Less work, less pay

This chart on sex self-segregation by the clock shows the primary reason women make less money than men.  They harbor a strong disinclination for work outside of normal working hours.  This is concomitant with the research that has shown women work fewer hours per week on average than men.  The excuse that it is “for the children” doesn’t fully account for the gap since there are only around 35 million American households with children under 18 vs 72 million American women in the labor force.  Moreover, it is a feeble excuse; an employer doesn’t care why a woman isn’t working, if she’s not working then obviously he shouldn’t have to pay her.

Now, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with women putting their children’s interests ahead of maximizing their income-earning potential.  Putting children before Powerpoint is an excellent choice and in my opinion, more women should work fewer hours and spend more time ensuring the viability of the human race.  The enlightened employer who offers the greatest amount of time flexibility to his female employees will usually find himself benefiting from a higher quality of women willing to work for him.  On the other hand, it is absurd to insist that having children is not a choice, that an employer is to blame for the life choices that his employees happen to make, or that there should be no negative consequences to one’s paycheck when one is working less than other employees.

Wait, so pulling demand forward doesn’t work?

Housing Double Dip a Done Deal

Everybody take a nice long look at today’s Pending Home Sales Index from the National Association of Realtors, because it’s just about the last positive picture we’re going to see for a while. Yes, the index rose even more than expected, as buyers rushed in to take advantage of the home buyer tax credit. And yes, those numbers will show up in Existing Home Sales in May and June, but then look out.

This index is based on contracts signed in August, and that’s how the credit was set up; you had to sign your contract by April 30th and close by June 30th in order to get your $8000 if you’re a first time buyer and $6500 if you’re a move up buyer.

And then came May, traditionally the height of the spring housing season. Mortgage applications to purchase a home began to sink. Now, four weeks later, mortgage purchase applications are down nearly 40 percent from a month ago to their lowest level since April of 1997. Yes, you can argue that a larger-than normal share of buyers today are all cash, but those are largely investors.

That means real organic buyers are exiting in droves.

This is precisely why I haven’t conceded anything about my home price predictions for 2010 even though prices have been rising instead of falling this year.* Notice how the language is beginning to sour, as “V-shaped recovery” has been gradually supplanted by “double-dip” and worse terminology. The so-called recovery has been nothing but a statistical illusion caused by carefully targeted Federal intervention designed to make things look better in an attempt to fool the economy into stabilizing itself. While this may sounds incredibly stupid, it’s actually the correct action if you happen to subscribe to Keynesian economic theory, based as it is on “animal spirits”.

The problem is that animal spirits are a symptom, not the disease. It is the amount of debt that is the issue, the economic cancer that has metastasized throughout the entire global economy. Getting the patient pepped up on financial coke and methamphetamine might make him feel invincible for a while – see the equity markets – but it’s not going to forestall his demise. It should be interesting to see what the estimated 40-percent drop in housing demand will have on the markets this fall.

*It seems I was correct not to concede anything, because in looking up the current NAR data to see how far prices had to fall this year in order to salvage my prediction, I discovered that my prediction of national median existing home prices falling below $165k before the end of 2010 had already been proven correct! NAR reports US prices as having fallen to $164,600 in February; they have since risen back up to 173,100. We’ll have to wait until December 31st to see who is more correct at the end of the year, Lawrence Yun at $179,500 or me at $165,000. However, at this point, I wouldn’t count out the possibility of a collapse below $140,000.

He looked guilty, your Honor

Lest you think my view of the Rule of Law being dead in America is unjustified:

Ohio’s highest court has ruled that a person may be convicted of speeding purely if it looked to a police officer that the motorist was going too fast. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that an officer’s visual estimation of speed is enough to support a conviction if the officer is trained, certified by a training academy, and experienced in watching for speeders. The court’s 5-1 decision says independent verification of a driver’s speed is not necessary.

With this helpful new judicial technique, I have no doubt that crime clearance and conviction rates will skyrocket, making for a safer, crime-free America! This is practically a perfect example of subjective law. Why even bother with actual written speed limits at this point when we can simply leave it to the discretion of the favored class to decide who is going too fast at any given moment.

