Category: Uncategorized

The fake Dr. Doom

Things must be getting bad. They’re so bad that Nouriel Roubini actually thinks he can risk turning bearish again:

Speaking at the Ambrosetti Forum on the shores of Lake Como, near Milan, Roubini said in an interview: “We are in a worse situation than we were in 2008. This time around we have fiscal austerity and banks that are being cautious.” Roubini, known for his bearish views on the world economy, thinks that there is a 60 percent chance of a second recession imminently.

This guy is a complete fraud. He got lucky once, and ever since has been sticking to the mainstream consensus expectations for fear he’ll be wrong again. If he’s saying “there is a 60 percent chance of a second recession” that really means that the statistical shenanigans that disguise the ongoing 2008 to 2011 depression as a recovery are failing.

Supply, demand, and education

It is ironic indeed that those who make a fetish of education are themselves so badly educated that the are unaware of the Law of Supply and Demand. It genuinely appears to surprise them that increasing the supply of university graduates would lower the value of a university degree.

More than a quarter of graduates do not have a full-time job three and a half years after leaving university. A staggering 115,000 youngsters who graduated in 2007 have been consigned to the unemployment scrapheap, lumbered with a dead-end part-time job or are still in education, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

The research will raise serious questions about the value of getting a degree when tuition fees increase from £3,290 to £9,000 next year…. It follows a study last week which revealed that one in five graduates earns less than a person who left school with as little as one A-level.

There is no question about it. The value of getting a degree declines with every additional degree that is granted. And as the number of less educated, more highly skilled workers declines, their value will increase. Furthermore, the expansion in the number of university graduates has coincided, unsurprisingly, with a significant decline in the quality of the educations they have received.

The PZ Myers Memorial Debate

Since we have learned that the Fowl Atheist, Paul Zachary, has given up the art of debating Creationists, (and no doubt numerous Christians will have to remind him of this when he calls into a radio show and attempts to ambush them), it appears we shall have to find another atheist with whom to debate the topic I suggested three years ago. Hence this announcement of the first PZ Myers Memorial Debate, dedicated to the short-lived, but inglorious debating career of our favorite community college butterfly collector. I’m sure we all recall how beautifully he ran; Paul Zachary’s reaction to a challenge reminded me of Usain Bolt’s to the sound of a starter’s pistol.

Of course, a debate requires an opponent, so I’m interested to know if there is an atheist who would like to contest the assertion that there is not only substantial evidence for the existence of gods, but that the logic and the evidence in support of the existence of gods is superior to the logic and the evidence for the nonexistence of them.

This will be a written debate. Each party will simultaneously submit an initial statement of no more than 1,500 words for the other party to critique, and both parties will have one week to respond to the other’s initial statement with a critique of no more than 2,000 words. Whoever the judges determine to have won the first round will have the choice between writing the next post or replying to the first-round loser’s next post. There will be five rounds, after which one side or the other may concede or simply withdraw, or continue if both parties wish. The second to fifth rounds will be limited to 3,000 words.

If you happen to be interested in opposing the assertion, please put your name forward along with any credentials you might deem relevant. I’m also interested in three judges, one Christian, one agnostic, and one atheist, so please put your name forward if you would like to be a judge and believe you are impartial enough to focus on the quality of the arguments. If multiple atheists wish to debate, I will post their names and encourage a discussion among them in order to allow them to select the strongest candidate.

I’m also interested in hearing recommendations on a scoring system. I was thinking of having the judges each award up to 5 points on each exchange, but perhaps someone will have a better idea.

Anyhow, it would be impossible to put up a worse showing than the Fowl Atheist, so if you’re interested, do let me know.

Holocaust a surprising boon for Jews

Without the Holocaust, would the Jews ever have gotten their own internationally recognized state in Palestine? Would they be able to so easily trump every criticism of a Jew, be it legitimate or illegitimate, by simply crying anti-semitism? Sure, the Tribe would probably still run Hollywood even if there had never been a Holocaust since they created it, but would Ben Shalom be Chairman of the Federal Reserve and would Jews be so heavily represented in the U.S. Senate, the Congress, and the U.S. media without it? Clearly, Jews should be as deeply grateful to Mister Hitler for helpfully slaughtering a few million of their fellows as China’s girls are for a mere 43 million of them being sacrificed to the greater good of their sex:

[G]ifted young women are increasingly common in China’s cities and make up the most educated generation of women in Chinese history. Never have so many been in college or graduate school, and never has their ratio to male students been more balanced. To thank for this, experts say, is three decades of steady Chinese economic growth, heavy government spending on education and a third, surprising, factor: the one-child policy….

