Vox Popoli

Peter Schiff expects another one-third drop in house prices:

If we assume that the bubble was artificial, we can instead imagine that home prices should have followed the more typical path during that time. When you do these extrapolations, a very sobering picture emerges.

The authors of the Case-Shiller index had assigned the index a value of 100.0 in January of 2000. This figure does not represent a dollar value for home prices but is simply a benchmarking tool. In December 2008, after a severe 28% decline from its June 2006 peak of 226.29, the Case-Shiller 10 City index stood at 162.1. However, if home prices had followed the 3.4% annual 100-year trend line from December 1997 (when the index was at 82.3), then the index would have arrived at only 118.92 in December 2008. This would suggest that the index would need to decline an additional 27% to get back to the historical trend line. Extrapolating along the sunnier 50-year annual average increase would put the index at 132.2 by December 2008. This would still put the trend line 18.5% below current prices. A cursory look at the chart below should disabuse anyone of the notion that home prices have now hit bottom. Policymakers and economists should by no means rely upon projections that see home prices turning around in the near term.

However, the story by no means ends there. Given the current conditions in the real estate market, with bloated inventories, growing unemployment, nonexistent consumer credit and shattered illusions of real estate riches, it would be logical to assume that prices will fall below the trend line. How much is anybody’s guess, but 10% would be conservative. Given that we are entering uncharted territory with price declines much sharper than those seen in the Great Depression, I would argue that the 100-year price trend would be the better projection to use. In such a scenario, the index would bottom out at around 108 if a 10% overshoot on the downside is seen. That leaves another 34% decline in home prices on the table.

That would indicate a median existing home price of $115,632 at the bottom, although given the way in which the scenario thus far has played out closer to the way the deflation hawks predicted, I wouldn’t count on the mass inflation that he’s expecting to provide a higher nominal price.

“We are out of money”

Steve Scully, C-Span: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?
Obama: Well, we are out of money now.

The United States has been an empire in decline since the 1970s. As has been the case with every other declining world power in history, there are a variety of reasons for this decline, which is why there are no straightforward solutions for reversing it. In looking at the situation, however, it is clear that there are a number of contributing factors that are more important than others. Among them include:

1. The abandonment of constitutional money
2. The expansion of the voting franchise
3. Global military aspirations
4. Transformation of the labor force
5. Mass immigration

UPDATE – Krugman sees California as a potential bellwether too: [T]he California precedent still has me rattled. Who would have thought that America’s largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic? On the other hand, the problems that plague California politics apply at the national level too.

The more I’ve thought about it, the more it has become obvious that the general science education, the state of which so concerns some scientists, is a ludicrous proposition. John Derbyshire and Charles Murray, neither of whom are known as major religious enthusiasts, have made strong cases that one size fits all is a totally ineffective model for a variety of subjects for a variety of reasons. A future beautician doesn’t need physics nor does a plumber require any knowledge of biology. As Sherlock Holmes, a literary creation of no small scientific bent, once said, to him it makes no difference at all if the sun rotates around the earth or if the earth rotates around the sun.

So, here’s a question for the science enthusiasts. What is the positive case for science education in the public schools? Why is it necessary? How does it further actual science in any way? And why should it take precedence over various subjects that aren’t presently taught and which every student will need in the course of their lives? Why are there courses on Geology and Life Sciences and none on Taxes, Budgets, or Investments?

Still, I find it interesting that a point many defenders of women’s suffrage would still argue is accepted as a given by at least some scientists:

Professor Andrew Oswald, from Warwick University, and Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee, of York University, wrote in an unpublished article that has been submitted to an economics journal: “This paper provides evidence that daughters make people more Left-wing, while having sons, by contrast, makes them more Right-wing.” Professor Oswald said that having daughters made men “gradually shift their political stance and become more sympathetic to the ‘female’ desire for a … larger amount for the public good”.

Of course, a cynic might suspect that this is because many parents have lower expectations for their daughters, believe they are less capable of taking responsibility for themselves, and want them to have government support so they don’t have to provide it themselves. Back when I graduated, it was still fairly common for young female graduates from good schools to expect to live off Mommy and Daddy for a while in a way that the young male graduates simply couldn’t. No doubt the fact that almost four-fifths of graduates won’t find full-time jobs right after college this year will have an impact on this pattern, but it still would be interesting to know what percentage of women from expensive private universities go to work after graduating compared to their male counterparts.