Let them fend for themselves

Unsurprisingly, some women are upset that most people are inclined to stay out of a domestic dispute, especially if the woman is lower class:

Last night, ABC used hidden cameras and actors to see what regular people would do if they saw an obviously abused woman being harassed by her boyfriend. A lot of regular people failed the test.

Failed the test? I’d say they passed it, assuming that the test is of their intelligence. Only a white knighting gamma or a clueless fool doesn’t know that many women are aficionados of the “let’s you and him fight” game. If I don’t know the couple involved, there is very little chance that I am going to risk injury or jail on behalf of a woman with a taste for the thug life. And since women are so strong and independent these days, why should they expect help from anyone of either sex? I respect the right of women to not only make their own decisions, but also to experience the full consequences of those decisions.

This isn’t to say I have never intervened in a violent situation. If I happen to know the people involved and understand the situation, I will consider escalating the level of violence without warning to bring the situation to a close. An acquaintance once punched his girlfriend in the jaw right in front of me; she was a friend of mine who had previously dated one of my best friends. So, I immediately bounced his face off a nearby brick wall. Twice. However, to be honest, I have to admit that I had always disliked the guy and it is entirely possible that my reaction was less white knightly and more opportunistic.

Anyhow, the point is that you should never get involved in a violent situation unless you intervene without warning and with a conclusive level of violence. Unless the situation CLEARLY and ABSOLUTELY justifies you incapacitating the assailant without warning, stay completely out of it. Don’t posture, don’t lecture, and don’t white knight. It’s not your business and you really don’t want to end up like the Hispanic guy who was killed trying to help a woman who couldn’t even bother to call for help for her rescuer.

This doesn’t mean that one must suffer the interruption to one’s dinner, of course. Etiquette demands that one clear one’s throat, lean over, and say: “My dear man, I could not possibly care less what sort of gorilla sex games the two of you happen to enjoy, but unless this is part of the scheduled dinner theatre, I would be most appreciative if you would throttle your woman outside the premises, thank you very much.”

Calling the bankers’ bluff

More and more Americans are discovering that bankers are more bark than bite:

A growing number of the people whose homes are in foreclosure are refusing to slink away in shame. They are fashioning a sort of homemade mortgage modification, one that brings their payments all the way down to zero. They use the money they save to get back on their feet or just get by. This type of modification does not beg for a lender’s permission but is delivered as an ultimatum: Force me out if you can. Any moral qualms are overshadowed by a conviction that the banks created the crisis by snookering homeowners with loans that got them in over their heads.

“I tried to explain my situation to the lender, but they wouldn’t help,” said Mr. Pemberton’s mother, Wendy Pemberton, herself in foreclosure on a small house a few blocks away from her son’s. She stopped paying her mortgage two years ago after a bout with lung cancer. “They’re all crooks.”

Foreclosure procedures have been initiated against 1.7 million of the nation’s households. The pace of resolving these problem loans is slow and getting slower because of legal challenges, foreclosure moratoriums, government pressure to offer modifications and the inability of the lenders to cope with so many souring mortgages.

The average borrower in foreclosure has been delinquent for 438 days before actually being evicted, up from 251 days in January 2008, according to LPS Applied Analytics.

I wouldn’t say they are all crooks, but certainly all the big bankers are. I don’t see why anyone who has a mortgage with any bank that received TARP money should pay them so much as a single dime. It is very clear that the rule of law no matter applies in the USA, so there’s no reason why the enmortgaged masses shouldn’t follow the lead of their would-be financial masters and ignore anything that isn’t in their immediate pecuniary interests.

If your credit is already ruined, why on Earth would you continue to send what little money you have left to a collection of bankrupt thieves and scam artists.

Look out, ladies!

Al Gore is on the prowl!

Al and Tipper Gore, whose playful romance enlivened Washington and the campaign trail for a quarter century, have decided to separate after 40 years of marriage, the couple told friends Tuesday. In an “Email from Al and Tipper Gore,” the couple said: “We are announcing today that after a great deal of thought and discussion, we have decided to separate.