Still, 43 million girls have “disappeared” in China due to gender-selective abortion as well as neglect and inadequate access to health care and nutrition, the United Nations estimated in a report last year. Yin Yin Nwe, UNICEF’s representative to China, puts it bluntly: The one-child policy brings many benefits for girls “but they have to be born first.”

No doubt we will soon read about how the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis has brought about a renaissance of Tutsi intellectual life in Rwanda and be informed that it was a combination of the sack of Rome, the Black Death and the Mongol invasion of Europe that accounts for that continent’s historical significance. No doubt the AGW/CC crowd will want to ride this pale horse too.

A formidable defender of Darwin

Since Paul Zachary is so fearful, perhaps I should debate this kid. He can’t be any less capable of presenting a logical argument, and clearly he can parrot the current Cult of Darwin consensus with the best of them:

Amid the hoots at Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry for saying there were “gaps” in the theory of evolution, the strongest evidence for Darwinism presented by these soi-disant rationalists was a 9-year-old boy quoted in the New York Times.

After his mother had pushed him in front of Perry on the campaign trail and made him ask if Perry believed in evolution, the trained seal beamed at his Wicked Witch of the West mother, saying, “Evolution, I think, is correct!”

That’s the most extended discussion of Darwin’s theory to appear in the mainstream media in a quarter-century. More people know the precepts of kabala than know the basic elements of Darwinism.

Well, if a nine year-old kid thinks it’s correct, it must be correct! QED. Miss Coulter’s last claim is certainly interesting, given the massive emphasis that the Cult of Darwin places upon exposing schoolchildren to its relentless propaganda at an early age. But who would have thought that children who can barely learn to read in 12 years of public school might have a tough time retaining anything they’ve been taught about a dynamic quasi-scientific theory?

Personally, I tend to find it extremely amusing when accused of being ignorant about TENSTE(p)NSBMGDaGF. Never mind that I was taught about it in public school by credentialed members of the Cult of Darwin in precisely the manner the cultists advocate. The fact is that unlike most Darwinians, I have read seven of Richard Dawkins’s ten books, two of Stephen Gould’s, a random assortment of books by other authors including Charles Darwin, Marc Hauser and Daniel Dennett, around 50 published papers which relate to natural selection in some way and more than 20 years worth of magazines such as Natural History and New Scientist.

This doesn’t make me any sort of expert on the subject. But I should think it tends to indicate that I am not completely uninformed about it. And it’s certainly ironic to be repeatedly accused of ignorance when not having read any economists from Turgot to Tobin or theologians from Tertullian to Craig ever seems to prevent credentialed Cult of Darwin members from opining authoritatively on economics or theology.

All ur bikes are belong to us

It’s always interesting to see when one aspect of the overblown Nanny State is at war with another aspect of it. I think we can safely declare the Green movement dead with this report of egregious child abuse:

“On August 25th my 10 year daughter arrived home via police officer, requested to speak to me on the front porch of my home. The officer informed me that in his ‘judgement’ it was unsafe for my daughter to ride her bike to school.”

Ms Tryon called the mayor’s office and the chief of police office in order to determine what laws she was breaking by allowing her daughter to ride her bike to school. Her daughter’s route to school was reasonably safe.

Major Verran of the police department returned Ms Tryon’s call. She said he told me, “He had spoke with the District Attorney’s office who advised that until the officer can speak with Child Protective Services that if I allow my daughter to ride/walk to school I will be breaking the law and treated accordingly.

She asked, “What law she would be breaking to which the answer was ‘child neglect'”.

Ms Tryon confirm with Major Verran that her daughter was indeed breaking no laws at any level, but it was Ms Tryon who was breaking the law by allowing her daughter to ride/walk to school. Even though it only takes her daughter 7 – 9 minutes to bicycle to school, she is expected to ride the bus.

