Tag: mailvox

Mailvox: catastrophe is clarifying

In which Ashley Miller and I exchange email on the matter. She responded to my email thusly:

Thank you for your very polite e-mail.

The point of my article was to say for that people like me — people for whom secular values, gay rights, and abortion are important issues – Ron Paul is a bad choice.

For people like you, who believe the country is going to implode economically and therefore, relatively reasonably, don’t care so much about the other issues, Ron Paul may well be an excellent choice. And I agree that it isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing, I have no respect for either party.

It’s just that I don’t think that the country is going to implode. And I don’t think a man who thinks it’s OK for states to take away my rights so long as the federal government doesn’t is libertarian or worth supporting.

Thank you,
Ashley

In response to which, I wrote the following:

Dear Miss Miller,

I completely agree with you. If you don’t think the country is in any significant economic peril, and most people admittedly don’t, then there is no reason you should support Ron Paul if you disagree strongly with his social positions. I would simply encourage you to keep an open mind about him if your perception of the economic situation changes.

Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter if you favor government support for the poor or for foreign invasions, if the government has no money, it can’t do anything at all.

Best regards,
Vox

Now, contrast with this the barrage of pointless venting she received in response to her original piece. While I don’t agree with her posting the contact information and IP addresses of those who attacked her, I don’t agree with the over-the-top vituperation either.* It’s neither necessary nor productive; if one recalls that the woman isn’t even aware that the US and global economies are in a frighteningly parlous state, then what are the chances that she has correctly analyzed other socio-political issues, or is even capable of doing so?

I treat the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Myers harshly because they claim to be intellectually and academically superior, when it is readily apparent and easily demonstrable that they are not. I treat the various anklebiters harshly because their aggressive behavior and incivility demand it. But someone who is a graduate student, who is doing no more than expressing her opinion, however ignorant, fallacious, and stupid it might be, on her own blog is not simply not acting in an offensive manner.

I know I’m not going to convince someone like Miss Miller that a libertarian like Ron Paul merits support from those who disagree with him on social grounds because she is not going to be able to recognize that her concerns about Paul enforcing his own social perspective in an authoritarian manner stems from her own psychological projection. Nor do I have any interest in repeating myself and attempting to convince her of the current economic state, not when I have already published a book on the subject. But it is quite possible to convince her that IF her perception of the economy is incorrect, THEN Paul merits not only another look, but outright support since in that case Paul would be correct and her position would clearly have been shown to be false. Catastrophe is clarifying, and some will never see clearly until forced to do so by events.

This isn’t about being patient, it is about being civil and understanding that even the strongest, most thoughtless brick wall has cracks that the reality of nature can eventually exploit and utilize to bring down.

As for those who think a few nasty emails prove anything at all about Ron Paul or his supporters, I have more than one hundred times that many that would suffice to “prove” the same thing about Obama supporters, Bush supporters, atheists, Muslims, scientists, feminists, and so forth.

*I would encourage Miss Miller to remove the contact information. I’ve received hundreds of threats like those and worse for more than 10 years of writing op/ed and have never seen any benefit to me or anyone else in publicizing the personal information of those attacking me. Once you start writing on controversial topics in public, you can expect to be targeted by those who disagree with you and there is nothing to be gained from exacerbating the situation.

Mailvox: context is king

Druidhouse perceives a nonexistent contradiction:

in the interview you say that WWII didn’t get us out of the depression, but rather that the fact that the u.s. was the only manufacturing facility left standing and that europe and the rest of the world were in rubble, thereby giving us a monopoly for a while on manufactured goods. but it was precisely WWII that left Europe’s infrastructure in ruins and america’s unscathed which gave us that monopoly. you are expressing a contradiction. and there’s nothing wrong with my reading comprehension.

I am not expressing a contradiction here. While there is nothing wrong with Druidhouse’s reading comprehension, or more to the point, his listening comprehension, his confusion stems from his ignorance of what “WWII got us out of the depression” means in the economic context.