Between Tipper’s campaign against rock music and Al’s global warming scam, I don’t think there has been a more awful political couple since the Perons. But let’s face it, their relationship was never the same after Naomi Wolf started dressing him.

Feminism made you fat

Clayton Cramer explains:

When I was in elementary school, I had very few classmates who were even chubby. There was one kid out of 400 in my elementary school who would be considered fat (and probably not even obese)—and he was from Turkey. There are many causes of the increasing obesity problem, and this article focuses on one very substantial cause—but let me emphasize that it is not the only cause—just one that liberals caused.

One of the advantages kids had back then was mothers who were home, and actively involved in child rearing. Even mothers who had to work full-time (like mine) still managed to play an active role in encouraging healthy dietary habits. I was limited to one soft drink a day. Dinner included reasonable portions of meat, a starch, and vegetables—and as much as I hated overcooked vegetables, I was expected to eat them. Desserts were infrequent in our house—perhaps once a week. Nearly every other kid that I knew came from a similar home, with parents making similar efforts to encourage self-discipline and healthy eating….

This transformation didn’t just “happen.” It was the result of a conscious decision by liberals to actively promote the idea that no woman was really “fulfilled” unless she had a full-time career—and staying home and raising kids wasn’t part of the career track. Through active propaganda campaigns and passage of laws banning sex discrimination in employment, liberals destroyed the postwar social consensus that a man would normally be the primary breadwinner. Part of what helped destroy that postwar consensus was that there were a lot of well-educated women who wanted to be more than just mothers. Another factor was the rise of no-fault divorce, which made it much easier for guys to dump their families. Women who had been content to be homemakers now had no choice but full-time employment.

I recall that there were two fat kids in my high school graduating class of 160, and only the girl was obese. And while it’s been some time since I was last in the USA, but I distinctly remember desperately looking around for a harpoon until I realized that evolution works too slowly for all of the grotesque, waddling creatures I saw to be land whales.

Just one more aspect of societal decline for which feminism is to blame. And what was the benefit, again?

Scientific American and social autism

Scientific American reports on a study which implies that atheism may be a form of virtual Asperger’s Syndrome:

Bethany T. Heywood, a graduate student at Queens University Belfast, asked 27 people with Asperger’s Syndrome, a mild type of autism that involves impaired social cognition, about significant events in their lives. Working with experimental psychologist Jesse M. Bering (author of the Bering in Mind blog and a frequent contributor to Scientific American Mind), she asked them to speculate about why these important events happened—for instance, why they had gone through an illness or why they met a significant other. As compared with 34 neurotypical people, those with Asperger’s syndrome were significantly less likely to invoke a teleological response—for example, saying the event was meant to unfold in a particular way or explaining that God had a hand in it. They were more likely to invoke a natural cause (such as blaming an illness on a virus they thought they were exposed to) or to give a descriptive response, explaining the event again in a different way.

In a second experiment, Heywood and Bering compared 27 people with Asperger’s with 34 neurotypical people who are atheists. The atheists, as expected, often invoked anti-teleological responses such as “there is no reason why; things just happen.” The people with Asperger’s were significantly less likely to offer such anti-teleological explanations than the atheists, indicating they were not engaged in teleological thinking at all. (The atheists, in contrast, revealed themselves to be reasoning teleologically, but then they rejected those thoughts.)

This sounds a more than a little sketchy in the usual social science manner; it’s actually a smaller sample size than was the case in the utterly unscientific comparison of the high AS Quotient average reported by atheist Pharyngula readers to the neurotypical range reported by regular readers here at VP, which involved more than 100 individuals. I think it would be more illuminating to learn whether those diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or full-blown autism are more or less likely to be atheists, as the reported predilection for non-teleological thinking suggests that those suffering from this form of mental impairment would be tend to be predisposed towards atheism and materialism.

Of course, the existence of neurotypical atheists should not be a surprise since many atheists do not exhibit the impaired social cognition that is the hallmark of the militant New Atheists. This is why it is always important to distinguish between the individual who merely happens to lack belief in gods from the anti-religious socially autistic crusaders who simply cannot understand that your religious beliefs, whatever they might be, are no legitimate concern of theirs.