By the way, in Big Government Europe, children are not only expected to walk to school, but this time of year there are massive posters put up warning drivers to be careful and on the lookout for schoolchildren walking to and from school. The only police involvement is to man the crossings at the busy streets.

As a commenter on another site pointed out, it’s a fascinating charge of child endangerment, especially considering that the schoolbus she will be required to ride doesn’t have seatbelts, much less five-point child safety seats. But let’s not be too harsh on the police officer. He’s just concerned for her safety, because the police are all about protecting and servicing.

What feminism is

In Gloria Steinem’s own words:

“Feminism starts out being very simple. It starts out being the instinct of a little child who says ‘it’s not fair’ and ‘you are not the boss of me,’ and it ends up being a worldview that questions hierarchy altogether.”

In other words, it is an intrinsically childish ideology founded on an abstraction and defies empirical reality and the entire historical record of Man. That sounds about right.

Analyzing the Obama “jobs plan”

Obama’s attempt to address unemployment and the economic contraction can best be described as “quixotic”. Another apt adjective would be “doomed”:

The White House scrambled Monday to finalize a new jobs initiative as President Obama nominated the last member of the economic team that will be charged with carrying it out. In tapping Alan Krueger, a Princeton University professor and noted labor expert, to be chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Obama turned to an economist who officials said was well suited to guide the White House through a jobs crisis…. Obama’s nomination of Krueger would largely reconstitute the economic policy team inside the Treasury Department during the first two years of the administration. At the time, Krueger served as Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner’s top economic adviser. His work overlapped with that of Gene Sperling, who was a top adviser on budget and tax issues.

The Krueger appointment only makes sense, given that Obama’s economic policy team did such an effective job in 2009 and 2010, avoiding the Second Great Depression and subsequently producing seven straight quarters of economic recovery, right? Let’s look at the elements of the proposed plan:

1. a tax cut that would directly reward companies for hiring new workers

The big companies already have billions parked in offshore accounts. The tax cut won’t be big enough to balance the risk and additional expenses that new hires impose on small companies. Conclusion: irrelevant, but at least it won’t cost anything.

2. new spending for environmentally friendly construction and for rehabilitating schools

This is just more of the same Samuelsonian stimulus, but not so much that the demand for labor it will create can’t be met by the existing construction labor force that is already half-idle due to the collapse in the real estate markets. Conclusion: this will increase federal debt and create no new employment.

3. clean-energy tax cuts.

Actual tax cuts will do nothing. I’m guessing these are actually subsidies disguised as tax credits. Conclusion: More federal debt, more malinvestment, no new employment.

4. programs to target long-term unemployment, potentially including a version of a Georgia unemployment insurance program that pays employers to hire workers who have been unemployed and provides funding for training.

Theoretically more useful, depending upon the industry. Serious employer-provided training could be a genuinely positive long-term boost to employment if it was combined with import tariffs in manufacturing industries, especially if tighter immigration restrictions were imposed as well. But since neither trade restrictions nor immigration restrictions will be incorporated and the training will probably be oriented towards low-skill service industry jobs, all of the subsidized positions will disappear as soon as the subsidies do. Conclusion: expensive and irrelevant. A 2012 Census would have the same effect and likely prove more useful.

5. new programs to lift the housing market, such as a refinancing initiative that could pump tens of billions of dollars into the economy.

Conclusion: This is the Bank of America bailout signaled by Warren Buffet’s investment. I suspect the plan will somehow involve shifting household debt to the federal sector and thereby attempting to encourage homeowners to take on more debt. This might involve something like a federal guarantee for X amount of debt with administration-approved banks in return for every XY amount of new debt borrowed from BACthose banks. The Fed and the administration are desperate to get the household sector borrowing again since the trillions in financial sector debt they ate in 2008 didn’t even slow down the decline in financial borrowing. Conclusion: if large enough, it would trigger a short term spending and employment boost combined with another debt-deflation disaster within three years.

6. renewing — and potentially expanding — ongoing efforts, such as a two-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax.