In that context, which of course is the context in which the Alt Investors interview took place, “WWII got the USA out of the Great Depression” is a Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian argument in which it is asserted that the huge increase in government expenditure involved in the production of war material led to the post-war economic growth. It absolutely does NOT mean that “winning the war and surviving with the only intact industrial infrastructure” led to economic growth.

This should be obvious, since the economists who make the “WWII solution to depression” argument are not advocating World War III and the destruction of the European and Chinese industrial infrastructures, but rather increased government expenditure. It is a particularly stupid argument, of course, since Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union also vastly increased their defense spending without realizing any post-war economic growth as a result… and it was not even necessary for the USA to enter the war to ensure the destruction of the German, Russian, French, Italian, and British infrastructures.

Mailvox: this is not the multiplier you’re looking for

Albatross gets caught attempting to pull the old switcheroo:

There are two senses in which the multiplier is used. In one sense, the multiplier is used as a statistic about government spending (i.e. suppose the government spends one dollar more, if GDP increases by 1 dollar, you have a multiplier of one). In this case, you wouldn’t understand my point. In another case, the multiplier refers to a theoretically posited increase in private sector activity because the government enables an “injection” into the economy (this is the sense in which the money multiplier exists). I meant the second sense and most Keynesians mean the second sense. You can’t understand Keynes’s thought experiment vis a vis burying money (since no gov’t money need be spent) unless you understand the injection multiplier as opposed to the statistical multiplier. I can go into further details if you’d like but I this is enough for you to understand why we came to different extensions from your conclusion.

Albatross failed to recognize which multiplier was the subject at hand. The entire 2008-2009 debate over the multiplier, and the context of the ECB study to which the linked article was referring, solely concerned the “fiscal multiplier”, which does not render Albatross’s point difficult to understand so much as entirely irrelevant. For example, here is The Economist’s article on it, to which Paul Krugman subsequently responded in his post entitled “Multiplying Multipliers”.

The debate hinges on the scale of the “fiscal multiplier”. This measure, first formalised in 1931 by Richard Kahn, a student of John Maynard Keynes, captures how effectively tax cuts or increases in government spending stimulate output. A multiplier of one means that a $1 billion increase in government spending will increase a country’s GDP by $1 billion.

The size of the multiplier is bound to vary according to economic conditions. For an economy operating at full capacity, the fiscal multiplier should be zero. Since there are no spare resources, any increase in government demand would just replace spending elsewhere. But in a recession, when workers and factories lie idle, a fiscal boost can increase overall demand. And if the initial stimulus triggers a cascade of expenditure among consumers and businesses, the multiplier can be well above one.

The multiplier is also likely to vary according to the type of fiscal action. Government spending on building a bridge may have a bigger multiplier than a tax cut if consumers save a portion of their tax windfall. A tax cut targeted at poorer people may have a bigger impact on spending than one for the affluent, since poorer folk tend to spend a higher share of their income.

Crucially, the overall size of the fiscal multiplier also depends on how people react to higher government borrowing. If the government’s actions bolster confidence and revive animal spirits, the multiplier could rise as demand goes up and private investment is “crowded in”. But if interest rates climb in response to government borrowing then some private investment that would otherwise have occurred could get “crowded out”. And if consumers expect higher future taxes in order to finance new government borrowing, they could spend less today. All that would reduce the fiscal multiplier, potentially to below zero.

However, it must be noted that the notion of potentially reducing the fiscal multiplier below zero is practically – I should not have said theoretically – unthinkable, for the obvious reason that there has never been a time since the original publication of The General Theory that any of the developed economies has come anywhere close to reaching full employment, except for revised definitions of “full employment” that all fell well short of an economy operating at full capacity. No Keynesian or Neo-Keynesian spends any time whatsoever considering theoretical sub-zero stimuli, for the obvious reason that they tend to render the entire Keynesian perspective either unnecessary or counterproductive. The usual Keynesian claim is that fiscal multipliers reliably range from 1.5 to 3x… which has been shown empirically to be untrue.

