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Atheism: the anti-Game

PZ Myers considers why women don’t like atheists:

It’s an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting with how annoying we are, and just for once I’d rather not go down that road. So here’s the Woman Problem, and it’s not a problem with women: it’s a problem with atheist and skeptic groups looking awfully testosteroney. And you all know it’s true, every time I post a photo of some sampling of the audience at an atheist meeting, it is guaranteed that someone will count the contribution of each sex and it will be consistently skewed Y-ward.

Let’s me get this straight. Women don’t like a group of men who are known for being socially difficult, taking every excuse to pick arguments, launching unprovoked attacks on other’s beliefs, throwing hissy fits at the drop of a hat, and basically behaving like drama queens on all occasions. And on top of this, they tend to be inordinately interested in science.

This is a mystery? Seriously? All that’s without even taking the high Creepy Guy factor which some of the atheist women report of the skeptic conference attendees and even atheist leaders into account.

Now, obviously not all atheists are hapless when it comes to women. Consider the examples of Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins, who managed to marry seven women between them…. But I would be interested in hearing from the women here why they are disinclined to find atheist men attractive beyond the obvious desire to marry a man of like religion.

A big win, but not a surprise

Holland 2
Brazil 1

It’s a huge win for the Dutch, but since I picked them to win the Cup, I wasn’t the least bit surprised. Cesar’s goal-tending was shaky, as is the longstanding Brazilian tradition, and the Brazilian players simply didn’t have the self-confidence of their legendary predecessors. The game should probably have finished 3-1 if the Dutch hadn’t been so concerned about burning clock that they couldn’t put away a three-on-zero opportunity in injury time.

In the other game, I can’t see Uruguay having any trouble with Ghana.

Interview with Vox Day

The lovely and libertarian Ilana Mercer turns it around and interviews me about The Return of the Great Depression. This is the first part of a two-part interview:

The “infamous Internet Superintelligence,” Vox Day, author of “The Return of the Great Depression,” needs no introduction. My WND colleague and fellow libertarian dishes it out on the impending depression, D.C. dummies (down to their position under The Bell Curve) and a dark future. As always, Vox makes this glum stuff fun.

Ilana: Republican President George Bush was as good if not better than Clinton and Carter at laying the legislative foundation for the minority mortgage meltdown. Comment with reference to the thesis of your book (and mention some other Republicans who’d like ditto-heads to forget their political pedigree).

Vox: Like Carter and Clinton, George W. Bush pushed government programs designed to boost homeownership among low-income families that couldn’t afford to meet the debt obligations they were assuming. These programs were focused on minorities, particularly Hispanics, which is why the four states where the majority of defaults have been located to date are California, Arizona, Nevada and Florida. However, it should be kept in mind that these inept and bipartisan housing programs were not the cause of the core problem; they were merely a consequence of the overall problem of debt chasing a dwindling pool of borrowers.

I would be remiss if I did not point out, as noted in the book, that the heavy lifting on where the home defaults happened was done by Steve Sailer.

The parable of the wise parents

Okay, it’s more of an anecdote than a parable. But it’s an important one anyhow:

Our daughters are 15 and 17. Most of their friends are very concerned about their parents’ financial situations and tell me their parents have too much debt. Whether their parents know it or not, these kids know exactly what is going on and they are scared.

My oldest daughter told me this week that her friend “K”‘s mother is jealous of me. I asked her why, and she said her friend’s mother thinks I never worry about money and seem carefree. I told my daughter that is only because we don’t have debt.

I reminded her of the years when her friend K’s family went on cruises while we were tent camping in a state park. I told her that her dad and I made a decision when we first got married that we weren’t going to buy anything, not even a car, until we had the cash to buy it.

We previously had a mortgage, but we paid it off in 13 years. I told her we just didn’t want the stress. She gave me a hug and walked away without saying anything.

What you give your kids isn’t limited to the material possessions you give them. In fact, those are the least important things you can provide.

