Banking is bad for the economy

It’s amazing that people are talking about how excessive finance and credit money warp the economy to its detriment without ever managing to mention the vital Austrian concept of “malinvestment”. But at least they are starting to talk about it, as it will lead them there eventually.

A new study from the Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ central bank, as it is dubbed) shows exactly why rapid finance sector growth is bad for the rest of the economy.

The study, by Stephen Cecchetti and Enisse Kharroubi, is a follow-up to a 2012 paper which outlined the negative link between the finance sector and growth, after a certain point. When an economy is immature and the financial sector is small, then growth of the sector is helpful. Enterprising businessmen can get the capital they need to expand their companies; savers have a secure home for their money, making them more willing to provide finance to the business sector; and so on.

But you can have too much of a good thing. The 2012 paper suggests that when private sector debt passes 100% of GDP, that point is reached. Another way of looking at the same topic is the proportion of workers employed by the finance sector. Once that proportion passes 3.9%, the effect on productivity growth turns negative. Ireland and Spain are cases in point. During the five years beginning 2005, Irish and Spanish financial sector employment grew at an average annual rate of 4.1% and 1.4% respectively; output per worker fell by 2.7% and 1.4% a year over the same period.

The new paper examines why this might be. One part of the thesis is a familiar complaint, neatly summarised in the 2012 paper

people who might have become scientists, who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers

In short, the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers from other industries. The finance sector then lends the money to businesses, but tends to favour those firms that have collateral they can pledge against the loan. This usually means builders and property developers. Businessmen are lured into this sector rather than into riskier projects that require high R&D spending and have less collateral to pledge.

I’m reading the paper now, and will review it once I’ve finished digesting it.

Novella Book Bomb: the aftermath

Final tally: over 1,500 books sold. Thanks very much to everyone who participated! Final Amazon rankings:

One Bright Star to Guide Them: #359
Big Boys Don’t Cry: #411
Other Heads: #883

This means that nearly twice as many people bought a Sad Puppies-recommended novella as cast a Hugo nominating ballot in 2014. Larry’s campaign to increase reading is clearly working, as longtime fan figure Mike Glyer of File 770 not only read Tom Kratman’s novella, but reviewed it as well:

I plunked down $2.99 for Tom Kratman’s novella “Big Boys Don’t Cry” during yesterday’s ”book bomb” pushing novellas on the Sad Puppies slate, because I just can’t stand on the sidewalk when the parade goes by. Sometimes this leads to good things. I bought Redshirts a couple years ago because of the social media campaign and it turned out to be pretty good. Can lightning strike twice?

Maggie, the protagonist of “Big Boys Don’t Cry,” is a Ratha — a sentient armored weapons platform, the human race’s ultimate ground combat unit. Spoiler warning: She’s not a boy. And apparently she can cry.

As a big fan of Keith Laumer’s original Bolo stories, as well as Elizabeth Bear’s 2008 Hugo-winning ”Tideline”, I find Kratman’s variation compelling because he asks important questions about intelligent, self-aware tanks the earlier classics never investigated.

Like: Why do artificial intelligences subject themselves to human command? Why do they sacrifice themselves for human interests?

Stay tuned. There will be more activity on this front.

A historical crime?

Eight years of Obama have killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition:

Obama’s drone campaign has killed more people during the six years of his presidency than were killed the 350 years of the Spanish Inquisition.

In his speech on Thursday, he said:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history.  And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.  In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Fair enough. But how is Obama himself doing on that score?

Well, on Monday of this week the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published their annual study of deaths from U.S. drone strikes, and reported the following:

At least 2,464 people have now been killed by US drone strikes outside the country’s declared war zones since President Barack Obama’s inauguration six years ago, the Bureau’s latest monthly report reveals…. So how does that number of 2,464 killed in Obama’s drone program — not including those killed in Iraq or Afghanistan — compare to, say, the Spanish Inquisition?