Trivial. They’ll have to eliminate it for at least a five year period for this to have any effect on unemployment.

This doesn’t even include the plan to extend “emergency” unemployment benefits, which will tend to increase the unemployment rate. The only way the Obama administration is going to reduce the unemployment rate is to continue the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s practice of artificially lowering the labor force participation rate to keep U3 below 10 percent. Of course, the continued decline in the Employment-Population Ratio to pre-1953 levels will expose this predictable shenanigan.

Setting Mr. Harris straight

This promises an amount of amusement, as Sam Harris has unaccountably decided to dabble in economics:

I’ve written before about the crisis of inequality in the United States and about the quasi-religious abhorrence of “wealth redistribution” that causes many Americans to oppose tax increases, even on the ultra rich. The conviction that taxation is intrinsically evil has achieved a sadomasochistic fervor in conservative circles—producing the Tea Party, their Republican zombies, and increasingly terrifying failures of governance.

Sam is off to a bad and overly politicized start. First, Sam simply has it wrong as there is very little conviction that all taxes are intrinsically evil, since most of those opposing the income tax have no problem with a flat tax, sales taxes, or excise taxes. No one expects the government to do without any funding at all, it is the amount of funding required that is at issue. Thus, it is not an issue of taxation, but rather one of government spending. Harris also gets the Tea Party wrong, as it is a rebel force within the Republican Party that is primarily opposed to the pro-spending Republican establishment and is focused on unseating certain types of Republicans during the nomination phase rather than electing Republicans in the general elections. This should be obvious, as the Tea Party began in opposition to a Republican administration, not a Democratic one.

Happily, not all billionaires are content to hoard their money in silence. Earlier this week, Warren Buffett published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he criticized our current approach to raising revenue. As he has lamented many times before, he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary is. Many conservatives pretend not to find this embarrassing.

Warren Buffett is a corrupt old bag of shit. He steals from the American people with the connivance of the Wall Street bankers, the Bush administration, and now the Obama administration. Witness his little deals with Goldman Sachs and now Bank of America. To point to Buffett as any sort of moral examplary indicates that Harris has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Buffett is the poster boy for how government creates the very income inequality that bothers Harris so.

Conservatives view taxation as a species of theft—and to raise taxes, on anyone for any reason, is simply to steal more. Conservatives also believe that people become rich by creating value for others. Once rich, they cannot help but create more value by investing their wealth and spawning new jobs in the process. We should not punish our best and brightest for their success, and stealing their money is a form of punishment.

How is taking money from others utilizing the threat of violence not a form of theft? It is true that not all rich people become rich by creating value, of course. Some inherit it, but more often these days, they do so through government-enabled gambling and government corruption.

Of course, this is just an economic cartoon. We don’t have perfectly efficient markets, and many wealthy people don’t create much in the way of value for others. In fact, as our recent financial crisis has shown, it is possible for a few people to become extraordinarily rich by wrecking the global economy.

Like, for example, Warren Buffett. Buffett creates nothing, neither do the financial institutions, which presently skim off around 30 percent of all the corporate profit in the USA.

Nevertheless, the basic argument often holds: Many people have amassed fortunes because they (or their parent’s, parent’s, parents) created value. Steve Jobs resurrected Apple Computer and has since produced one gorgeous product after another. It isn’t an accident that millions of us are happy to give him our money.

But even in the ideal case, where obvious value has been created, how much wealth can one person be allowed to keep? A trillion dollars? Ten trillion? (Fifty trillion is the current GDP of Earth.) Granted, there will be some limit to how fully wealth can concentrate in any society, for the richest possible person must still spend money on something, thereby spreading wealth to others. But there is nothing to prevent the ultra rich from cooking all their meals at home, using vegetables grown in their own gardens, and investing the majority of their assets in China.

And the inevitable atheist tendency towards totalitarianism finally shows through. Rich people aren’t “allowed to keep money”. They have it. It’s theirs. As in, not yours, Sam. This is called the principle of private property, and upon it all the wealth of the Western world is founded. Or rather, was founded before it was turned into collateral in a ponzi scheme.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the two richest men in the United States, each have around $50 billion. Let’s put this number in perspective: They each have a thousand times the amount of money you would have if you were a movie star who had managed to save $50 million over the course of a very successful career. Think of every actor you can name or even dimly recognize, including the rare few who have banked hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years, and run this highlight reel back half a century. Gates and Buffet each have more personal wealth than all of these glamorous men and women—from Bogart and Bacall to Pitt and Jolie—combined.