And while we’re on the subject of impaired social cognition, I found this comment on the article to be as amusing as it is ironic. “Socially speaking, the world is full of all kinds of people, but the atheists I choose to associate with are outspoken because of their innate consideration and compassion in light of another’s plight with respect to primitive irrational superstitions.”

Mailvox: IQ vs genius

MB inquires about my relative dearth of creative accomplishment:

Would you care to expound on the idea that simply possessing a genius IQ in no way presupposes that the owner will produce genius art work or scientific discovery? For example, I perused your novel Summa Elvetica and within the the first few pages could discern that your prose was workman-like and ordinary (as opposed to Shakespeare or my own fiction).

Whereas your discursive prose and arguments are a cut above the general punditry. I would surmise that focus has much to do with it. You have focused little on what makes for profound and beautiful in the creative, I would guess, and more on other things.

So, do you feel disappointed that your creative work is weak while your opinion work is excellent, or simply practice the art for the pleasure and not the result as so many guitarists enjoy strumming a few tunes while incapable of demonstrating the instrument’s potential and scope?

First, I reject the idea of genius-level intelligence. Intelligence is real and IQ is a reasonable measure of it, but it is not synonymous with genius. Intelligence is nothing more than raw intellectual capacity while genius is a proven form of intellectual achievement. There are geniuses who do not have an unusually high level of intelligence while the vast majority high-IQ level individuals are not geniuses. That latter category, I regretfully have to admit at this point, would appear to include me… although should my most recent technological innovation achieve a sufficient level of success, people will eventually reach an entirely different conclusion. Suddenly the dilettante vanishes and is replaced by the Renaissance Man. Such are the vagaries of reputation.

I must also take exception to MB’s description of Summa Elvetica as a weak creative work based on what appears to have been more of a perusal than an actual reading. While its prose is admittedly no more than functional, when viewed from a structural perspective, SE is arguably among the most creative works of fantasy fiction to be published in recent years. I think it would be a travesty to ignore those aspects and simply lump the novel in with all of the stagnant vampire and zombie fluff that has been published of late. Consider, for example that the Black Gate reviewer actually confused the fictional Question of Aelven anima with a real one composed by Thomas Aquinas. I may not be playing the guitar as well as the more notable soloists, but I am indubitably playing it in a different and innovative manner. In any case, I like playing it regardless of the result.

Now, as to the notion of whether my creative works have been hampered by my lack of focus, that is almost surely the case. But not to any great extent. Due to diminishing marginal returns, I don’t think that focusing more on fiction would significantly improve my prose style. Based on my extensive reading, I believe you either have it or you don’t, and I simply don’t. Compared to the writers I admire, I am wholly mediocre when it comes to writing prose and it is only my intelligence that permits me to surmount that on occasion by adding other elements that readers of a more intellectual inclination may find interesting. I don’t think my commentary is actually any better in that regard, it’s just that the bar is set so low by the professional journalists that practically anything looks good by comparison. It’s much harder to come out well in a comparison with Tanith Lee and Guy de Maupassant than with Ann Coulter and Maureen Dowd.

Also, in the case of commentary, those aforementioned other elements are much more important than the prose. No one cares how beautifully you might happen to write about bond yield spreads, but they care a great deal about knowing if you have correctly ascertained the next area of debt contagion.

WND column

The Declining Value of College

For more than 100 years, college has been considered a sound and desirable investment in one’s financial future. But unlike other forms of investment, those contemplating dropping more than $100,000 to obtain a degree from a private university, or $28,000 for one from a public university, seldom stop to consider whether what made sense for a previous generation still makes sense today.

Although most middle-class parents regard the idea of not “investing” in their children’s college degrees about as positively as necrophilia and cannibalism, examining the current value proposition of higher education should not be a controversial concept. The fact that National Lead may have been a great investment in 1910 doesn’t mean that it is in 2010. Apple was a fantastic investment in 1990, but looks significantly less promising now that its $233 billion market cap has exceeded Microsoft’s.