About 2,250 people were tried and handed over to the crown, then executed, in the 356 years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Obama administration is nearly 50 times more murderous on an annual basis than the medieval institution he was criticizing. And whether or not you are convinced that the Inquisition’s victims got a fair trial, it should be noted that they did get a trial.

I always find it curious, too, when men conspicuously avoid mentioning the name of Jesus.

Identifying Gamma males

A recovering ex-Gamma helpfully provides a list of behavioral attributes:

  • When you are having an argument with someone and it appears you are wrong, the most common belief and defense is that the other person simply doesn’t understand what you are saying.
  • When discussing matters with someone and you think you are maybe, possibly, being shown to be wrong, you start to get snarky, crack lame jokes, and immediately try to change the subject.
  • If someone holds an opinion contrary to yours, and you don’t think you have a good defense immediately to hand, you start to look for unrelated ways to disqualify the other person as being less than knowledgeable about the subject, even going so far as to disqualify them as being a good person or sometimes even a person at all.
  • Definitions are tenuous for you and words can be redefined at leisure during a discussion. If someone quotes the dictionary and it disagrees with your definition they are arguing unfairly and the dictionary is wrong.

The rest of the list is at Alpha Game. I’m mostly interested to note how often we see this very sort of behavior from trolls and pinkshirts, which tends to confirm the more casual observations of their low socio-sexual status. See the recent post, A Rabbit Visits, and note the similarities even though this was sent to me several days ago.

Keep in mind that this is a former Gamma explaining his previous mindset, it’s not an outsider’s interpretation.

Detonating the EU

Greek has their finger on a bigger trigger than most people realize:

The political detonating pin for Greek contagion in Europe is an obscure mechanism used by the eurozone’s nexus of central banks to settle accounts. If Greece is forced out of the euro in acrimonious circumstances – a 50/50 risk given the continued refusal of the creditor core to acknowledge their own guilt and strategic errors – the country will not only default on its EMU rescue packages, but also on its “Target2” liabilities to the European Central Bank.

In normal times, Target2 adjustments are routine and self-correcting. They occur automatically as money is shifted around the currency bloc. The US Federal Reserve has a similar internal system to square books across regions. They turn nuclear if monetary union breaks up.

The Target2 “debts” owed by Greece’s central bank to the ECB jumped to €49bn in December as capital flight accelerated on fears of a Syriza victory. They may have reached €65bn or €70bn by now….

The Eurogroup insists that the primary budget surplus be raised from 1.5pc of
GDP in 2014, to 3pc this year and 4.5pc next year. As Nobel economist Paul
Krugman says, they want to force a country that is already reeling from six
years of depression – with the jobless rate still near 50pc – to triple its
surplus for no other purpose than paying off foreign creditors for decades
to come. They are doing to Greece what the Western allies did to a defeated
Germany at Versailles in 1919: imposing unpayable and mutually-destructive
reparations on a prostrate nation.

Combined with the fact that ISIS is planning to flood southern Italy with “immigrant” invaders, it becomes readily apparent that the EU may not last another eight years. The difference between 1933 and 2023 is that the enemy is no longer defined as other Europeans, but Islamic and African invaders.

Italians are already demanding that the Italian navy start sinking boats coming across the Mediterranean and attacking refugee holding centers. The Spanish are looking at the Greek situation and wondering why they should not do the same. The Front National is rising quickly in France; the rise of PEGIDA has been arrested but it will resume soon enough, along with support for AfD once the news of Germany being on the hook for up to €515 billion penetrates the electorate.

No wonder Juncker, the unelected Head of the European Commission has turned openly anti-democratic. But he is as delusional as Hitler in the bunker. Gunnar Beck from London University makes an equally apt comparison: “Germany’s leaders can’t let Greece leave the euro, and the Greeks know
it. They will die in a ditch to defend the euro. This is our Eastern Front,
our Battle of Kursk, and I’m afraid to say that it will end in unconditional
surrender by Germany,” he said. 

Like gravity, economics always wins in the end.

