Our gerentocracy doesn’t suck because they are old. No, it sucks because their ideas have been terrible for 50 years, and they continue jamming them down our throats to this day. Have a nice day.
Gerentocracy
Dec 15th, 2020 by wintercow20
The Challenge of Adapting to Climate Change
Dec 12th, 2020 by wintercow20
The “experts” tell us we have only a few decades. Many of the climate models, for what it’s worth (such as RCP8.5) do not assume much adaptation.
Here is a glimpse of the challenge: Seoul, South Korea 1960 vs. Seoul, South Korea today:
They Believe Their Own Malarkey
Dec 12th, 2020 by wintercow20
I am just finishing up the absolutely gut-wrenching book from Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine. Words cannot do it justice. Just as the Hiroshima story and the Auschwitz story and the slavery story must be told and retold and taught to our children, it would be unconscionable for all of us not to be very well educated about what happened in the totalitarian Socialist regimes through history. I have read dozens of books on it, but I really think what happened during Mao’s Great Leap Forward is the most absurd. Some regimes have been more internally brutal such as Stalin and his purges, and some regimes have been far more efficient at wiping out anything that disagreed with them (Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge), but no regime can match the sustained ideological and economic delusion that Mao and his cadres perpetrated on the people of China.
Two things stand out as truly incredible to me in this entire gruesome episode, and perhaps they will come as a shock to the anti-capitalist apologists for socialism.
One: There is an absurd degree of competition in the socialist regime, far more than you see under capitalist regimes. The POINT of capitalist regimes is to find ways to cooperate with each other. It may appear that buyers compete with buyers and that sellers compete with sellers, but that is all for the privilege of cooperating with each other. And the wonderful part of capitalist institutions is that if you “lose” the competition to cooperate with one partner, you still have resources to bargain with and you can propose a huge range of alternative transactions to satisfy other trading partners.
That is certainly not the case in socialist regimes. Not only did the entire Chinese communist system prostrate itself to its dear leader (most ridiculously by the Potemkin experimental agricultural plots that had cadres jacking up yield and production numbers by doing things like destroying peasant clay huts to use as fertilizer, by replanting grain from other fields and close-cropping them onto the experimental fields, by simply making up ridiculously wrong production numbers, and then to “impress” Mao with these surplus production so much so that they were encouraged to stop planting for a year or two, or to eat five meals a day, even as they villages were on the verge of starvation, and then this is followed with the absolute cultish insanity of trying to rise up the world production rankings for things like steel and cotton and other commodities, so they would export lots of this “surplus” grain to other nations in order to import industrial machinery to help them become the world’s 3rd largest producer of cotton bolts instead of 5th. The whole thing was immorally absurd), but the kind of competition that Mao and his cadres enforced on his people makes the most ruthless capitalist look like a stuffed animal. Mao had all of the communes and villages competing with each other to show the best production numbers, and if they did not hit increasingly unrealistic expectations for production targets, extreme shame and worse would befall village managers and the peasants they managed. It was a fiasco. Hundreds of calls per week went back and forth from Beijing and the villages to report on how well various villages were doing in this race. The managers and workers, fearing obviously for their own and their families’ well being would stop at nothing to fall behind, and to disasterous consequences.
Second: and when the obvious disastrous consequences came, and they did horrifically, the Chinese citizens went so far beyond what happens in a market as to create the need for a new word to describe it. When you are disgustingly poor and hungry, you do and sell anything just for a morsel. And that they did. The Chinese peasants were forced to prostitute themselves, and that was a modest problem. They were forced to eat anything and consume anything that was theirs, immediately, because it was all to become the “property” of the canteen (the entity that distributed the collective goods). Indeed, the canteen encouraged the peasants to eat as much as they could, so as to continue the myth of the bountiful harvests of the workers. And this exacerbated the shortages of everything. The peasants resorted to selling anything and everything they could. They would rip up their floorboards of their modest homes (before they were destroyed or condemned by the collective) just to secure a little food, and they would even resort to selling their children, or worse.
You really need to read it to appreciate the scale and magnitude and depth of the deprivation and maliciousness. But it is also clear that the Maoists believed their own BS. Ultimately, they unleashed competitive and greedy forces that no market system could possibly be capable of.