The elite institutions are of interest because if one wants to look at the socio-sexual patterns, it’s useless to waste time on the classes where everyone has to work just to pay the bills. Of course, under Obama, that description will probably apply to an increasing percentage of households.

Quodlibeta has the script:

Bertrand Russell – With Hypatia’s death, Christianity sapped the intellect of the people and all Pagan learning vanished for a thousand years. This period became known by historians as ‘The Dark Ages’. Only a few candles of reason burned in a world lit by the fire of superstition.

The Dark Ages – The scene is a field outside a monastery. Groups of filthy peasants are shown wearing hoods and slapping themselves in the face with bibles. A hairy man sits in the foreground scratching himself and attempting to copulate with a chicken. To the right, a group of plague infested men and women are busily worshipping the dismembered toe of a saint. This is an age of darkness.

The sad thing is that this is a reasonably accurate summary of the historical beliefs of the average Internet atheist and it’s not as far as it should be from the level of historical knowledge exhibited by the New Atheists.

What with the health benefits of skim milk, red wine, dark chocolate, caffeine, and now weightlifting:

Men with stronger muscles from regular weight training are up to 40 per cent less likely to die from cancer than men who do not pump iron, according to new research.

All they have to do now is figure out how video games, reading, pasta carbonara, and the internet are good for you and I’ll be quasi-immortal.

I have to seriously question the political savvy of any politician think that the general electorate would view the heightened risk of politicians committing suicide as anything but a positive thing:

Embarrassing disclosures about the vast expenses claims of MPs amount to a “McCarthy-style witch-hunt” that risks driving politicians to suicide, an MP warned on Friday. Nadine Dorries wrote on her blog that the two-week scandal, in which the Daily Telegraph has drip-fed details of how MPs have abused their generous expense allowances, was forcing politicians to the brink.

Hunt away, baby. Hunt away.

Mirabile dictu, but a ScienceBlogs blogger actually manages to read and correctly comprehend one of my posts about science:

I own well over two dozen physics textbooks, and on a little thinking and poking, I note that as far as I know not a single one of them tries to define science. I’m pretty sure none of them even try to define physics. Even the freshman intro text only makes passing comment about how physics requires measurement before launching into a discussion of the SI units…. I know science isn’t all that hard to get a handle on, but of course there’s intrinsically some fuzziness or else that whole “philosophy of science” thing would have been put to bed a long time ago.

It is one of the great ironies of the day that the very foundation of materialist philosophy should be so utterly nebulous as “science”. For all that the basic method of science is quite simple to understand, nearly everyone seems to have a different definition of it, as was shown in the various quotations from different science textbooks. I ran into yet another one just two days ago, when I began reading Michael Shermer’s intriguing The Mind of the Market. (About which I will write more in the near future, those who think my contempt for the New Atheists applies indiscriminately to all atheists will probably be confounded by my forthcoming review of the book; as if I’m likely to be prejudiced against an author who kicks things off with a quote from Human Action.)

Shermer writes: “Darwin’s Dictum encodes the philosophy of science of this book: if observations are to be of any use they must be tested against some view—a thesis, model, hypothesis, theory, or paradigm. Since the facts never just speak for themselves, they must be interpreted through the colored lenses of ideas—percepts need concepts. Science is an exquisite blend of data and theory—percepts and concepts—that together form the bedrock for the foundation of science, the greatest tool ever devised for understanding how the world works.”

Shermer derived his dictum from an 1861 letter from Charles Darwin to an economist named Henry Fawcett, in which Darwin wrote: “[A]ll observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!”

Needless to say, Darwin’s Dictum is far from the impartial, objective, and imperial image of science that is put about by propagandists such as Richard Dawkins and echoed by the science fetish freaks. The gap between science as it is actually practiced and the myth of science is largely the result of efforts of some – not all – secular humanists to coopt science in defense of their philosophical, political, and ideological ends. A real scientist wouldn’t get his knickers in a twist over evolution, creationism, or even the Hindu creation account being taught to fifth-graders, as he would realize:

1) Very, very few of these kids will ever become scientists in a field that involves a related science.

2) The current system of science education is producing too many grad students and PhDs already.

3) The schools are already struggling to teach children basic reading and arithmetic and don’t even attempt to try teaching them skills that most of them will actually need, such as how to fill out a tax form or apply for a loan.

