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Mailvox: heretic!

JimH apparently does not understand the basic concept of “fundamentalism”:

Sorry, I’m new here but it sounds like you wouldn’t agree with most Christian confessions of faith or Christian creeds. Nor could you likely hold office in any Christian denomination. How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian? You would quite possibly be labeled a heretic by many. I don’t know you well enough, but if you’re somewhat rolling your own religion and are as lacking in humility toward the Church as your blog suggests, there are cult-like overtones to your faith. I’d hardly call that fundamental Christianity.

I don’t agree with most of them. That is why I often describe them as a religion called “Churchianity” as opposed to Christianity. “How exactly does this square with calling yourself a fundamentalist Christian?” It is one and the same; most modern churches are more focused on the man-made edifice they have constructed on top of the Christian faith, be it political ideology, sexual revisionism, or doctrinal inventions.

fun·da·men·tal
adjective
1. serving as, or being an essential part of, a foundation or basis; basic; underlying: fundamental principles; the fundamental structure.

I have no religious regard whatsoever for the various extra-Biblical traditions of the various Christian churches, although I do respect them in the same manner I respect many of the non-religious traditions of Man. But I consider Churchian dogma such as the Trinity, the Rapture, infant baptism, transubstantiation, purgatory, female pastors, bans on alchohol and dancing, Papal infallibility, and Bishop Ussher’s historical chronology to be no more theologically legitimate or Biblically supported than I do the sale of indulgences, Dante’s geography of Hell, or Milton’s history of Lucifer’s Fall.

I have no doubt that some of the very churches that openly violate Scriptural teachings in their organizational structures would call me a heretic. What of it? If an ordained lesbian who subscribes to the Trinity and bides her time awaiting the Rapture by baptizing infants and attempting to revive Prohibition asserts I am a heretic, that merely tends to strengthen my suspicion that she does not worship the same god that I do. It is ironic, of course, that so many atheists like to strike the pose of potential burnee at the stake when history indicates that it was actually Christians who shared my skepticism concerning extra-Biblical dogma that were targeted by murderously inclined church authorities.

How and why should one show any humility towards organizations that teach demonstrable extra- and contra-Biblical falsehoods as the equivalent of Scripture? Consider, for example, that even those Christian scholars who subscribe to the Trinity concept “admit the trinity is not Biblical, did not exist in the Apostolic age, and was developed over a period of 295 years.”

It is even more ironic that what JimH “would hardly call fundamentalist Christianity” is far more genuinely fundamental Christianity than the concoction of Churchian creeds and structures that he considers acceptably orthodox. And adhering to the clear and undeniable teachings of a religious text that was written nearly 2,000 years before one was born is the exact opposite of “rolling one’s own religion”.

As for my failure to subscribe to what most people erroneously call the Nicene Creed, I merely point out that it isn’t even the Nicene Creed, but rather a substantially modified version of that creed produced by the First Council of Constantinople 56 years later. My religious beliefs actually happen to be more in accordance with the actual Nicene Creed than the beliefs of those who confess the subsequent Imperially-approved modification.

Three critics, three letters

Matthew David Surridge writes three intelligent responses to critics of the fantasy genre:

Dear Mr. Gopnik,

I read your recent article in The New Yorker, “The Dragon’s Egg,” with some interest. I haven’t read Christopher Paolini’s work; my interest is less in Young-Adult literature than in fantasy fiction. From that perspective I found your piece intriguing for what was left unsaid, or what you chose not to investigate. Specifically, I thought there were two major lacunae in the thinking underlying your approach to fantasy.

The first is apparent fairly early on, when you write that Ossian, The Silmarillion, and The Children of Húrin are boring. Later, you say: “And the truth is that most actual mythologies and epics and sacred books are dull. Nothing is more wearying, for readers whose tastes have been formed by the realist novel, than the Elder Edda.” This may well be so, though I’d like to think the enigmatic poems of the Edda can intrigue most readers. At any rate, true as what you say may be, the reverse is true as well. If you’re a reader whose tastes were shaped by mythology, the realist novel is pretty weak sauce. Surely, though, there’s more to be said about either form.

I’d like to draw upon our shared heritage as Montrealers to illustrate what I’m saying. Imagine, one early April night as the NHL season nears its end and the baseball season gets underway, a hockey fan and baseball fan change sports for one game. The baseball fan watches a hockey game, the hockey fan a baseball game. Leaving aside issues of team loyalty, and assuming both games put the best elements of their sports on display, what are the fans going to see?