Ignorant and slackminded

I was not at all impressed by the lunatic defense of economic credentialism by an economist employed by the very institution that is most responsible for the incoming Great Depression 2.0. But then I read this astonishingly ignorant appeal to morality by Fred Clark and I had to admit that Kartik Athreya may have had a point in insisting that at least some bloggers shouldn’t write about economic matters:

I’m not an economist, but we’ve got five applicants for every single job opening. If you tell me that the best response to that situation is to lay off hundreds of thousands of teachers, I will not accept that this means that you’re smarter and more expert than I am. I will instead conclude — regardless of your prestige or position or years of study — that you’re a moral imbecile. And knowing what I know about your inability to make moral judgments I will have no reason to trust you to make complicated macroeconomic ones.

No, Fred, it’s perfectly clear that you’re not an economist and you don’t know a damn thing about economics. I’ve read a lot of nonsense since the credit crunch began in the summer of 2008, most of it written by economists, but this is remarkably stupid even by those standards. There is simply no defense for either the infantile moral posturing or the spectacular ignorance revealed by it. The misplaced Keynesian faith in animal spirits notwithstanding, economics is not magic. It is complicated, yes, and there are a few special exceptions to the law of supply and demand, but that law is not significantly more flexible than the laws of physics. What the clueless Clark doesn’t recognize is that the federal government has massively and permanently distorted the signals of the labor market for a long period of time, leading to an incredible malinvestment of human capital into various industries, including the education industry. Now that the artificially extended limits of demand have been reached in that and many other industries, the education bubble is in the process of popping precisely as Austrian theory predicts, leaving hundreds of thousands of teachers, (or more accurately, hundreds of thousands of non-teaching admininstrative bureaucrats employed by the school districts), whose labor is no longer necessary or affordable at their current rates by deeply indebted communities.

Morality has nothing to do with the correct conclusion that when a glass is already full, you cannot pour more water into it. It’s simply an observable matter of fact. And if a full glass happens to be shrinking, then water is going to have to come out of it. Taking exception to such basic logic does not make you a moral exemplar, rather, denying it makes you an intellectual imbecile. Based on the evidence here, logic also dictates that no economist, or even economically aware individual, need concern themselves with what Mr. Clark thinks of their moral judgments or anything else.

If Clark wishes to wax indignant over gross and destructive immorality, he should focus his ire on the Fed, on the banks, and on the politicians who constructed a fraudulent financial system that was mathematically certain to fail and inflict millions of job losses on teachers, real estate agents, government employees, Fortune 500 corporations, and small family businesses alike. The salient fact is not whether 9.7% unemployment is high enough or not, but that utilizing more government intervention to prevent that rate from rising higher is guaranteed to extend and exacerbate the trauma to the labor force.

The reason the economic contraction confounds so many political bloggers like Slacktivist regardless of their party allegiance is that the problem cannot possibly be characterized as a Democratic problem or a Republican problem. It is, instead, a fundamentally structural problem with the financial system that dates back to the establishment of the fourth U.S. central bank. The long run has arrived and it has rendered the conventional liberal vs conservative debate completely irrelevant. Ironically, the solution is to be found in the example set by a Democratic president, Andrew Jackson. If Democrats want to find an plausible answer, they need to look to their party roots, not their present ideology.

UPDATE: the comments are even better. This was my favorite: “If Krugman and DeLong are right (and Paul Krugman is always right) then short-term government borrowing and spending should be a high priority right now.”

Paul Krugman is always right? That’s an intriguing statement.

1. Paul Krugman recommended investing in real estate and stocks while making fun of gold investors in 2002.
2. Paul Krugman thought the Fed should inflate a housing bubble in 2002.
3. Paul Krugman declared a $600 billion stimulus plan was required in November 2008. In 2009, he complained that the Obama adminstration’s $787 billion stimulus plan was too small.
4. And he was a bit late in recognizing the obvious.

You can’t teach an old economist new models

While Thomas Sowell is generally right as to his theme of government intervention converting the crash of 1929 into the Great Depression, he is woefully incorrect with regards to the details of how and why it happened:

The widespread belief is that government intervention is the key to getting the country out of a serious economic downturn. The example often cited is Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intervention after the stock-market crash of 1929 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, with its massive and long-lasting unemployment.

This is more than just a question about history. Right here and right now, there is a widespread belief that the unregulated market is what got us into our present economic predicament, and that the government must “do something” to get the economy moving again. FDR’s intervention in the 1930s has often been cited by those who think this way.