Sad Puppies Novella Bomb

Larry Correia drops it:

Today we are Book Bombing the three suggested novellas from the Sad Puppies slate. These are novellas that the Evil Legion of Evil thinks are great, and should be considered for fancy awards. No gimmicks, no BS, just awesome stuff.

How a Book Bomb works is that we try to get as many people to buy them off of Amazon in the same day. Because they have a rolling average best seller list that updates hourly, this causes the book to move up the list. The higher it gets, the more people outside the Book Bomb see it, and check it out too. Success breeds success, and best of all, the author GETS PAID.

And all authors should have GET PAID on their mission statement.

Throughout the day I’ll update the sales rankings. This is Very Special Book Bomb because someone accused me and Brad of trying to get people to vote without reading the works. On the contrary, that misses the point. These are good, so we want you to read them….

Right now the stories are at the following ranks:

A lot of you will have already bought these and read these. So, I’d encourage you to participate in the Novella Bomb by posting reviews of them on Amazon.  Now, Rabid Puppies has two other Novella recommendations, but we’re focusing on supporting Sad Puppies in this today so we will leave them out of the Novella Bomb.

In case you are interested, they are:

  • “The Plural of Helen of Troy” by John C. Wright, City Beyond Time
  •  “Pale Realms of Shade” by John C. Wright, , The Book of Feasts & Seasons

Now, that’s a lot of John C. Wright, you might say. And you’d be right. And yet, on pure merit, there is a very reasonable case for him winning Best Novella, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story this year, for the simple and straightforward reason that he published the best work in each of those categories this year. As Larry says: “I think [he] is one of the greatest wordsmiths alive. The man is brilliant.”

And, as one of his editors, I entirely concur. There is nothing to make you seriously consider giving up on writing fiction yourself like reading the first draft of a John C. Wright story.

UPDATE:  Amazon has updated the rankings:

    A rabbit visits

    It was rather amusing to see a Whatever rabbit creep out of the warren just long enough to discover this place, only to run quickly away to warn all the other rabbits how dark and scary and terrible it is:

    I’m a fairly casual Scalzi fan. I read Whatever regularly and I’ve read almost all of your books (most of them from the library – sorry!) and I’ve enjoyed almost all of them. I’m aware of some of the controversies that have floated around in the past, but this is the first time I actually ventured into the comments section of one of the bizarre blog posts you’ve commented upon. I was somewhat repelled by some of the comments supporting this idiotic blog post, but then I made the mistake of clicking on a link to one of the commentator’s blogs.

    Holy shit, I have never descended into such a cesspool of ignorance and hatred – even on Youtube. John, what on earth did you manage to do in order to generate such vitriol? I ended up on a page where you were continually referred to as ‘McRapey’ and these….people…were gleefully interpreting this post as ‘the head rabbit trying to reassure the warren’ as the bulldozers came closer. I vaguely recall the whole ‘McRapey’ thing, but wasn’t that years ago? And how on earth have so many other troglodytes gathered together to gibber their hatred of you into the darkness? Dammit John, the worst thing I’ve ever thought of you was that Old Man’s War seemed too derivative of The Forever War- these people want you slowly tortured to death!

    Hey, I understand there are horrible people out there and I understand that the Internet encourages bellicose assholery that would never be said face to face in the real world. But good god, you’ve managed to put a serious dent in my faith in humanity overall. These people are so…pathetic…and yet they hate you SOOOO MUCH! I’m impressed that you can express such sympathy to these obviously mentally-ill individuals. Hugs? I’d rather see them in asylums with padded walls, stout locks and some very patient psychiatrists.

    So brave. And he wants to see all of you obviously mentally-ill individuals locked up in asylums. That’s a totally new and different position for the Left, isn’t it? It’s particularly funny to see a casual Scalzi fan call anyone else pathetic. One can only roll ones eyes at those who haven’t seen through the charlatan’s act yet. McRapey’s response was, as always, laden with his unique combination of lies and self-serving spin:

    You appear to have landed on the site of Theodore Beale/Vox Day. The short version is he’s an odious little man who is deeply envious of my career, which he feels he should have, and lies about me a lot to make himself feel better. It doesn’t appear to be working very well, either in making him feel better, or doing any material damage to me. I had in fact already cut him out of my ego surfing (the poor lad cannot go a day or two without talking about me) long before I made my Lenten observation choice this year. So he didn’t affect the choice one way or the other.