The baseball fan’s going to look at a hockey game and think it’s ridiculous. Where’s the stillness, the reflection, the carefully-unfolding rhythm of baseball? Hockey just keeps moving, at ludicrous speeds to boot. It’s crude, players blocking other players with their bodies, and there’s clearly no strategy; players race back and forth and back and forth along the ice surface, in frantic pursuit of a round black Mcguffin. It’s wearying. And the violence — what on earth is the need for that? Don’t these people realise how ridiculous this sport is?

The Children of HúrinThe hockey fan, meanwhile, finds the baseball game dull. The thing just goes on and on, and nothing happens, and nothing keeps happening at length. There’re no real battles in the game, outside of a few footraces; nobody physically struggles against anyone else. Not one body check. And no flow; a pitcher throws a ball, and then something happens or, most often, doesn’t. There’s no structure of one play constantly organically developing into another. No plot. (There’s also a ludicrous structural imbalance favouring big-market teams, but admittedly that’s really something separate from my metaphor.)

Neither hypothetical fan really understands the game they’re unfamiliar with. They can’t see the structures of the sport, and don’t appreciate the gamesmanship involved. More than that, neither fan appreciates the long traditions of the other’s game. Their tastes have been shaped by the sport they love to the point where the virtues of the other sport simply seem nonsensical, or at best an entertainment of a lower order.

Which is what I found lacking in your article. Your perception of Tolkien and of mythology as boring is, I feel, not a particularly useful critical judgement. All it really tells me is that you as a critic are not likely to be particularly sensitive to the techniques and processes of fantasy fiction. That you do not understand the work you’re talking about.

Which in turn leads me to the second problem I found in the way you approached fantasy: a lack of awareness of traditions within the genre. You didn’t seem to appreciate the diversity of forms within fantasy, nor did you seem to understand that fantasy represents a tradition (or group of traditions) that reaches back at least to William Morris — I’d argue well before him. I felt that weakened your piece in a number of ways.

It’s a very interesting post and I highly recommend you read it if you have any interest in the SF/F genre. I don’t agree with everything Surridge says, of course,* but the core of his theme is exactly right. I would find it hard to agree more with Surridge when he writes: [I]t’s possible to love a book and still disagree with it. This possibility, I think, increases with the greatness of the book. I don’t agree with Dante Alighieri that gays and non-Christians ought to be handed an eternal afterlife of punishment, but I think The Divine Comedy is a great book. And it’s one that I like, even love, beyond my appreciation of Dante’s poetic technique, and intricate structure, and brilliant fusion of reality and imagery and allegory. Because it is a great book, one’s affirmation or rejection of is able to go beyond the affirmation or rejection of the writer’s beliefs.”

Surridge has it exactly right here. I recently finished reading China Mieville’s Embassytown, which I will review sometime in the next few weeks, and while it is a quite literally Satanic novel, it is a very good novel and one that is well worth reading for precisely that reason alone. (And other reasons too, to be sure.) The key point is that the greatness of a literary work is not in any way determined by the degree to which it corresponds with the reader’s beliefs and opinions.

*I will state that it is a grotesque insult to the language to insist that the “transgendered” are not perverse, i.e. “disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired”, no matter how “hateful” or “insensitive” they or anyone else might happen to find the description. One thing I refuse to tolerate is the ideological corruption of language.

Mailvox: context is king

Druidhouse perceives a nonexistent contradiction:

in the interview you say that WWII didn’t get us out of the depression, but rather that the fact that the u.s. was the only manufacturing facility left standing and that europe and the rest of the world were in rubble, thereby giving us a monopoly for a while on manufactured goods. but it was precisely WWII that left Europe’s infrastructure in ruins and america’s unscathed which gave us that monopoly. you are expressing a contradiction. and there’s nothing wrong with my reading comprehension.

I am not expressing a contradiction here. While there is nothing wrong with Druidhouse’s reading comprehension, or more to the point, his listening comprehension, his confusion stems from his ignorance of what “WWII got us out of the depression” means in the economic context.

In that context, which of course is the context in which the Alt Investors interview took place, “WWII got the USA out of the Great Depression” is a Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian argument in which it is asserted that the huge increase in government expenditure involved in the production of war material led to the post-war economic growth. It absolutely does NOT mean that “winning the war and surviving with the only intact industrial infrastructure” led to economic growth.