If Organic Were Truly About the Planet …
Dec 8th, 2020 by wintercow20
I’d add, “just leave people the hell alone” and our world would be immeasurably better. Here is a bit from Alex Tabarrok’s tribute to Walter Williams:
Our colleague, the great Walter Williams, died on Tuesday shortly after teaching his last class–which is exactly how he would have wanted to go. He was 84 and had been teaching at George Mason since 1980. As Don Boudreaux writes in the WSJ:
For 40 years Walter was the heart and soul of George Mason’s unique Department of Economics. Our department unapologetically resists the trend of teaching economics as if it’s a guide for social engineers. This resistance reflects Walter’s commitment to liberal individualism and his belief that ordinary men and women deserve, as his friend Thomas Sowell puts it, “elbow room for themselves and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of their ‘betters.’ ”
Walter taught UCLA-Chicago price theory to multiple generations of George Mason students. His students loved him. He secured funding for me when I was a student, for which I have always been grateful. You can find many of his graduate exam questions here. They are tough!
Walter led a remarkable life recounted in his autobiography, Up From the Projects. He was arrested for disorderly conduct several times and drafted into the army. He was later court-martialed but, acting as his own attorney, he wins his case. He’s sent to Korea and when asked to fill in a form stating his race he writes Caucasian because the Negros got all the worst jobs. He tells his commanding officer that he has pledged to defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic and that he, the commanding officer, is a domestic enemy of the constitution. He writes to complain to President John F. Kennedy. The army gives him an honorable discharge. His wife, Connie, helps him to become more mannerly. It was only when he discovered economics, however, that he learned to combine trouble-making with discipline. He was interviewed a few years ago on these themes by Jason Riley for the WSJ:
“I was more than anything a radical,” says Mr. Williams. “I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence.
“But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence.”
During his junior year at California State College in Los Angeles, Mr. Williams switched his major from sociology to economics after reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Black Reconstruction in America,” a Marxist take on the South’s transformation after the Civil War that will never be confused with “The Wealth of Nations.” Even so, the book taught him that “black people cannot make great progress until they understand the economic system, until they know something about economics.”
He earned his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA, which had one of the top economics departments in the country, and he says he “probably became a libertarian through exposure to tough-mined professors” — James Buchanan, Armen Alchian, Milton Friedman — “who encouraged me to think with my brain instead of my heart. I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions.”
Walter was never politically correct. He once demanded that our Dean do something about the lack of representation of Asian-Americans on the GMU basketball team. He enjoyed his iconoclasm but his provocations were designed to get people to stop and think not to offend. It’s not clear that this is possible anymore.
Walter was a brilliant communicator. GMU Econ Chair Daniel Houser noted:
That Walter is so beloved by legions of non-economists speaks not to his dumbing down of economics in order to attain popularity. Instead, it speaks to his unusual mastery of economics to make it accessible and relevant to ordinary men and women.”
Walter was always his own person, perhaps best reflected in this interview with Nick Gillespie.
Gillespie: Let’s talk a little bit about the broad-based libertarian movement. Do you feel that you are part of a libertarian movement?
Williams: No, I don’t.
Gillespie: So, what are you then?
Williams: I am not a part of a movement. I have never been part of a movement, I just do my own thing.
So, We Should Have Over 6,000 Representatives in Congress
Nov 29th, 2020 by wintercow20
I’ve always believed there should be a much larger congress, with the end of gerrymandering districts as well. I never realized that the proposed first amendment to the constitution actually would have called for a huge number of reps. Sadly it was only approved in the house and not by the senate. Here it is:
Article I. After the first enumeration required by the first article of the constitution, there shall be one representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred representatives, nor less than one representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of representatives shall amount to two hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred representative [sic] [the usual “nor less than one representative” is omitted either by mistake or for brevity’s sake] for every fifty thousand persons.
Desacrilize Woke Fundamentalism
Nov 29th, 2020 by wintercow20
Read the entire thing:
The way forward must therefore involve bolstering an emotionally compelling narrative of freedom which foregrounds the threats emanating from a politics of psychic redistribution. Government has an important role to play here, balancing the teaching of minoritarian narratives of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust with an equivalent appreciation of the illiberal atrocities and cultural totalitarianism committed by perfectionists claiming to speak for the weak, like Stalin and Mao. Revulsion at the thought control portrayed in Orwell’s 1984 needs to become a cultural reflex. This will balance today’s minoritarian liberal sensibility with an equally potent vigilance against the threats that those speaking the language of equality pose to expressive freedom.
