 percent after spanking ban was
instituted in 1979 and is significantly higher than that of the United
States. In Trinidad, a paper titled “Benchmarking Violence and
Delinquency in the Secondary School: Towards a Culture of Peace and
Civility” concluded that a ban on corporal punishment in school had led
to indiscipline and even physical attacks on teachers. Dr. Robert E.
Larzelere of Oklahoma State has even published annotated studies
showing that what little scientific evidence has been produced to
support anti-spanking bans is not sound. One need not have a position on
corporal punishment to recognize that Harris did not, in fact, actually
look into the relevant research he cites so blithely.

This failure to
correctly establish a factual premise and build from it is found
throughout the book; Harris makes a habit of beginning with a conclusion
and belatedly attempting to support it with a statement of fact that is
often dubious and occasionally downright in error.

Still, Sam Harris is to be lauded for taking the moral bull by the
horns and bravely attempting to make the case for the possibility of a
secular and scientific morality. “The Moral Landscape” raises some
interesting questions and provides the reader with more than a little
material for thought. On the downside, Harris’ repeated attacks on Dr.
Francis Collins are unseemly as well as irrelevant to his topic; one
wonders what his editor was thinking to permit such a lengthy tangent
that is more indicative of a Victor Hugo novel than a serious scientific
work. And in the end, the reader is forced to conclude the argument for
a science-based morality presented in “The Moral Landscape” is even
more demonstrably incorrect than was the scientific hypothesis that
served as the original inspiration for the book.

Worker unrest at Walmart

I’m considerably less unsympathetic to this labor action than my natural hostility to unions might indicate.

Walmart workers and their supporters are planning to launch protests in stores in 15 cities across the US on Thursday, as part of a small but vociferous movement to raise wages and improve conditions for some of the nation’s lowest paid workers.

The action follows strikes last week by fast food workers demanding a higher minimum wage and a civil disobedience action in Washington DC in August, where a coalition of Walmart workers and unions called for a minimum annual wage of $25,000 and the reinstatement of 20 employees they claim were illegally fired by the company after strikes in early June.

OurWalmart, a union-backed members group, says it has filed more than 100 unfair labour practice charges against Walmart with the National Labor Relations Board, including 20 illegal terminations and 80 disciplinary actions. The board said it was looking into “several cases”.

I’ve seen some commentators pointing out that the Walmart workers don’t seem to realize that their wage demands would eliminate the corporation’s operating profits. Whether that is true or not, I think it is totally insane to expect low-income workers to demonstrate more concern for the health of the corporation than the vast majority of Fortune 500 executives do.

We’ve spent the last five years watching bank executives rape their banks of more than FIFTY PERCENT of the profits, then pay themselves bonuses as the federal government hands them trillions to prevent them from going under.  Why on Earth shouldn’t the Walmart workers feel justified in demanding a mere $25k annual minimum wage?  It’s a lot more affordable than bailing out the banks again.

Lions Den IV: Gunther Roosevelt

Now that the Lions Den series has been introduced with some more or less established writers, I thought it would be good to start bringing some new writers from the burgeoning independent publishing scene into the mix as well.  I don’t know anything at all about Gunther Roosevelt, except that it is obvious there is no chance in Hell that his anthology, Tales of a New America, would be published by any mainstream SF/F publisher, with the possible exception of Baen Books.  As always, if you’re interested in being one of the three two one volunteer reviewers of the book, please send me an email. We are all set for reviewers.

After 9/11/01, I had hoped that Americans would rally against one of the most vile and long standing enemies of humanity, Islam; but neither the experience of the wholesale slaughter of thousands of innocent Americans nor the glimpse of an unveiled totalitarian and psychotic Arabian evil could hold the sociopathic Left in check for long.
Combining the Bush administration’s incompetent foreign policy, the President’s absurd belief that ancient places with tribal peoples filled with simmering animosities and rabidly violent inclinations could embrace impartial  institutions and liberal democracy, along with the Left’s program of political correctness, destruction of Christian morality, indoctrination of the young, and corruption of all American institutions and triumph of crony capitalism — I realized that America was over.

Voting Republican, Libertarian or anything else was useless. Nothing could stem the tide of America’s financial and social destruction anymore than our elected representatives wished to stem the invasion by Mexicans, Asians, Africans, and Muslims regardless how many Americans were killed, raped, molested, robbed, and maimed by the illegal and legal hordes.