Furthermore, Albatross not only erroneously attempted to apply the “injection multiplier” to a discussion that explicitly concerned the “fiscal multiplier”, but also defined the injection multiplier incorrectly. The injection multiplier is not “a theoretically posited increase in private sector activity because the government enables an “injection” into the economy” but rather “any injection into the economy via investment capital, government spending or the like [that] will result in a proportional increase in overall income at a national level.” It includes, but is not limited to, the definition he provided.

Returning to the orginal point, it’s not at all surprising that the fiscal multiplier has been determined to reliably be less than one. As I noted in RGD, Robert Barro’s study of federal spending in WWII demonstrated that even in the most commonly cited Keynesian success story, “the estimated multiplier for defense spending is 0.6-0.7”.

Mailvox: A new GOP foreign policy

A VP reader who writes at Policymic recommends the GOP adopt Ron Paul’s foreign policy:

Republicans love to wax poetic about America’s founding documents. Read anything by popular conservative pundits to get up to speed on how our precious Constitution has been shredded by liberals and why America desperately needs to return to the principles contained therein.

The major Republican presidential contenders all share that view as well. Newt Gingrich’s website, for example, tells readers that religious liberty and life are unalienable rights “contained in the Declaration of Independence.” Mitt Romney has similarly ripped on “advocates of “secularism” for taking the idea of separation of church and state “…well beyond its original meaning.”

The problem, however, is that Republicans don’t endorse their own back to basics argument when it comes to foreign policy. Conservatives, historically speaking, don’t a endorse the idea that America is the world’s police force, and for the sake of consistency and the good of the country, today’s Republicans need to abandoned this interventionist mindset.

This may sound like a strange argument if you don’t know your history, so let’s briefly put it context. The idea that America should cross the globe solving every nation’s problems is a progressive one. And it makes sense when you think about it. The left generally accepts that the government ought to have a very active role in society, alleviating poverty, ensuring a level playing field or the little guy, and so on. So why wouldn’t the same be true of foreign policy as well?

It’s all quite true. Unfortunately, it’s all quite irrelevant. The observable fact of the matter is that most Republicans, including many who call themselves conservatives, are now progressives on the foreign policy front. There is literally nothing conservative about the Republican Party’s mainstream anymore, and they are at their most left-wing and pro-government intervention with regards to foreign policy.

What they should do and what they can reasonably be expected to do are two completely different things. Which is why they are so often called, quite correctly, the Stupid Party.

Mailvox: an easy choice

Jamsco asked me to consider presenting an argument for supporting Tebow and the Broncos versus an argument for supporting the Vikings. I rejected that because there is absolutely no chance I would ever support any team against the Vikings. I find The Miracle of Tebow to be even more entertaining than the Tarvaris Jackson Experiment, and I wish the young man well in general, but against the Vikings?

Never. The only circumstance in which I might consider supporting another team against the Vikings is if one of my children was playing against them. And even then, I’d probably hope for an excellent individual performance in defeat.

However, I can say that seeing the Vikings lose to Tebow and the Broncos on Sunday would be less painful than most historical Vikings defeats. I rank Vikings defeats on the following 10-point pain scale:

10- Dallas Hail-Mary game. Pearson absolutely committed offensive pass interference.
9 – Oakland. Super Bowl XI.
8 – Atlanta. 38 in 98. This was dreadful, but unlike the other two games, I didn’t actually cry. One of the guys at the bar in Florida did, however.
7 – New Orleans. NFC Championship aka The Greased Pig Game. This probably would have been an 8 if I was younger and was still capable of feeling normal human emotion. Also, New York 41-0. People tend to forget the Vikes were actually favored. Total disaster from the get-go.
6 – New England. The 28-27 game. How do you lose when you’re winning 27-0? Pittsburgh. Super Bowl IX. I didn’t expect the Vikings to win, but I still hoped. Washington. The Darren Nelson drop in the 1987 NFC championship. We would have crushed Denver too.
5 – Any loss to the Packers when the Vikings are favored. And pretty much any loss to the Lions. Not that the Lions are a rival, it’s just that it’s so unexpected.
4 – Arizona. 18-17 in 2003 to knock the Vikings out of the playoffs. Or any playoff loss in a year when the Vikes clearly aren’t good enough to compete.
3 – Any loss to the Packers when the Packers are the better team. Losing then isn’t surprising, it’s just annoying. As are the Packer fans. Or losing after leading by 10 or more in the third quarter. Or any loss in the second half of the season after starting 6-2 or better.
2 – A regular season loss.
1 – A preseason loss.