Defending the objective purity of science never been the noble question of “truth” that the science fetishists often pretend it to be; the same ignoramuses who fret continually about children being exposed to anti-Darwinian ideas actively push economic and political concepts that have been far more conclusively demolished, in some cases, for centuries. The historically established conclusion that there never were any “Dark Ages” has been in the encyclopedias for more than seventy years, and yet many of those who worry about science education frame it as their fear of a second “dark age”.

As has proven to be the case with journalism, the notion of objective science is little more than a modern charade. Shermer is right; interpretation is a significant part of the process and therefore science must be more open and open-minded if it is to prosper. If, on the other hand, it follows the rigid and dogmatic path of its purported defenders such as Richard Dawkins and many of the writers at ScienceBlogs, it will continue to ossify and become less relevant. In fact, if the would-be secular priesthood gets its way, science will not only become a less useful tool to understand how the world works, it will become an important means of inhibiting an understanding of how the world works.

And in answer to Built on Facts’s ruminations, I would say that the reason that biology textbooks appear to be more concerned with definitions than physics textbooks is because the textbook writers know their claim to the mantle of falsfiable objectivity and scientody is tenuous and also because they are attempting to artificially restrict the bounds of what is deemed to be legitimate scientific inquiry.

I’m only surprised at the speed with which the grandiose initial claims are being disavowed by those who profess belief in evolution:

Many paleontologists are unconvinced. They point out that Hurum and Gingerich’s analysis compared 30 traits in the new fossil with primitive and higher primates when standard practice is to analyze 200 to 400 traits and to include anthropoids from Egypt and the newer fossils of Eosimias from Asia, both of which were missing from the analysis in the paper. “There is no phylogenetic analysis to support the claims, and the data is cherry-picked,” says paleontologist Richard Kay, also of Duke University. Callum Ross, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois agrees: “Their claim that this specimen should be classified as haplorhine is unsupportable in light of modern methods of classification.”

So, it’s clear that what passes for the science isn’t there. Not yet, and probably not ever. One gets the impression that many serious scientists would really prefer to avoid having Ida thrown in their faces for the indefinite future the way they already have to answer for Piltdown Man and all the other evolutionist hoaxes. Seriously, is there any other so-called “science” with a more gruesome record of outright fraud? And somehow, I doubt that scientists putting their efforts into marketing spin is going to do much for their credibility.

“Any pop band is doing the same thing,” said Jorn H. Hurum, a scientist at the University of Oslo who acquired the fossil and assembled the team of scientists that studied it. “Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.”

Science: as credible as bad music. Well, if that’s their goal, I have no doubt they’ll manage to achieve it.

The treatment of auto dealers like this doesn’t seem right, but as for the nullification of the franchise contracts by the bankruptcy court, I think it’s reasonably common practice for bankrupt companies to be released from contractual obligations.

On Thursday, May 14, 2009 I was notified that my Dodge franchise, that we purchased, will be taken away from my family on June 9, 2009 without compensation and given to another dealer at no cost to them. My new vehicle inventory consists of 125 vehicles with a financed balance of 3 million dollars. This inventory becomes impossible to sell with no factory incentives beyond June 9, 2009. Without the Dodge franchise we can no longer sell a new Dodge as “new,” nor will we be able to do any warranty service work. Additionally, my Dodge parts inventory, (approximately $300,000.) is virtually worthless without the ability to perform warranty service. There is no offer from Chrysler to buy back the vehicles or parts inventory.

Our facility was recently totally renovated at Chrysler’s insistence, incurring a multi-million dollar debt in the form of a mortgage at Sun Trust Bank.

HOW IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CAN THIS HAPPEN?

THIS IS A PRIVATE BUSINESS NOT A GOVERNMENT ENTITY

This is beyond imagination! My business is being stolen from me through NO FAULT OF OUR OWN. We did NOTHING wrong.

However, even from this admittedly plaintive email, it’s not hard to point out that the man is incorrect. He did do something wrong. He put his business in debt because another party told him to. If the facility renovations were so important to Chrysler, then Chrysler should have funded them. If they weren’t willing to take the risk of doing so, the dealer should have known better than to take the risk for them.

Everyone makes mistakes. I’ve made some humdingers. But, in general, going into debt in order to do something of benefit to another party is an inexcusable one. No doubt his justification was that Chrysler might have threatened to pull the franchise. Well, if that’s the sort of business partner you have, you’re better off without them. Now he’s in pretty much the same situation he would have been if he’d told Chrysler to take a hike, but with the addition of millions in debt to pay off.