What could be done? Politics was hopeless. The people had no voice nor advocate no matter who they elected, and half were co-opted anyway and part of the scheme of government growth, employment, or benefit. The answer was as clear to me as it was to the Founding Fathers — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.

It was also clear that moaning and complaining about the present situation was a waste of energy and trying to organize incremental reforms to re-establish a coherent and sane society was futile in the extreme.

What is needed is revolution, but before it can begin, people need a vision of what a saving remnant might accomplish in carving out a territory within America and building a new nation and ethno-state. People would need to see what a New America might look like where they could thrive as they once had, and if determined, might return to conquest in driving out invaders and their collaborators from ancestral homelands

Hence, the Tales of New America that offers that offers twenty-three snapshots from a period fifty years or so years into the future.

The Tales present a new society in the making, its cohering into a state with religious foundations, its gathering of people, and organizing of institutional machinery and an advanced military. You meet a border guard in a key outpost with the power of life and death trying to maintain his humanity while enforcing laws with harsh penalties.

There are athletes, soldiers, hardware store salesmen, foreign spies, Berkeley refugees, Mexican gang bangers trying to hang on to their territory, ghetto dregs when the well’s run dry, Leftist peaceniks facing their folly, mindless government bureaucrats revenged upon, and a movie producer helping to create a new Hollywood who make up some of the characters in the stories.

The reader will find that some stories are better written or more engaging than others, but that’s the beauty of an anthology like this — readers will disagree on what they most liked or didn’t enjoy as much.

Tales of New America is a panorama through time of possibilities for a thriving and prosperous future for civilization, the Northern European kind, that has done more good for more people and would continue to do so were it re-infused with great purpose and common identity.

Right wing warmongers

John Hawkins takes a poll of 46 right-wing bloggers, including me, concerning the proposed military adventure in Syria:

#1) Do you think Congress should give Obama authorization for ANY sort of military operation in Syria?

No: 84.8% (39 votes)
Yes: 15.2% (7 votes)

#2) If it were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Assad used chemical weapons in Syria, would you support bombing Syria?
No: 76.1% (35 votes)
Yes: 23.9% (11 votes)

It’s informative to see that the warmongering Right is considerably less enthusiastic about the use of military force than either the antiwar Left or the Nobel Peace Prize winner in the White House.  But fortunately, the United States has an elected leader it can trust to lead it into war.

“I didn’t set a red line. The world set a red line.”
– Barack Obama,  September 4, 2013

“We have been very clear to the Assad regime but also to other players
on the ground that a red line for us is, we start seeing a whole bunch
of weapons moving around or being utilized.”
– Barack Obama, August 21, 2012

John Ringo on a 2013 Hugo winner

The Baen Books author wonders how much longer conservative and libertarian readers are going to continue to buy derivative books written by a progressive male demi-feminist who openly despises them:

So about the whole Scalzi ‘thing.’

Scalzi was pissing
me off even before getting a Hugo for a novel so remarkably unremarkable
it would barely have made it to paperback in the 1970s. Nothing against
it, it’s a fun, simple, mindless, read from all I’ve gathered. But it’s
not exactly Stranger in a Strange Land or Nightfall.

Scalzi
is president of SFWA (sort of the writer’s union for SF authors) or
whatever they’re calling it this week. As president instead of, oh, I
dunno, working to get better generalized terms for new authors, ensuring
contracts are upheld with publishers, maybe, someday, getting a fucking
health care insurer for all us authors who don’t have health insurance,
he’d been concentrating on IMPORTANT matters like making sure all
characters were called s/he and women weren’t being harassed at cons
(which happens and is up to the convention people to manage) and… The
list of ‘not-core-issue’ kerfuffles he’s been involved in as president
makes you think he’s president of ACORN not an SF union. And it was not
only driving out members (or they were expelling members for
‘bad-speak’) it was making the group as irrelevant as the opinion of an
abyssal nematode.

But I wasn’t the only one that Scalzi was pissing off. And that’s sort of the important point for Scalzi….

Which is where we start to see the issues with Scalzi suddenly not so
much ‘coming out of the closet’ but making a splash on a variety of
hot-button issues that really don’t sit well with his RETAIL market. The
people who actually BUY the books over the counter as opposed to
market, sell and even buy them for distribution. The more books you can
get a bookstore to buy, the more likely you are to sell them. So being
the poster child for your commercial people is a good thing.
Pissing off the people who in the end have to actually buy the books to read…. Not so much.