What is on that one page in Out of Work that could change people’s minds? Just a simple table, giving unemployment rates for every month during the entire decade of the 1930s. Those who think that the stock-market crash in October 1929 is what caused the huge unemployment rates of the 1930s will have a hard time reconciling that belief with the data in that table.

Although the big stock-market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed — and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.

This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to “do something.” What the government decided to do in June 1930 — against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it — was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.

This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under Pres. Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first president of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn. Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits — and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.

While Thomas Sowell was among the economists I liked and respected most in college, I knew that he had lost his fastball when he wrote a column defending Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment that contained some factual errors regarding Pearl Harbor. When I emailed him information demonstrating that both he and Malkin were factually incorrect and her conclusions were false, he basically hemmed and hawed and said that it really didn’t matter because he likes her work. After that, I pretty much ceased to pay attention to his columns. But a number of people have emailed me this column on the Great Depression, thinking that I would approve of it. And while the cited example of historical employment statistics is a really useful one that I wish I had included in RGD, I have already shown that Sowell’s contention here about the root cause of the unemployment to be false there.

For many years, it was supposed that the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930 played a major role in the economic contraction of the Great Depression. As more economists are gradually coming to realize, this was unlikely the case for several reasons. First, the 15.5 percent annual decline in exports from 1929 to 1933 was less precipitous than the pre-tariff 18.3 percent decline from 1920 to 1922. Second,
because the amount of imports also fell, the net effect of the $328 million reduction in the balance of trade on the economy amounted to only 0.3 percent of 1929 GDP. Third, the balance of trade turned negative and by 1940 had increased to nearly ten times the size of the 1929 positive balance while the economy was growing.”
– The Return of the Great Depression, p. 192

Because Sowell subscribes to neo-classical economic theory, he has no idea why the Great Depression occurred and he still hasn’t recognized that we are in the Great Depression 2.0. His instincts are sound enough; he knows that government intervention can’t solve the problem but because his economic model doesn’t account for debt, he can’t figure out what the core problem is. So, like most free market-oriented mainstream economists, he casts about for something that the government did that fits his model and assumes that it must be the causal factor, even when the evidence clearly shows that it was, at most, a trivial factor.

The thing that is so patently absurd about the Smoot-Hawley tariff theory of the Great Depression is that America was not an import/export-based economy 80 years ago. The percentage of imports and exports as a percentage of GDP was so small that not even shutting them down completely could have caused such a massive contraction in the 1930s American economy. Debt was the problem then and debt is the problem now. The federal stimulus exacerbated the problem then, and the global stimulus is exacerbating the problem now. And given the relative size of historical debt+stimulus to present debt+stimulus, it should not be hard to understand why the Great Depression 2.0 will be worse than its historical predecessor.

College isn’t worth it anymore

It would appear that the value of a college degree is actually about one-third of its previously estimated value. And that’s without factoring either opportunity cost or 4.5 years of lost wages into the value equation.

If there’s one truism that goes virtually unchallenged these days, it’s that a college degree has great value. Beyond the great books, beyond the critical reasoning skills, and beyond the experience itself, there’s another way that a college degree has value: Over the course of a working life, college graduates earn more than high school graduates. Over the past decade, research estimates have pegged that figure at $900,00, $1.2 million, and $1.6 million.

But new research suggests that the monetary value of a college degree may be vastly overblown. According to a study conducted by PayScale for Bloomberg Businessweek, the value of a college degree may be a lot closer to $400,000 over 30 years and varies wildly from school to school. According to the PayScale study, the number of schools that actually make good on the estimates of the earlier research is vanishingly small. There are only 17 schools in the study whose graduates can expect to recoup the cost of their education and out-earn a high school graduate by $1.2 million….

One-third of what was previously estimated… that sounds familiar somehow… ah, perhaps this is why.

Like most things, it comes down to supply and demand. Full-time college enrollment has increased 44 percent since I graduated in 1990. The US population has increased 20 percent, thus rendering a generic college degree approximately 24 percent less valuable while the cost has risen 63 percent in constant dollars. Even if you assume that you graduate successfully, your education dollar is worth about 28 percent of one spent in 1990.

Let’s face it. Scientific studies are largely superflous when you’ve got a superintelligence handy.

Let the slaughter begin

Australia has an atheist leader!