I would say that a loss to the Broncos would probably be about a 1.5, not because I’m cheering for Tebow, but because the season is shot anyhow and I’d just as soon see Frazier go. I see no reason to have any confidence in him. The Vikings run defense isn’t as epic as it was a few years ago, but it is still a top-10 run defense giving up only 99.6 YPG, which should slow down the top-ranked Denver running attack. The Vikings should win, even without Adrian Peterson, since their weak and wounded pass defense, (missing both starting corners and ranked 29th), should be capable of rising to the challenge posed by Tebow’s arm, and because the Denver defense simply isn’t as good as many casual observers imagine.

By the way, I always support the NFC North team in the playoffs. Bears, then Packers. I hate the NFC West. I don’t hate the NFC East, but I hate the way the media spends half their coverage on the NFC East and the other half on the rest of the league. And the NFC South still strikes me as a nonentity, the Saints one Super Bowl notwithstanding.

Anyhow, I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s game. You can always judge a player better when you see him play against a team you know well. I do wish Winfield wasn’t on IR; it would be fascinating to see if Denver could run his way or not… I’m betting not, but we won’t be able to find out.

Mailvox: two questions

DW asks about overpopulation and marital submission:

I’m a fairly new reader of your blog and a big fan. I have two questions. Some of my friends are scientists—a biologist, a chemist and a biochemist. They all tell me that the world is overpopulated. I don’t believe them. Do you think the world is overpopulated? Also, since you’re a Christian, do you believe the stuff Paul wrote about a wife being submissive to her husband? I’ve been… trying to figure out how to argue for the traditional Christian view that the husband is the head of the wife and that women shouldn’t hold authoritative positions in the Church in today’s world.

I think some parts of the world are overpopulated, which is to say the parts of the world that cannot manage to feed or maintain civilized societies without external support. It is absurd to be sending vast quantities of food, medicine, and money to third world nations that cannot provide for themselves while simultaneously permitting third-world immigration. This is actually a monstrous policy that not only ensures devastation throughout the third world, but throughout the civilized world as well.

If you consider that the Nigerian city of Lagos alone has 1.6 million more Nigerians than there are Swiss in Switzerland, it should be readily apparent that Europe’s money, technology, and medicine has helped expand the African population to quantities it can no longer reasonably support than America’s money, technology, and medicine could support China.

So, the world is overpopulated in parts and the consequent idea of substituting immigrants for natives – or electing a new people, as the Democrats are now explicitly doing with their creation of an “Obama Coalition” – will turn out to be even more disastrous than the attempts to industrialize the uncivilized have been.

As to the second question, yes, there is no shortage of historical and scientific evidence in support of the Biblical concept of female submissiveness in marriage. It should not be necessary to argue this at all with fellow Christians, as the Churchian concept of mutual submission is not only illogical, it is outright anti-Christian.

In light of the Biblical analogy, the concept of mutual submission requires the belief that Jesus Christ submits himself to his church. I would no more accept a nominally Christian authority that taught “mutual submission” as being legitimate as I would one that taught one should pray in the name of Obama instead of Jesus Christ.

Mailvox: atheists are thankful too

MD drops a note:

Although we don’t have thanksgiving here, I admire the sentiment so I must give thanks to you for (although often infuriating; & even just sometimes plain wrong) relieving the tedium of the working life. Although I disagree with you at least as much as I agree with you, you are at least (& rarely for most of the media) both clever and interesting and free-thinking. Anyway, us Brits don’t do love-ins, so that’s enough til next year.