And the market fraction of true ‘Modern Progressives’ who read combat SF is HYSTERICALLY low.

Many people who used to be fans of the 2013 Best Novel winner are beginning to figure out that Scalzi is a fraud, not so much because he exaggerates his daily blog readership by a mere 46,000 readers (or, if you prefer, 1,150 percent), but in terms of him being an original writer or one who is even remotely considerate of conservative or libertarian perspectives.  It’s possible, I suppose, that the all-seeing eye of Instapundit, who used to push Scalzi’s books on a regular basis, happens to be totally unaware of the Hugo awards, which he has not seen fit to mention.

Or perhaps the libertarian opinion leader has, like Mr. Ringo, gradually had his eyes opened to the real Scalzi, to the man’s increasingly vocal support for insane left-wing policies, to his hatred for free association, and to his complete flip-flop on free speech.  Remember, back in 2005, before he was established in the science fiction world, Scalzi was claiming that he wouldn’t want to see anyone expelled from SFWA for their beliefs. In 2013, he quit paying his SFWA dues and threatened to quit the organization entirely if someone wasn’t expelled from the SFWA for their beliefs.

How things change once a man feels he can afford to reveal his true character.

Unlike Mr. Ringo, I’m genuinely pleased that McRapey won the Hugo for a mediocre and derivative novel. That isn’t false magnanimity, it is merely that I am publicly on record as stating that the awards in the SF field became a hopelessly politicized joke when incoming SFWA president Catharine Asaro won the Nebula for The Quantum Rose in 2002. I drew considerable ire from many SFWA members for pointing that out on Black Gate last year, and I view three-time SFWA president John Scalzi’s Hugo for Redshirts as conclusive evidence in support of my hypothesis.

I also found it amusing that even McRapey’s little Twitter friend at the Guardian wrote about the Hugo awards with a distinct damned-by-faint-praise air to the article.

There is something else too, something darker. I once accidentally won a drawing award when I was six. I can’t draw at all and so I traced an image of a wood duck for a homework assignment. I had absolutely no idea that the teacher would send it into the Star as part of a big state-wide school competition, still less that I would win it for my 5-7 age group. That bloody duck was even featured in the Minneapolis newspaper. I don’t think my mother realized I wasn’t an artist until after I had graduated from college and she never figured out why both the newspaper clippings and the award disappeared.

So I speak from experience when I say that the only thing that rankles the soul more than merit that goes unrecognized is recognition that the receiver knows is unmerited. As writers, we know very well where our books stand in comparison with the greats as well as which of our contemporaries merit being numbered among them. That is why there are few things I could do to more cruelly scar the hypersensitive McRapey over time than the voting WorldCon membership has now done. Once the excitement from his long-sought Sally Field moment fades and the inevitable self-doubts creep in – for the narcissistic gamma male is ever prone to self-doubts as well as grandiose delusions – well, that’s when it should get interesting.

At least he’ll always have his lawn.

On the other hand, there are still those, like Professor Bainbridge, who not only don’t know mediocre science fiction when they see it, but are from the short-sighted conservative school of thought that is proud to materially support the very progressives, socialists and Trotskyites who seek to destroy it.  I can’t say I blame him, as I used to be inclined to a libertarian view of that perspective until the creation of Fox News made it very clear what a severe price had been paid over time for the privilege of feeling open-minded.

Another discussion of Ringo’s observations of John Scalzi’s achievement in left-liberal politicking, including an appearance by the Toad of Tor herself, can be found here. Note that you have to turn off NoScript to see the comments.

How the OC spent his summer vacation

The OC provides an update on the current Rampant Loon publications:

If you’ve been following Stupefying Stories on facebook, you
know that slightly more than two months ago, as we were in the throes of
releasing the July issue, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. This
apparently was why I seemed to have boundless energy. My blood sugars
were five times higher than normal. I had the metabolism of a
hummingbird.

My doctors immediately put me on an aggressive treatment plan, which
immediately made things much worse. By the time a month later when we
were trying to finish up both the August issue and the long-delayed
zombie anthology, and just as the aforementioned soap opera was reaching
its dramatic climax for the season, the diagnosis was revised to
full-blown Type 1. Apparently my endocrine system was not merely out of
adjustment. My pancreas had just plain packed up and quit.