As a child, she was a Baptist, now she’s an avowed atheist. Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard this week completed the image of a thoroughly modern Australian leader by telling the nation she doesn’t believe in God.

Oh relax, all you hyperventilating godless pansies. Not all ambitious atheists are mass murderers. There’s only a 3 in 5 chance that she’ll be bathing in the blood of Australian virgins as Australia’s Dictatrix-for-Life ten years from now.

Mailvox: a female one-two punch

AC babbles, as women who are desperate to avoid accurate criticism are wont to do:

Still looking for anyone who has anything good to say about women…(prove me wrong, someone, please!) What is the most grievous part about this blog? For it being written by a Christian, it does nothing to build up relationships between men and women. It builds men up by destroying the character of women. For someone who writes about the destruction of society, Vox is doing his fair share of it.

This is precisely why so many men find women to be contemptible and do not respect them. They are CONSTANTLY demanding approval and cannot bear even the slightest criticism. The merest factual observation is immediately transformed, in the average woman’s fertile imagination, into an unjust prosecution motivated by evil ulterior motives. Given that the subject is the ongoing female war against men, why on Earth should anyone expect anything good to be said about women in this context? This absolutely does not mean there is not anything good about women; many women wrote to thank me for my ode to mothers a few years ago and tell me how it made them cry. But when Admiral Nimitz was discussing the various weaknesses of the Imperial Japanese Navy with his officers in order to take advantage of them and win the war, I tend to doubt he spent much time praising the snappy Japanese uniforms, the excellent aeronautics of the Mitsubishi Zero, or the Japanese knack for electronics wizardry.

And it is simply stupid and all too typically female for AC to attempt to turn around my sound demographic, economic, and socio-sexual arguments about the way in which women’s collective and unconscious acceptance of feminist ideology is destroying Western civilization and claiming that I am doing my fair share of destroying society by “destroying the character of women”. That completely misses the central point! I am first and foremost observing that modern women have collectively destroyed their own characters and this is to the detriment of society; how can I possibly do to them what they have already done to themselves?

Women, the point of my criticism is not to make you feel better about yourselves, it is to tell you that you collectively need to change your behavior if you wish to live happy married lives surrounded by children in a reasonably free and wealthy society. If you’d rather be mounted by a cavalcade of pagan thugs before being abandoned to raise your bastard spawn in grass huts constructed amidst the ruins of a once-great civilization, then by all means feel free to ignore it. I’m certainly not going to stop you. But regardless of which fate you prefer, stop whining. I don’t define reality, I merely observe and comment upon it.

While MomProf doesn’t grasp the vital point, she is at least wise enough to dip a toe in before leaping to embrace the crocodiles:

I have read VD’s columns for some time now, and I find his economic observations, in particular, to be quite astute. But this one, I admit, baffles me.

Very well, let’s consider the two primary options here. Either I have suddenly and uncharacteristically lost my ability to correctly analyze a complex situation, or an intelligent and educated woman is unable to separate her analytical capabilities from her emotions regarding a subject that directly concerns her on multiple levels. Anyone care to have a whack at factoring the probabilities here?

I share Vox’s loathing of the feminists’ war on everything male, the feminization of men, and the mockery and marginalization of fatherhood. I despise the Left’s worship of abortion, and their rallying cry that it is the high watermark of ‘femaleness’ to destroy your own children. Any number of social pathologies have spun out of this depravity. But the answer, at least if I understand the arguments made here, is not to “go back” to a time when women were ignorant and dependent, and to remove the procedural and political protections to ensure that they remain that way.

A very bad start, and not one that bodes well for MomProf’s subsequent arguments. MomProf is seeking to rule an answer out of bounds, which does nothing more than demonstrate her personal biases. If we are to take her words seriously – and everyone here knows my position on that – she would prefer mass societal depravity to women being ignorant and dependent. Of course, most regulars already know what my rebuttal will be – do you SERIOUSLY think they are not ignorant and dependent now? They have simply traded dependence on their husbands and fathers for dependence upon the federal and state governments; given her profession, MomProf’s own job likely, though not necessarily, renders her at least partially dependent upon government largesse. I fail to see how this is supposed to be an improvement, even in comparison with MomProf’s mythically dystopian past.