    This should be fun. Let’s chronicle the lies:

    1. “Odious little man”. Odious is subjective, but I am taller and heavier than my favorite former NFL cornerback, Antoine Winfield. Unlike Larry Correia, I couldn’t crush Scalzi’s skull with my bare hands, but I could probably snap his tubby neck.
    2. “deeply envious of my career”. Yes, that’s why I write 850-page epic fantasy novels, so I can have a career like a guy who openly rips off Heinlein, Piper, Dick, and Star Trek in order to write novels less than half that long. That’s also why I spend my time doing anthologies with Jerry Pournelle, editing landmark military theory by Bill Lind and Martin van Creveld, and working with great authors like Tom Kratman and John C. Wright. When I’m not designing ground-breaking computer games. I don’t envy anything about him. Not his career, not his blog traffic, not his fans, not his publisher, not his looks, not his wife, and not his life. The one thing that impresses me about him is his astonishing ability to put lipstick on a bowel movement and sell it to the sufficiently credulous. But I don’t envy it.
    3. “which he feels he should have”. I had my shot at that kind of career. I turned down the Starcraft tie-in novels that Pocket Books and Blizzard asked me to write. Once they started talking about the Queen of Blades cackling evilly before she swept dramatically offstage, I decided it was not for me.
    4. “Lies about me a lot”. Au contraire. John Scalzi lies about himself a lot. I tell the truth about him, truth which is always supported by conclusive evidence. For example, John inflated his “extraordinary amount” of site traffic by 5x in a 2010 interview with Lightspeed Magazine. I merely exposed the fact that he was actually getting 12,860 pageviews per day, considerably less than the 64,500 daily pageviews he was claiming
    5. “to make himself feel better”. I lift weights and score goals to make myself feel better. Doing a set of curls at 115 or putting the ball in the net is what makes me feel good. Dealing with Scalzi is more like picking up after the dogs. Someone has to do it, but it’s kind of disgusting.
    6. “doing any material damage to me”. Scalzi’s site traffic is down by as much as 60 percent from when it peaked at 1,027,644 in May 2012. Many of the people who used to support him and read him simply don’t anymore. Not all of that is down to me, of course. A lot of people caught on to his fraudulent act over time, just as I eventually did. And by his own admission, he’s now out of contract with Tor Books.
    7. “cut him out of my ego surfing”. Probably, but not necessarily, a lie.This guy publicly admits to searching the Internet for references to himself several times a DAY. What are the odds he’s telling the truth here? Good lord, I haven’t searched my name in months. If I want to read fiction about myself, I’ll just go to my Wikipedia page.
    8. “he didn’t affect the choice one way or the other.” Actually, I buy this. If Scalzi is observing Lent, good for him. At least he appears to be looking in the right direction. One hopes he will finds what he needs to fill the gaping hole in his heart.

    Total = 6 lies and one possible lie in 5 sentences. Scalzi’s not even trying; he can usually average 2+ per sentence without even breaking a sweat. And even his worst calumnies were easily exceeded by this wild-eyed rabbit’s foot-stomping performance:

    The right wing has proven time again that they have no imagination, much less any capability for rational thought. They are never going to dominate the awards simply for the fact that they can’t write for shit. Right now they are promoting John C Wright, hah! puulllezze! That idiot couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag and will never win any award. Let them try to take over the awards, I say bring it on.

    (shakes head) It’s like they don’t even know what the words they are using mean.

    #GamerGate and 4GW

    Mendicant Bias has clearly read his Lind and correctly applied it to #GamerGate and society alike:

    We have seen the most important and fundamental values of our society torn down and destroyed by vandals who used the tactics of cultural Marxism to subvert our society. We have seen abominations like gay “marriage”, no-fault divorce (read: his-fault), government-subsidised abortion and freely available birth control, and universal suffrage become “acceptable”—as if these cultural freak shows could ever possibly be considered “normal”. We have seen our most fundamental rights of conscience, association, freedom of thought, free exercise of religious belief, and freedom of action circumscribed, shrunk, and destroyed before our eyes. And we let it happen.