Something had to give, and as it turned out, it was our August release schedule.

Things have begun to stabilize since then. I’m now on a treatment
regimen consisting of two different types of insulin and five injections
daily, with each dose being calculated based on my latest blood glucose
reading and then adjusted by a variety of fudge factors—all things my
pancreas used to do autonomically. A remarkable organ, the pancreas;
terribly underappreciated. As Joni Mitchell said, “You don’t know what
you got ‘til it’s gone.”

Fortunately, he’s doing much better now and is working on both Headcrash 2.0 and the sequel to Rebel Moon, entitled Rebel Moon Rising.  No, I cruelly jest, while he is doing better, he is doing nothing of the kind. But there is the new Showcase and new Stupefying Stories on the way soon.

Al Qaida’s air force

Karl Denninger correctly sums up the upcoming Syrian misadventure in his customarily reserved manner:

Obama is spouting off from the ass once again in Sweden. Every
time this buttclown, McStain, Graham or the others open their mouths (or
McStain plays poker during the Senate hearing yesterday) they continue to obfuscate and ignore the bottom line:
A military strike at Assad’s government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA’S AIR FORCE.

The rest of this debate is arm-waving.

A military strike at Assad’s government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA’S AIR FORCE.

Al Qaida is a sworn enemy of the United States.  The United States has ratified their statement of being our enemy through more than 10 years of continual declaration of a “state of emergency” citing the so-called “war on terror.” It is an act of Treason according to our Constitution to provide material aid and comfort to a sworn enemy of our nation.

A military strike at Assad’s government IS ACTING AS AL QAIDA’S AIR FORCE.

To be honest, it’s hard to argue with either his argument or his conclusions.  Meanwhile, the leading House Republicans are busy demonstrating that while attacking Syria is clearly not in either the national interest or the party’s interest, the decisive factor appears to be that they see it as being in Israel’s interest.  Consider Eric Cantor’s statement that he’ll vote to authorize the use of military force against Syria no matter what the authorizing language happens to be.


“I intend to vote to provide the President of the United States the option to use military force in Syria. While the authorizing language will likely change, the underlying reality will not. America has a compelling national security interest to prevent and respond to the use of weapons of mass destruction, especially by a terrorist state such as Syria, and to prevent further instability in a region of vital interest to the United States.”

That is a total lie.  America has no “compelling national security interest” in Syria, especially since there are reports that the weapons came from Saudi Arabia and were set off accidentally by the Al Qaida rebels.  And seriously, what are the chances that launching missiles, or worse, invading, is going to reduce, let alone prevent, further instability in the Middle East?

It’s probably a good thing this didn’t happen in the late 1970s. I can’t even imagine how many Hal Lindsay readers would be convinced that the end of the world was approaching.

Why central bankers never learn

Zerohedge reports on India’s central bank digging its hole deeper:

With the value of the rupee plunging to new lows, the current account deficit at an all-time high and inflation running at nearly a ten-percent annual clip, India is in serious economic trouble. Indeed many are beginning to wonder whether the country is edging toward a replay of the events in the summer of 1991. Back then, an acute balance of payments crisis forced New Delhi into the indignity of pawning its gold reserves in order to secure desperately needed international financing.

At a small public event the other week, Duvvuri Subbarao, the outgoing head of the central bank, pointedly referred to a recent book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, and conceded that policymakers rarely learn from their mistakes. He conceded that:

        “… in matters of economics and finance, history repeats itself, not because it is an inherent trait of history, but because we don’t learn from history and let the repeat occur.”

This is a theme that policymakers have been pondering for a while. More than a year ago, at what was ostensibly a celebration of an updated book on the economic reforms catalyzed by the 1991 debacle, Subbarao warned that the dangers sparking that crisis – ballooning fiscal and current account deficits – were once again lurking. At the same time, a high-ranking commerce ministry official told a group of business leaders that economic indicators were provoking “a sense of déjà vu.” Worried that conditions were ripe for a replay of the 1991 crisis, he exclaimed:

        “Why are we dodging these [policy challenges]? In 1991, we were candid enough to take these decisions. The quicker we take these decisions, the better it would be, instead of acting like ostriches.”

The reason is fairly simple. Men have a very difficult time understanding things when their continued financial well-being depends upon them failing to understand them.