Clearly someone needs to set him straight about this being an atheist-hating, anti-science echo chamber of stupid Christards waiting for Round Two…. The truth is that I’m always glad to see intelligent and well-educated critics participate in the discussion and challenge my views, either privately or publicly, so long as it is in a straightforward and intellectually reasonable manner. I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on everything; my family and my best friends never have, so why would you or anyone else?

No one gets it right all the time. Certainly not me. Religion doesn’t claim to contain all the truth – now we see as though through a glass darkly – and any honest scientist is open about the limitations of science. How can we, who are mere mortals, possibly think to either know it all or even possess a proper understanding of what “all” means?

But I would encourage MD to give thanks to God rather than to me. Even if he doesn’t believe in Him… especially if he doesn’t believe in Him. After all, if He doesn’t exist, then what could be the harm?

Mailvox: the dangerous Ron Paul

The cognitive dissonance at work in N’s email, written in response to yesterday’s column, is remarkable:

I like Ron Paul but I don’t like him closing all our bases around the world and bringing our army back home. This isolationist view is DANGEROUS and will only empower and embolden our enemies and actually bring us closer to WORLD WAR, this time right at our DOORSTEPS!

Is that what you want???

If Reagan said America was that “shining city on the hill”, dimming it around the world with an isolationist view will only make stronger the darkness of this world. We need to keep shining that light shining everywhere, bud. The cost of peace ain’t cheap, but war is a hell of a lot more expensive!

Yes, that is precisely what I want. All military bases closed, all American troops back in the USA. To argue otherwise is indicative of a shockingly stupid perspective which is not only illogical, but blatantly ignores both the historical record and the observable reality of present U.S. foreign policy.

First, the argument about “the cost of peace” is a non-starter. America is presently engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Iran. (Don’t kid yourself, there are already CIA and most likely special forces in Iran right now.) It may still be active in Libya. That is hardly peace.

Second, the USA is bankrupt. It can’t afford ANY military operations at all. Thanks to the expected failure of the Congressional supercommittee, automatic defense cuts must be made. As the global economic contraction continues, the U.S. military will have to shrink.

Third, it is American military operations that have not only brought enemies to our DOORSTEPS, but have brought them into the country. The Saudis who attacked the Two Towers on 9/11 were angry about the U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia and were “studying” in the United States. There are far more Somalis in the USA than there were before U.S. troops invaded Somalia and more Iraqis than before U.S. troops invaded Iraq.

Isolation is not dangerous. American strength and wealth waxed during its isolationist period and has declined steadily ever since, just as both the Roman and British empires declined once they started attempting to police the world. As I wrote in the column, the irony is that the one Republican presidential candidate whose policies would strengthen the American military and best protect American interests is constantly attacked by stupid and ignorant Republicans who wrongly believe that the more troop deployments that take place, the stronger the nation is.

No wonder they also fall for the Neo-Keynesian argument that the more money you spend, the wealthier you become.

Mailvox: ah, innocence

Evil Kirk has a touching faith in the technocrats:

Evil Kirk: 11/21/11 6:47 AM:

The crash already came and went. If you view crashes in the 1929 sense or the “It’s a Wonderful Life” sense, you’re out of date and just worrying over a bogeyman. You aren’t going to wake up tomorrow to bank runs and general panic. We are largely in a post-radical economic discontinuity age. Too much is known, temporary technocratic leadership is too readily accepted, and people in general are too savvy and suspicious to tolerate radical discontinuity.

I just had to post this publicly to ensure it was on the record. It is indeed amusing and indicates the mindset of someone who I suspect doesn’t track a single economic statistic, let alone the ones I do. And here I’d thought the public mocking of the concept intrinsic in Reinhart and Rogoff’s best-selling book had finally killed off the theme “this time it’s different”.

Mailvox: thinking Tebow through

castricv is skeptical that the Veer can work in the NFL:

Tebow is a great person, a stand up leader, and will always give his all. However, there is no way he is starting for any team past next year and though he may remain as a great backup or a pinch runner/QB, he will never be able to keep pace with the Brees, Brady, Rodgers of the league.

