Category: Uncategorized

Make that 5 of 8

Or, if you prefer to leave the non-economic prediction out of the equation, 4 of 7. In my review of my 2010 predictions, I noted that there were still two weeks left, the trend was down, and adjusted TOTLL was only $13 billion above my prediction of $6.3 trillion. In the December 22nd report, published today, TOTLL fell another $19.9 billion, ($22.1 billion from the revised 12/15 report).

That brings adjusted TOTLL down to $6.293 trillion, just enough to render the prediction correct if you are willing to remove the one-time $452 billion anomaly for which I have yet to see an explanation.

Book review: The Fuller Memorandum

The Fuller Memorandum, by Charles Stross
Ace (320 pages, $24.95, July 2010)

Charles Stross is the technocratic heir to H.P. Lovecraft. While he is probably best-known for his Singularity-inspired science fiction and has been known to dabble in committing the occasional fantastic indiscretion with his Merchant Princes series, Stross is unequivocally at his best when he combines his techno-savvy competence with unadulterated occultic horror. The Fuller Memorandum is the third of his Laundry series, which centers around the deeds of a British agent named, significantly enough, Bob Howard, who works for a branch of the English Secret Service in confronting evils that are much more dark and dangerous than anything James Bond ever had to face.

Having triumphed over die-hard trans-dimensional Nazis and grandiose villains with master plans, Bob and his wife Mo are forced to confront an evil, world-threatening plan to awake and unleash the demonic Eater of Souls in The Fuller Memorandum. The plot is convoluted and the squamous horror is amped up to eleven, as the strain of being forced to deal with the implacable darkness beyond the borders of our universe as well as the soul-crushing bureaucracy of the agency are beginning to wear heavily on both of them.

Read the rest at Black Gate.

WND column

The Fourth Government

In his dialogue “De re publica,” Marcus Tullius Cicero explained, though the fictionalized voice of Scipio Africanus, that there are three basic types of government. The first is the monarchy, in which the king rules. The second is the aristocracy, in which a select class of privileged delegates rules. The third is the democracy, in which the people rule themselves. Each type of government has its strengths and weaknesses, and through those weaknesses, a cyclical process occurs in which one type of government devolves into the next.

VPFL Champions 2010

60 MS Swamp Spartans
47 Bane Sidhe

Congratulations to Clay and the Swamp Spartans, who continued in the time-honored VPFL tradition of knocking off the regular-season leader in the championship game in a surprisingly low-scoring finale. As a prize for winning the league, they will be back to play again next year. Third place was claimed by Greenfield with an 89-60 defeat of the Quixotes.

On the NFL side, if Frazier starts Favre after last week’s performance against the Eagles by Webb, I wouldn’t even think about converting his interim label.

Don’t be impressed by credentials

Even very good grades to go with the requisite university degree don’t indicate anything more than the possession of a pulse and a large student loan. And the problem isn’t limited to the United States:

The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland’s oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970. Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970. At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970.

I’m not saying that credentials aren’t important in practice if you’re concerned with getting past the HR gatekeepers. But the important thing is to understand that you’re not purchasing an education any longer, you’re just buying an employment ticket. So, your object should be to figure out the fastest, least expensive way to buy the ticket that will get you where you want to go. That may mean a conventional 4-year degree at a private university, but it may not now that more and more quality schools are offering degrees online. The important thing is to approach the process with open eyes and an open mind.

And, of course, to pursue an actual education on your own because you’re certainly not going to get it at a university. Given what we’ve learned in looking at the undergraduate and graduate science curriculums, even those with the sort of hard science educations that require university schooling have to admit that pretty much everything they’ve learned outside their core scientific discipline has been learned outside the academic system.

Mailvox: one less god and the banana

Lithp wishes to respond to my critique of Stephen Roberts’s One Less God argument:

All right. I’m interested in addressing your critique:

“1. No, we are not both atheists.
2. No, you are confusing God with gods. If you simply take the First Commandment into account, you will know that this is incorrect. Few atheists understand that monotheism concerns the worship of one supreme Creator God, not belief in the existence of only one supernatural being that demands worship.
3. Unless an atheist dismisses the Christian God because they believe Him to be an evil supernatural being falsely posing as a deity worthy of worship, he is not doing so for the same reason that Christians dismiss the pagan gods.”