In fact, there are people who rank far below Gates and Buffet in net worth, who still make several million dollars a day, every day of the year, and have throughout the current recession.

Some people have more money than others. Big deal. I don’t see Sam handing over his royalties to the poor. If he’s a typical atheist, he gives a lower percentage of his income to charity than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett does.

And there is no reason to think that we have reached the upper bound of wealth inequality, as not every breakthrough in technology creates new jobs. The ultimate labor saving device might be just that—the ultimate labor saving device. Imagine the future Google of robotics or nanotechnology: Its CEO could make Steve Jobs look like a sharecropper, and its products could put tens of millions of people out of work. What would it mean for one person to hold the most valuable patents compatible with the laws of physics and to amass more wealth than everyone else on the Forbes 400 list combined?

This is actually a very good point and something which has concerned me for nearly 20 years. I remember going over a list of 100 employees with my father and realizing that about 10 of them actually did anything particularly relevant to producing the products we sold. Everyone else was basically talking to other people or filling out forms.

How many Republicans who have vowed not to raise taxes on billionaires would want to live in a country with a trillionaire and 30 percent unemployment? If the answer is “none”—and it really must be—then everyone is in favor of “wealth redistribution.” They just haven’t been forced to admit it.

Dude, they already kind of do. There may not be a trillionaire yet, but since the Employment-Population Ratio is presently 58.1, that means 41.9% of the population is already not employed. And if he means U3, as I showed yesterday, that’s already over 15%. I haven’t recalculated U6, but if that’s not over 30% now, it’s very close.

Yes, we must cut spending and reduce inefficiencies in government—and yes, many things are best accomplished in the private sector. But this does not mean that we can ignore the astonishing gaps in wealth that have opened between the poor and the rich, and between the rich and the ultra rich. Some of your neighbors have no more than $2,000 in total assets (in fact, 40 percent of Americans fall into this category); some have around $2 million; and some have $2 billion (and a few have much more). Each of these gaps represents a thousandfold increase in wealth.

Some Americans have amassed more wealth than they or their descendants can possibly spend. Who do conservatives think is in a better position to help pull this country back from the brink?

The problem has nothing to do with income inequality. In fact, the income inequality stems from the real problem, which is the massive quantities of debt in the system. The relatively recent increase in income inequality is primarily an artifact of the massive quantities of financial sector debt combined with the way in which the federal government – the very institution Harris imagines using to reduce income equality – is providing a backstop insuring the very wealthiest against the negative consequences of the huge gambles they are taking. For example, Warren Buffett was probably the primary beneficiary of the federal government’s $85 billion credit line to AIG, $13 billion of which went directly to paying off Goldman Sachs.

I will address his addendum in a future post.

The static answer

In related news, a similar study has determined that increased cholera outbreaks cannot be explained by rainbow-striped unicorns:

Cholera outbreaks seem to be on the increase, but a new study has found they cannot be explained by global warming…. Vibrio lives in water near river mouths, waxing and waning in cycles based on blooms of plant plankton. The plankton are eaten by tiny crustaceans to whose shells Vibrio attaches. Warmer ocean surface waters suppress plankton growth, so scientists had assumed cholera outbreaks would decrease with global warming.

So, the hypothesis was that cholera outbreaks would decrease with global warming. But the subsequent observation is that cholera outbreaks are increasing. Now, the logical mind would conclude that the most likely explanation is that global warming is therefore not taking place, even if it is possible that there is no relationship between cholera outbreaks and global temperatures. But since what presently passes for the scientific mind no longer permits the questioning of certain assumptions revealed by the Divine Consensus, the conclusion is that the hypothesis must be wrong. In fact, it must be reversed.

So, even when science is wrong, it is right. That sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it…. The question is, is this better described as “self-correction” or “the answer is static, only the question is dynamic”?