I said much the same thing after watching the Miami game. And I still THINK that’s the case now that the Broncos are 4-1 with Tebow at the helm, compared to 1-4 when starting Orton. (So much for Coach Fox’s ability to correctly calculate his team’s chances to win.) But I’m no longer so certain it can’t keep working in the long term, because there is the possibility of a running-heavy game being very effective for a team in an era when the entire NFL has gone passing-mad for two very important reasons. Turnovers and game time.

The Broncos simply don’t turn the ball over in the Tebow offense. In six games, he has one INT and one fumble lost. That is absolutely huge in the day of the frequent pick-six. Let’s look at the three elite quarterbacks castricv mentioned. Drew Brees has 7 INT 0 FL in the last six games. Brady has 5 INT 1 FL in the same span. So, you have to factor in Tebow’s turnover rate of .333 compared to 1.16 and 1.0. Part of Aaron Rodgers incredible value as a QB comes from his low turnover rate of 0.333, the same as Tebow’s. I think this is an aspect of the position that analysts are leaving out of the equation and helps explain why the Broncos are winning despite everyone’s expectations.

Imagine if the Broncos acquired a very good running back to pair with Tebow, one that can break a stacked box like Adrian Peterson. The quarterback being a runner helps address the stacked box issue because there is an additional blocker. I’m not saying this definitely would work, I’m simply saying that I can imagine that it COULD work. And it has a lot more potential than throwing another mediocre quarterback with a turnover rate of 2+ like Orton out there.

The lack of turnovers is particularly significant since a running team reduces the number of possessions for both teams from 12 to 9. Since the average points scored in a game by one team is 21, the average number of scoring possessions is around 3. (Keeping it simple here.) An average NFL quarterback turns the ball over twice per game, so in normal game he’s got to lead his team on a scoring drive three times out of ten to give it a reasonable chance to win, but three times out of seven when playing Tebow and the Broncos. How many quarterbacks can be expected to score every other drive?

Tebow, on the other hand, only has to generate a scoring drive one out of every three drives. Throw in the field position advantage provided by the nearly two turnover advantage, and you can see why the approach might theoretically work so long as Tebow can continue to avoid turning the ball over. He’ll never be able to keep pace with Brady, Brees, or Rodgers, but then, he doesn’t necessarily have to. Remember, this is not all that different from the approach that Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick used to beat the superior K-Gun offense of the Bills in Super Bowl XXV.

The three things that struck me when watching the final Denver drive to beat the Jets were as follows:

1. Tebow has excellent vision and patience when running the ball. It’s really striking. This makes stopping him much harder than it looks. There must have been four or five times when a Jets defender would have had him if he hadn’t seen the opening and taken it at just the right moment. It also explains why he is so much more effective towards the end of games when the defenders are a little tired and slow.

2. His teammates have his back. Champ Bailey has been the most openly supportive, but after the last touchdown, when Tebow returned to the bench, one of the Denver cornerbacks, Cassius Vaughn, bent down, hugged him, and the microphone caught him telling Tebow “You keep turning it on! We love you, boy.” In the ultimate team sport, this is more meaningful than most spectators understand.

3. The coaches can’t believe what’s happening and really don’t know what to do with him or about him. There were more similarities than differences between the reactions of Fox and Ryan. After the touchdown run, Fox had his hands on his head, happy, but with a look of incredulity on his face. Ryan looked equally incredulous, but totally disgusted too.

But the NFL has to be loving the situation. A mediocre Denver team has somehow become must-see TV for NFL fans around the nation. Not only was the Denver stadium shaking with the chanting of the fans, but I have seldom heard the TV commentators more intrigued with the last five minutes of a 13-10 non-playoff game. They were actually laughing after Tebow scored. The whole drive was so awesome and ugly that I had to watch it twice. Make that three times.

Now, I can’t see it happening. I honestly can’t. I could see Denver winning the AFC West and perhaps even upsetting New England in the playoffs, but I can’t see them beating Pittsburgh or Baltimore. But just for the fun of it, can you imagine how utterly insane it would be, how totally nuclear the sports media would go, if Denver were to face Green Bay in the Super Bowl?