I am afraid I must disagree vehemently with the gender-distinctive personality characteristics Vox ascribes to women and men. Yes, I know plenty of frivolous, shallow, petty and gossipy women. But many women are hard-working, virtuous, rational, intelligent, analytical – and yes, good at math and science (for what that’s worth). Taking away (or relinquishing) the right to vote is no panacea, particularly when our country is filled with ignorant, violent, irresponsible, addicted, and stupid men – and THEY’LL vote?

Great, now she’s revealing an inability to understand statistics in favor of her personal experience of women at the highest levels of education and intelligence. Yes, many women are virtuous and rational and good at math. The problem is that a lot more of them are not. Furthermore, men proven to be violent don’t vote in the USA and all men weren’t supposed to be enfranchised anyhow. Only the top quintile of men proven to be responsible were originally eligible to vote; I am as opposed to the universal male franchise in a democratic republic as I am to female suffrage. That being said, no doubt my position on democracy will confound MomProf; I only support universal male and female suffrage in a true and direct democracy. Does she really believe in the will of the people? Is she willing to do likewise or are we just quibbling over her hourly price?

Just as some women will tend to take advantage of a system that affords them freedom by exploiting it, so men will (and have for millennia) tend to take advantage of a system that affords the women in their lives little freedom. There is far too much proof to believe otherwise.

Yes, that’s precisely why women can’t be permitted to vote in a democratic republic. They are ALWAYS the core of the electorate that gravitates first to the Napoleons, the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, and the Obamas. The point is that women are always going to give their rights away to someone, hence the need to restrict suffrage in order to prevent them from giving away their freedom, and everyone else’s, to the sweet-talking monsters for whom history shows they inevitably fall.

The problems in our society are not caused by more freedom, more political power, or more access to education. The problem is the corruption of the educational system, the complete ignorance of the political structures that hold liberty in place, and a culture of licentiousness and complete abdication of personal responsibility.

She’s wrong because she doesn’t grasp the connection. The latter stems from the former.

All of this blather about “I’d give up my right to vote,” from certain women (who, I hope, are speaking hyperbolically) is nonsense. Will you give up your right to own and inherit property, too? Your right to attend school? Your right to defend yourself in a court of law? Your right to shield yourself and your children from an abusive spouse? (And please, spare me any claims that men are more abusive because they’re angry at our feminized society.) Why not just don the burqa and be done with it?

It is neither blather nor hyperbole. Sweet Darwin, but it never ceases to amaze me how incredibly stupid people who attempt to use the childish “well, how would YOU feel?” argument against either Spacebunny or me are. What obvious consequence of “we left the bloody country more than a decade ago” do you not grasp? Do foreigners vote in the USA? It is patently obvious that neither of us give a damn about our personal “right to vote”. And anyone capable of doing math would understand that any rational, freedom-loving woman should be enthusiastic about giving up her right to vote so long as the portion of the population that invariably inclines towards fascism of one sort or another was likewise disenfranchised. And it is grotesquely ignorant to claim that the female right to vote is connected in any way to the female right to inherit property or attend school, given that women were doing both long before 1920. MomProf simply doesn’t understand that the path she is defending is the direct route to the burqah she fears. Unless a woman is young and pretty, of course, in which case it is the brothel for the first few years.

Our country will not strengthen until its citizens begin to make choices in their personal lives that reflect fiscal responsibility, self-discipline, sexual restraint, the delay of gratification, a willingness to sacrifice for spouse and children – in short when our adults begin to behave like ADULTS and not like spoiled adolescents. But they must do these things because they WISH to, not because they HAVE to. I don’t know how anyone who calls himself (or herself) a “libertarian” can claim otherwise.

MomProf doesn’t understand the difference between libertarian and libertine. A common error.

Feminists love to shriek that if conservatives had their way, women would be forced back into lives of ignorance, dependence, and submission. I have always accused them of ridiculous, unwarranted hysteria. Speaking as a conservative (and a wife, and a mother of two children, and a professor of entrepreneurship), reading these posts, now I am not so sure.

I’m not a conservative, so this meandering has nothing to do with me. But ironically, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, it is the feminist ideology that has infected the majority of Western women that will ensure the women of the future are forced into lives of greater ignorance, greater dependence, and far more ignominious submission than they have known in the last 400 years in the West.