On Point 1, the first part is not meant to be taken literally. Of course a monotheist is not an atheist. The point is that disbelieving in deities is not such a novel concept. I can proceed no further unless you clear up a point for me: Are you saying that you DO believe in pagan gods, you just don’t think they are what they claim?

“It is so eminently fitting that atheists should rely upon fake quotes to argue in support of their supposed dedication to reality.”

I should think the point matters more than who said it.

“Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Myers are no more philosophically sophisticated than the teenagers and make pretty much the same arguments.”

Okay. You really aren’t going to get a more in-depth rebuttal from anyone other than “no they aren’t,” because you didn’t actually demonstrate how this is so. This is especially problematic for someone such as myself, who doesn’t really follow any of these people. Additionally, I don’t see why you keep using the phrase “teenager” to describe an ignorant person. I’m 19 and I can tell you why Ray Comfort’s banana argument is a load of nonsense.

1. I am aware that Roberts’s first statement can be viewed as mere rhetorical exaggeration, even though most atheists who quote it do take it literally. That doesn’t make it any less false. The fact that he begins with a demonstrable falsehood doesn’t bode well for his argument, since it indicates he is more interested in the superficial sound of his argument than its substance. If you’re going to pose as a philosophical champion of material fact and reason, shouldn’t you really stick to strict factual accuracy?

2. That’s a reasonable question. Yes, I do believe in the literal existence of intelligent and supernatural beings that are not the Creator God and may or may not seek human worship. Some of the pagan gods in the written historical record are these creatures whereas others are mere human invention. The Bible describes both kinds. I would put Zeus and Amaterasu in the fictional category and Baal, Wotan, and Damballah Wedo in the non-fiction one based on the behavior of their human worshippers. As I have repeatedly written, atheists like Roberts and even some Christians fail to make the vital distinction between “God” and “gods”. There are many gods but only one Creator God who merits our worship and who sent His Son to die on our behalf.

Please note that one needn’t believe in the existence of either the Christian God or the pagan gods to understand that the distinction renders Roberts’s argument invalid.

3. Again, if you are claiming to be devoted to fact and reason, basing your self-proclaimed most effective argument on a fictitious statement at the very least renders your devotion to fact more than a little suspect. That being said, if the point stands, it stands, though obviously without the benefit of the presumed authority of the erroneously quoted individual who didn’t actually supply the quote. It also calls either the knowledge or the intellectual honesty of the individual providing the false quote into question.

4. First, the overlap between the arguments presented by the Reddit “teenagers” and the New Atheists is easily confirmed by comparing them. Second, I have actually demonstrated how the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Myers, and others are philosophically unsophisticated and have gone into considerable detail explaining precisely how those arguments are incorrect. Since I have published an entire book on the subject, I don’t believe it is either necessary or possible for me to rehash several hundred pages of material every time the subject comes up again. Of course, until someone reads the book, their opinion on the matter is entirely irrelevant.

Moreover, numerous atheists have reached precisely the same conclusion about the lack of philosophical and theological sophistication on the part of the New Atheists as I have. Dawkins and Myers have both openly admitted their own ignorance of philosophy and/or theology; you should note that the Courtier’s Reply is a feeble attempt to justify that ignorance. You may also wish to note that only Harris, Dennett, and Onfray even pretend to have any knowledge of philosophy.

5. Teenagers are, for the most part, almost completely ignorant without realizing it. They have very little experience of the world and the vast majority are badly educated and poorly read. Even the most intelligent seldom have enough information at their intellectual disposal to use that intelligence to any significant effect. However, in this particular case, it was asserted by someone else that the people who were posting quotes in the Reddit thread were mostly teenagers. Not being familiar with that site, I simply accepted his assertion, even though I consider it to be questionable.

As for Ray Comfort’s banana, I have no idea to what you are referring. But what little I have read of Comfort does not lead me to conclude that it would take much in the way of either intelligence or experience to successfully address one of his arguments.