    The self-aware man who looks at how this happened will come away with a certain cold appreciation for the tactics of those who imposed this ashen, burning Hell upon us.

    When it comes to gaming, we have repeatedly seen how SJW tactics work. They have used the fundamental decency of the average Western gaming consumer against him, by browbeating him into believing that he is sexist if he wants “believable” (i.e. non-ridiculous) women in games, or that he is “racist” if he doesn’t want games to become some sort of absurd paean to multiculturalism, or that he is a misinformed idiot if he thinks that women can’t be just as strong and effective in an FPS game as men.

    They are exquisitely good at shutting down dissent. They’ve had forty years to entrench themselves and become institutionalised. And they have succeeded. They did this by capturing the single most important and powerful level of war. The Moral Level of War

    He also explains why #GamerGate has been uniquely successful in resisting the SJW onslaught when everything from the US Army to the churches have been overrun like France in 1940:

    The cultural Marxists who brought us to this point have used the moral level of war brilliantly, up until now, by bludgeoning anyone who disagreed with them into submission through the threat of being branded sexist, racist, and other double-plus ungood things. To the SJW set, any deviation from “acceptable” modes of thought was and remains Badthink. Hell, they even have their own programming language! (Note the satire.)

    But they grew overconfident, and made a huge mistake—giving us everything we need to destroy them, root and branch.

    Until recently, gaming “journalists” had a lock on how the consumer viewed the products that they paid for. Games that promoted “social justice” narratives were given high reviews—but when the rest of us actually tried playing them, we often found them to be unplayable garbage, because they sacrificed absorbing gameplay and great storytelling for smarmy preachiness and painfully stupid messages about “tolerance”.

    When #Gamergate first broke, the reason for this appalling state of affairs became perfectly clear: the gaming media were in bed, literally, with the very same game developers whose work they were reviewing.

    Overnight, they lost their moral high ground in the eyes of thousands of gamers all over the world. And they have continued to lose that support as gamers have mounted a vicious backlash against their immorality.

    This is a very, very important lesson to absorb. You cannot win at the moral level of war when crippled by ambiguous values and a lack of moral confidence. This is why the Christian churches that compromise their principles and turn against their own historic values rapidly collapse. Defeat at the moral level of war destroys an institutions raison d’etre; once robbed of its core reason to exist, an institution ceases to grow and rapidly begins to decline.

    Mr. Lind and I had a conversation about #GamerGate. He recognized it as an obvious manifestation of 4GW, so it’s interesting to see that the students of 4GW see it clearly as well.

    The post-democratic EU

    In keeping with their one-vote, one-time philosophy the Eurofascists have openly turned against democracy:

    Alexis Tsipras believes the existing deal is a disaster and says he has a democratic mandate to demand changes. And this exposes democracy’s limits within the European Union. The German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble says: “Elections change nothing. There are rules”.

    The president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker said “there can be no democratic choice against the European treaties. One cannot exit the euro without leaving the EU”.

    A German Euzi named Juncker speaking out against democracy. Greece is doing exactly the right thing; leaving the EU is hardly a threat, it is the restoration and recovery of national sovereignty from a gang of fascists who have learned to use banks instead of tanks.

    Niles Farage of UKIP understands what is at stake here:

    A tale of two comments

    Kevin Standlee and I were exchanging comments at File 770 about Patrick Richardson’s post concerning how he was not considered a Real Fan of science fiction and fantasy:

    KS: It sounds very much to me like, “Because there aren’t more people who think JUST LIKE ME!”

    VD: Then why are so many of you bitching about the fact that we’re flooding
    the Hugo voting with more people who do, in fact, think like us? Larry
    brought in a few dozen voters last year. Now we’re bringing in a few
    hundred more. You want more people? Fine. We’ll give you more people.