This should be obvious, since the economists who make the “WWII solution to depression” argument are not advocating World War III and the destruction of the European and Chinese industrial infrastructures, but rather increased government expenditure. It is a particularly stupid argument, of course, since Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union also vastly increased their defense spending without realizing any post-war economic growth as a result… and it was not even necessary for the USA to enter the war to ensure the destruction of the German, Russian, French, Italian, and British infrastructures.

Interview

Here is the interview with Alt Investors I did yesterday for those who might be interested. There are a few moments with some very bad buzzing on the line that lasts about five seconds each time, so consider yourself warned.

Since there has been an amount of interest in the topics being discussed, I wouldn’t mind having a transcript of it. If anyone is bored enough to type it up, please send it to me and I’ll post it here.

A scientific saint is exposed

English atheists like Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins like little better than to portray saints of the Catholic Church as being frauds. Which makes it rather satisfying indeed to see that one of the secular saints of the High Church of Atheist Science has been exposed as an unapologetic fraud:

In a surprising justification for duping millions of viewers, the TV star argued that owning up to splicing archive film with real Arctic scenes during the programme would have spoiled the mood. His blunt remarks came as more footage from the series was exposed as a sham.

Speaking after our exclusive story yesterday revealed shots of a polar bear and her newborn cubs were staged in a zoo using fake snow, Sir David, 85, said: “The question is, during the middle of this scene when you are trying to paint what it is like in the middle of winter at the pole, to say ‘Oh, by the way, this was filmed in a zoo’.

“It ruins the atmosphere, and destroys the pleasure of the viewers and destroys the atmosphere you are trying to create.

Ah, I see. “Ruining the atmosphere” is apparently a legitimate basis for deceiving people under the agnostic ethic. Remember that when you’re dealing with an agnostic in the future. If afterwards, she happens to complain that you were not truthful about [insert inconvenient truth here], you can simply explain that you were entirely justified in the deceit because telling him the truth would have ruined the atmosphere and destroyed her pleasure.

It’s rather amazing that the man could have reached 85 years of age without understanding the difference between “documentary” and “dramatic re-enactment”. And it is certainly informative to note that “This type of filming is standard practice across the industry when creating natural history programmes.”

Now, I haven’t had much interest in natural history documentaries – or rather, fakumentaries – since Marlin Perkins stopped ordering poor Jim to molest crocodiles in the river. But this confirms what I have always assumed, which is that they are little more than movies primarily designed for entertainment under the guise of being educational.

Mailvox: this is not the multiplier you’re looking for

Albatross gets caught attempting to pull the old switcheroo:

There are two senses in which the multiplier is used. In one sense, the multiplier is used as a statistic about government spending (i.e. suppose the government spends one dollar more, if GDP increases by 1 dollar, you have a multiplier of one). In this case, you wouldn’t understand my point. In another case, the multiplier refers to a theoretically posited increase in private sector activity because the government enables an “injection” into the economy (this is the sense in which the money multiplier exists). I meant the second sense and most Keynesians mean the second sense. You can’t understand Keynes’s thought experiment vis a vis burying money (since no gov’t money need be spent) unless you understand the injection multiplier as opposed to the statistical multiplier. I can go into further details if you’d like but I this is enough for you to understand why we came to different extensions from your conclusion.

Albatross failed to recognize which multiplier was the subject at hand. The entire 2008-2009 debate over the multiplier, and the context of the ECB study to which the linked article was referring, solely concerned the “fiscal multiplier”, which does not render Albatross’s point difficult to understand so much as entirely irrelevant. For example, here is The Economist’s article on it, to which Paul Krugman subsequently responded in his post entitled “Multiplying Multipliers”.

The debate hinges on the scale of the “fiscal multiplier”. This measure, first formalised in 1931 by Richard Kahn, a student of John Maynard Keynes, captures how effectively tax cuts or increases in government spending stimulate output. A multiplier of one means that a $1 billion increase in government spending will increase a country’s GDP by $1 billion.

The size of the multiplier is bound to vary according to economic conditions. For an economy operating at full capacity, the fiscal multiplier should be zero. Since there are no spare resources, any increase in government demand would just replace spending elsewhere. But in a recession, when workers and factories lie idle, a fiscal boost can increase overall demand. And if the initial stimulus triggers a cascade of expenditure among consumers and businesses, the multiplier can be well above one.