Religious fitness and science education

Ever since I started reading up on the present state of evolutionary theory a few years ago, I have found it rather remarkable to discover how resistant the TEpNS enthusiasts tend to be with regards to concluding what this article in the Scientific American points out is entirely obvious:

Blume’s research also shows quite vividly that secular, nonreligious people are being dramatically out-reproduced by religious people of any faith. Across a broad swath of demographic data relating to religiosity, the godly are gaining traction in offspring produced. For example, there’s a global-level positive correlation between frequency of parental worship attendance and number of offspring. Those who “never” attend religious services bear, on a worldwide average, 1.67 children per lifetime; “once per month,” and the average goes up to 2.01 children; “more than once a week,” 2.5 children. Those numbers add up—and quickly. Some of the strongest data from Blume’s analyses, however, come from a Swiss Statistic Office poll conducted in the year 2000. These data are especially valuable because nearly the entire Swiss population answered this questionnaire—6,972,244 individuals, amounting to 95.67% of the population—which included a question about religious denomination.

“The results are highly significant,” writes Blume: “… women among all denominational categories give birth to far more children than the non-affiliated. And this remains true even among those (Jewish and Christian) communities who combine nearly double as much births with higher percentages of academics and higher income classes as their non-affiliated Swiss contemporaries.”

In other words, it’s not just that “educated” or “upper class” people have fewer children and tend also to be less religious, but even when you control for such things statistically, religiosity independently predicts number of offspring born to mothers.

The spandrel explanation for religion has always looked like little more than willful blindness combined with wishful thinking on the part of anti-theists. In the same way that most atheists are reluctant to admit the unavoidably nihilistic conclusion to their material reductionism, (hence the “irrational atheist” appellation), many irreligious evolutionists so dislike religion that they will concoct any number of far-fetched hypotheses to avoid concluding that even from their own godless perspective, religion has great utility and provides a reproductive advantage. As anecdotal evidence, the 12 or so couples who made up our old Bible study in Minnesota and who were all just beginning to have their first children now have between three and six non-adopted children per couple. The average is probably around 3.8; even with the Christmas cards I can never keep them all straight.

But then, as I have repeatedly pointed out, scientists tend to be much worse than one would expect them to be at correctly applying logic. Although I suppose they really should not be expected to do it well; after all, the entire raison d’etre of the proper scientific method is to avoid relying upon logic in favor of reaching conclusions that are based firmly upon experimentation and observation, confirmed by replication. The problem, of course, is that logic is still required with regards to interpreting the significance of the conclusions provided by the scientific method and I have observed that very few scientists, if any, appear to have received any training in logic as part of their professional education.

Now, please feel free to correct me with actual curriculum-related facts if I am wrong about my conclusions here, but based on the many arguments I have seen put forth on various subjects from numerous individuals holding science-related PhDs, I very much doubt that many science majors devote any time to learning either history or logic. A look at the M.I.T. Department of Biology’s graduate and undergraduate programs shows no sign of requiring either beyond the standard Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Requirement for all undergraduate majors. While it is entirely possible that MIT science majors are choosing to study history or philosophy as part of their grand total of eight (8!) elective courses, they could just as easily be taking courses in Comparative Media Studies or Theater Arts. And given the astonishing inability of science majors to anticipate the supply and demand curves for PhDs in their chosen fields, one is forced to conclude that very few of them elect to study economics.

What this suggests is that scientists, on average, are at least as ignorant of history, economics, philosophy, religion, and logic as they believe non-scientists to be of science, and for precisely the same reason. Therefore, barring any convincing individual demonstration to the contrary, their opinions outside their professional discipline are ignorant and should be taken no more seriously than they believe the opinions of non-scientists are to be regarded within their field.

2011 economic predictions

1. U-3 unemployment will climb above 10 percent. The real unemployment rate will be much higher, but it will be masked by a decline in the Labor Force Participation rate below 64 percent. The employment-population ratio will fall below 58 percent for the first time since 1984.

2. Real GDP growth for 2011 will fall short of the 3.4 percent predicted by Goldman Sachs. It will remain positive in initial reports throughout the year, but the final quarter will eventually be revised down into negative territory. The legitimacy of GDP as a valid metric for economic growth will increasingly be called into question as the positive numbers are belied by actual conditions.

3. The 2011 federal deficit will exceed the projected $1.27 trillion despite the Republican House majority. This will likely be the result of emergency spending required for an economic or military crisis.

4. More than 230 banks will fail or be seized by the FDIC. This will represent around 1.2% of total deposits. Bank of America will be effectively nationalized to prevent it from failing.