    KS: Yep, go ahead. What many of us object to is the implication that people should nominate/vote for things without reading them, because it will make the Bad People Cry. Even more annoying to me is the implication that those of us who have been voting have been doing so for Evil Political Reasons, not because we like the works involved. This strikes me very much as an argument made by people who have so little empathy that they can’t believe any rational person would like things other than what they like, and therefore the only reason things they don’t like win is because of the system being borked by Evil People.

    VD: The rules were established last year when the other side declared they
    did not have to read our works to vote on them…. How can you condemn us for nothing more than
    following the example they set last year? We were being generous. If you actually think mediocre hackwork like
    Redshirts     and Ancillary Justice and “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”
    represents the best of science fiction today, I feel pity for you. If
    you were supporting that sort of thing for Evil Political Reasons, at
    least I could understand that. If you simply like wallowing in literary
    excrement, well… that is your prerogative.

    It’s interesting to see how the goalposts move, is it not? But I encourage you all to note that everyone from Kevin Standlee to John Scalzi now publicly declares it’s fine, it’s great, it’s wonderful that so many Sad Puppies have gotten involved in the Hugo voting process. They never seem to mention the Rabid Puppies though. I wonder why that might be?

    Meanwhile, they continue to ignore the fact that the pinkshirts are continuing to do the very thing they accuse our side of doing, which is to say, voting and nominating without reading everything and blindly rejecting the other side’s works on pure political grounds. Consider this very typical and telling comment from a Whatever rabbit:

    This blog post and the extended discussion in the comments
    caused me to seek out the Sad Puppy Slate for this year. I readily
    concede that I haven’t read any of the books or stories on this slate    ;
    but then, there are incredibly huge numbers of books and stories and
    articles I haven’t read that were published in 2014. It’s the nature of
    the field.

    My curiosity did lead me to check out one of the books in the “related works” category: John Wright’s Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth.
    One of the Amazon reviews of the book quotes one essay in which Wright
    writes: “girls who do not like love stories are well advised to learn
    to like them, because such stories deal with the essential and paramount
    realities on which much or most of that girl’s happiness in life will
    hinge.”

    Yikes! If that’s a sample of what is in store here, I am not
    inclined to spend $4.99 to purchase the book for my Kindle. After all,
    I’m a woman (not a girl, please note) whose happiness in life is
    certainly greater for the love of my beloved husband, but who was also
    very happy with a thriving career, thousands of books, great friends,
    frequent travel and an abundance of furry critters before he came into
    my life. The idea that I can’t be happy without a man — well, you know
    that old saying about fish and bicycles.

    So it appears that, once again this year, the slate has been chosen
    not with an eye toward the quality of the work in question, but as a
    means of sticking a thumb into the eye of those not likely to vote for
    the proposed slate. How does this win hearts and minds? Or is the
    battle the real end here, with persuasion not even intended? What does
    that prove?

    The pinkshirts are claiming to be able to judge our quality without ever reading any of it. Meanwhile, we openly mock the quality of the crap they hold up to be science fiction’s best precisely because we HAVE read it, my love. And there isn’t a word of criticism from the nominal Hugo moderates for the likes of this pinkshirt who hasn’t read a single thing from the other side, but rejects all of it on the basis of a single quote from a single review of a book. Furthermore, having been reading the Amazon reviews, she has to be aware that it is a book with 22 ratings averaging 4.8 stars, and yet she claims that single quote somehow indicates that it is a work that has not been chosen for its quality! It’s not just the pinkshirt-nominated works that reek of bullshit.

    Remember, both Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies have recommended for nomination John C. Wright’s highly regarded Transhuman and Subhuman, which was a #1 bestseller in Science Fiction History & Criticism and is still a Top 20 bestseller in Philosophy>Good & Evil, in the Best Related Work category that was won last year by an openly tendentious, ideologically-charged BLOG POST. But somehow, we’re accused of being the side that places politics over quality. The evidence strongly suggests otherwise.