The multiplier is also likely to vary according to the type of fiscal action. Government spending on building a bridge may have a bigger multiplier than a tax cut if consumers save a portion of their tax windfall. A tax cut targeted at poorer people may have a bigger impact on spending than one for the affluent, since poorer folk tend to spend a higher share of their income.

Crucially, the overall size of the fiscal multiplier also depends on how people react to higher government borrowing. If the government’s actions bolster confidence and revive animal spirits, the multiplier could rise as demand goes up and private investment is “crowded in”. But if interest rates climb in response to government borrowing then some private investment that would otherwise have occurred could get “crowded out”. And if consumers expect higher future taxes in order to finance new government borrowing, they could spend less today. All that would reduce the fiscal multiplier, potentially to below zero.

However, it must be noted that the notion of potentially reducing the fiscal multiplier below zero is practically – I should not have said theoretically – unthinkable, for the obvious reason that there has never been a time since the original publication of The General Theory that any of the developed economies has come anywhere close to reaching full employment, except for revised definitions of “full employment” that all fell well short of an economy operating at full capacity. No Keynesian or Neo-Keynesian spends any time whatsoever considering theoretical sub-zero stimuli, for the obvious reason that they tend to render the entire Keynesian perspective either unnecessary or counterproductive. The usual Keynesian claim is that fiscal multipliers reliably range from 1.5 to 3x… which has been shown empirically to be untrue.

Furthermore, Albatross not only erroneously attempted to apply the “injection multiplier” to a discussion that explicitly concerned the “fiscal multiplier”, but also defined the injection multiplier incorrectly. The injection multiplier is not “a theoretically posited increase in private sector activity because the government enables an “injection” into the economy” but rather “any injection into the economy via investment capital, government spending or the like [that] will result in a proportional increase in overall income at a national level.” It includes, but is not limited to, the definition he provided.

Returning to the orginal point, it’s not at all surprising that the fiscal multiplier has been determined to reliably be less than one. As I noted in RGD, Robert Barro’s study of federal spending in WWII demonstrated that even in the most commonly cited Keynesian success story, “the estimated multiplier for defense spending is 0.6-0.7”.

John Maynard is still dead

But that doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally give his corpse another whack with the shovel:

In the midst of the European debt crisis, economists at the European Central Bank just produced a paper that looks at how growth in the size of government affects economic performance. The authors, António Afonso and João Tovar Jalles, provide “evidence on the issue of whether ‘too much’ government is good or bad for economic progress and macroeconomic performance, particularly when associated with differentiated levels of (underlying) institutional quality and alternative political regimes.”

Here are some key findings.

We analyse a wide set of 108 countries composed of both developed and emerging and developing countries, using a long time span running from 1970-2008, and employing different proxies for government size […] Our results show a significant negative effect of the size of government on growth. […] Interestingly, government consumption is consistently detrimental to output growth irrespective of the country sample considered (OECD, emerging and developing countries).

Basically, an increase in government spending (whether financed by taxes or by borrowing) reduces economic growth.

This is contra everything that is ever taught about GDP in mainstream economics. TheoreticallyPractically, it should not be possible that an increase in G could ever lead to a decrease in C+I+G+(X-M). The situation isn’t that supply-side economics is voodoo economics, it is that all mainstream economics is voodoo… except that it doesn’t work even when the target genuinely believes in it.

And for those who want to speak good economica, it can be phrased thusly: The multiplier is less than one.

Sand in the iron fist

Even a murderous, totalitarian government isn’t enough to maintain complete control sometimes:

For the first time on record, the Chinese Communist party has lost all control, with the population of 20,000 in this southern fishing village now in open revolt.

The last of Wukan’s dozen party officials fled on Monday after thousands of people blocked armed police from retaking the village, standing firm against tear gas and water cannons.

Since then, the police have retreated to a roadblock, some three miles away, in order to prevent food and water from entering, and villagers from leaving. Wukan’s fishing fleet, its main source of income, has also been stopped from leaving harbour.

The Chinese Communists will win this one of course. But they won’t always win. And they have to win every single time to maintain control. The rebels only have to win once. It is interesting to see how even communist societies have to deal with the realities of socionomic pressure once the credit boom ends.