5. TOTLL will decline below $6.3 trillion on an unadjusted basis. (Below $5.9 trillion adjusted.)

6. The two government sectors will not be able to maintain their present rate of debt expansion which presently averages around $450 billion per quarter. As the financial and household sectors continue to decline, all sectors credit market debt outstanding, (Z1), will fall below $50 trillion for the first time since 2007.

7. The national median existing-home price will fall below 160k from the present 170,600.

8. There will be a serious Euro crisis, most likely brought about by a sovereign default or a nation announcing it will be leaving the Euro. Italy is the most likely candidate.

9. One U.S. state and at least three major cities (100k population plus) will attempt to file for bankruptcy or federal bailout. (It’s unclear if states can file for bankruptcy and public employee unions will oppose the city filings.)

Bonus: Sitemeter-recorded visits to the blog will increase from 2,370,028 visitors in 2010, (197,502 per month) to 2,750,000.

You might reasonably object that these predictions are essentially the same as they were last year. And while that’s true, you should also observe that very little has substantially changed since one year ago. The downside factors have increased somewhat thanks to Europe’s problems, the growing budget deficits and the uncovering of the mass mortgage fraud, but aside from anemic G-driven GDP growth, and higher gold and stock market prices, I don’t see much that’s been added on the upside.

Reading list 2010

I often get asked about what books I’m reading, so around March of this year I started keeping track of what I am presently reading and what I’ve read already. I only include books that I finished here; I’m still reading sporadically through Manzoni and the second volume of Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare and there have also been a few books that I picked up and abandoned here and there. I read a lot of Project Gutenberg books this year; P.G. Wodehouse always makes for excellent travel reading on a smartphone. It turns out that I read about one book per week now, which is considerably down from the days when I ripped through several science fiction and fantasy books per week. On the other hand, it takes a bit longer to get through Procopius and Dante than Heinlein and McCaffrey.

Anyhow, here’s the list, divided by how well worth reading I happened to find the book. This isn’t a statement about the quality of the book or the writing, just whether I happened to enjoy it or found it to be either useful or thought-provoking. For example, I think Gladwell is vastly overrated, but he’s quite readable and I picked up one tremendously useful insight from an essay in What the Dog Saw. And while it’s no secret that I don’t think much of Sam Harris’s ability to make his case, I quite enjoyed the fact that he dared to try making it as well as how he went about it. It’s always difficult to narrow it down to a single choice, but I think the most interesting book I read this year was probably Bourrienne’s Memoirs of Napoleon.

Five Stars
Memoirs of Napoleon, Louis de Bourrienne
Life of Nelson, Volume I, Alfred Mahan
Life of Nelson, Volume II, Alfred Mahan
Blood, Sweat and Chalk, Tim Layden
Free Trade Doesn’t Work, Ian Fletcher
The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Dante
This Time It’s Different: A Panoramic View of Eight Centuries of Financial Crises, Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff

Four Stars
The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris
The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross
The Makers of Ancient Strategy, VDH ed.
What the Dog Saw, Malcolm Gladwell
Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare, Vol. I, Isaac Asimov
The Armada, Garrett Mattingly
Goblin Moon, Teresa Edgerton
My Own Kind of Freedom, Stephen Brust
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Ludwig von Mises

Three Stars
The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes
Making Money, Terry Pratchett
The Letters of Cicero Vol. 1, M. Cicero
Space Cadet, Robert Heinlein
Ensign Flandry, Poul Anderson
A Circus of Hells, Poul Anderson
The Rebel Worlds, Poul Anderson
The Day of Their Return, Poul Anderson
Agent of the Terran Empire, Poul Anderson
The Persian Wars, Procopius
The Father of Us All, Victor Davis Hanson
Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac
A Feast for Crows George RR Martin
The Magician, W. Somerset Maugham
Death at the Excelsior, P.G. Wodehouse
The Coming of Bill, P.G. Wodehouse
The Cutting of Cuthbert, P.G. Wodehouse
The Adventures of Sally, P.G. Wodehouse
Jill the Reckless, P.G. Wodehouse
Mike and Psmith, P.G. Wodehouse
Mike at Wrykin, P.G. Wodehouse
A Damsel in Distress, P.G. Wodehouse
The Gem Collector, P.G. Wodehouse
The Girl on the Boat, P.G. Wodehouse

Two Stars
The Greatest Show on Earth, Richard Dawkins
The Stress of Her Regard, Tim Powers

One Star
On the Road, Jack Kerouac
The Diary of a U-boat Commander, Stephen King-Hall

2010 predictions scorecard

1. The BLS will report U-3 unemployment to be in excess of 11 percent. The actual number of unemployed workers will be much higher.
U-3 is at 9.8 percent.  There are some minor shenanigans going on at the BLS, of course, as the size of the labor force is shrinking even faster than the number of employed workers, thus keeping the unemployment rate artificially low, but I factored that into my prediction.  INCORRECT.
 
2. The BEA will report real GDP to be less than 12,973 in billions of chained 2005 dollars. A “double-dip recession” will be the official description, but rumors of a “second great depression” will be increasingly heard as the evidence mounts that a single large scale economic event is taking place.

A sluggish recovery is still the story.  There are negative rumors, but of a double-dip recession, not a large-scale depression.  The most recent GDP for Q3 was reported at 13,278.5 and it’s highly unlikely that Q4 will be reported any lower.  INCORRECT.

3. The Federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed the projected $1.17 trillion.

The 2010 deficit is presently being reported at $1.47 trillion.  CORRECT.

4. More than 200 banks will be seized by the FDIC. Their deposits will represent more than two percent of all U.S. bank deposits. 
The FDIC seized 157 banks with deposits representing 1.1 percent of all U.S. bank deposits.  INCORRECT.  

5. Commercial bank loans and leases (TOTLL) will fall below $6.3 trillion.
This one is hard to call since there were some SERIOUS statistical shenanigans, namely, an anomalous and unprecedented $452 billion increase in reported loans in one week at the end of March.  ( The average weekly change is + or – $12 billion.)  If that anomaly is removed from the equation, as I would argue it must be, TOTLL stands at $6.293 as of the December 22nd report.  If you’re wondering why I’m inclined to give myself the benefit of the doubt here, keep in mind that TOTLL has historically increased an average of 8.4% per year and would normally have been expected to end 2010 around $7.3 trillion. So, predicting not only a decline, but a sizable one of $350 billion, was a very high risk prediction.  CORRECT.
6. All sectors credit market debt outstanding, which is published in the Fed’s quarterly Z1 Flow of Funds Accounts, will fall below $52 trillion. This will mostly be the result of continued deleveraging by the financial sector, and to a lesser extent, the housing sector, which between them will decline by more than $1 trillion.
Z1 was retroactively reported at $51.9 trillion for Q1 and Q2 in the Q3 2010 report.  The financial sector credit dropped $1.2 trillion through Q3 and the housing sector declined $106 billion.  CORRECT.
7. The national median existing-home price will not rise 4% from $172,600 to $179,500 as predicted by NAR’s lead economist Lawrence Yun, but will fall below 165k instead.
NAR reported the national median existing home price at $164,600 in February 2010.  In fairness to Mr. Yun, however, it spiked to $183,000 with the end of the homebuyer’s tax credit in June before collapsing again.  The final year end report had it at $168,800. So we both got it right, but I was three times closer at the end of the year.  CORRECT.
8.  I also expect an increase in Sitemeter-recorded visits to the blog to increase from 1,942,640 in 2009, (161,887 per month) to 2,250,000, primarily as a result of an increased interest in economic matters.

Sitemeter reported 2,367,971 visitors in 2010, (197,331 per month), a 21.9 percent increase from 2009. CORRECT.

Not particularly impressive, I’m afraid, but still better than the mainstream economic prognosticators.  The Fed’s strategy of extend-and-pretend is still in effect and holding.  I don’t see it holding up through 2011 for several reasons, but I’ll take a look at what the mainstream predictions are before making my own.  I think the key thing to learn from this is that government will go to great extremes in fighting economic contractions and one cannot necessarily extrapolate limits from previous efforts.  I also think it’s important to note that although I was incorrect with regards to U-3, GDP, and FDIC seizures, I still had the general direction correct, just not the extent.  Bank seizures didn’t decline as expected, they increased, just not as much as I’d anticipated.  Real GDP did grow in chained 2005 dollars, but that was the direct result of the almost unprecedented explosion of government deficit spending and loan incentives rather than private sector growth.  And unemployment didn’t fall, it simply didn’t rise as much as I’d thought it would.