Communism is majoritarian, but its central cultural program—ideological control of free speech, internal purging of the impure, authoritarian and arbitrary justice, brainwashing, and propaganda—have been taken over by today’s minoritarian Left. Today’s liberal fear of majority tyranny must be counterbalanced by the horror of leftist thought control in order to undergird a rational liberal order that prioritizes science, logic, and evidence over left-modernism’s feelings-based, minoritarian epistemology. Together with an appeal to national solidarity and the falling intellectual prestige of wokeness, a more balanced liberalism can reappear to restore sanity.
Tags: Wokism
Bend the Knee
Nov 25th, 2020 by wintercow20
AI, Supercomputers and Computational Socialism
Nov 23rd, 2020 by wintercow20
There is a presumption in the planning vs. markets discussion that has gone back at least to the debates with Abba Lerner and Oscar Lange that it was simply a matter of computing power before we would be able to plan an economy. Well, that is a gross simplification, but if you think about the Soviet input-output matrices (still in use even in the US) the fundamental question/challenge seemed to be simply coming up with identifiable functional forms for consumption, investment, etc. and macroeconomic growth, and then it was a matter of churning and burning an optimization algorithm to produce the series of Qs and Ps that “solved” such an economy, the same way a “market” would “solve” it.
Now, for now I do not wish to rehash the zillion arguments regarding this. Right now I want to focus on two fundamental observations. We shall engage them more in the future.
ONE: I do not think for many people the essence of life is in making optimal decisions. And in any case, even if we want optimal decisions, to have an AI help us figure out what to do so that we make the “best” choice every time ultimately takes away everything that makes being human worthwhile – and that is human agency. (SIDEBAR HERE – I find en extremely eerie analogy here peddled by dogmatists of the left and right who demand total purity to their worldview in order to gain acceptance into the tribe, for example, look at the way that the woke/activists condemn Clarence Thomas or even Thomas Sowell as sell-outs of living a lie of false consciousness. Think about the removal of agency, and of course outright racism, that such positions imply).
TWO: Suppose we grant that in fact we DO want to optimize. Does the AI need to understand WHY different agents work, save and invest? Well it is supposed to. The reason I have a coffee mug on me right now is to help keep my window shade stay pulled down. If the AI knew that I wanted my shades pulled down, is it “smart” enough to look around for all of the possible substitutes and pick the best way for me to keep the shades drawn. Does it know why I want my shade drawn right now (so I do not scare the deer out in my yard) as opposed to trying to keep sunlight out during the day? In any case that is beyond my point. My point here is that we consume for all kinds of reasons, often unknowable to us. One of the fantastic things about the world is that lots of our economic behavior is constructive and positive-sum. But on the other hand, many of us are obsessed with games of status competition and other zero- and negative-sum games. If you’re truly passionate about playing games, consider taking it to the next level by trying your hand at betting on DAFABET, where your gaming expertise can potentially translate into an exciting and rewarding
We want to be “the smartest” we want to be the “most popular” we want to get the best mates, we want to be remembered to history, and many people simply want to have power. There is no denying this, even for people like me who claim to not explicitly lust for those things. But think about this, how is the AI/ML entity going to “optimize” in a world where all of our rawest instincts and emotions are dedicated to negative-sum destructive competiti0n? Who will write “the decider” algorithm that makes us settle for second, or third or n-th best in a world when we seek status and power? How will we and the AI not destroy the world. Note that this goes well beyond the standard paper-clip problem that is evening one at the challenges of AI dinner parties.
The Glorious, Ugly, Complicated and Absolutely Worthy of Celebrating Project of 1776
Nov 18th, 2020 by wintercow20
In my house, we celebrate Thanksgiving, we celebrate Martin Luther King Day, we love the Fourth of July. We revere Veterans Day and celebrate May 8. We recognize and respect and learn from all of our mistakes and achievements, and believe that the American IDEA is an idea worth fighting for, worth preserving and protecting.
We’ll give the mic to Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes:
Why Is This Insanity Important? Remember this when you are told that America is fundamentally an awful place, is irredeemably racist and should be burned to the ground.
It is EGREGIOUS behavior. Running with, and putting so much institutional support behind a narrative that had problems. Yes she did assert that because a few of the founding generation feared the British potentiality of interfering with the slave traffic, this motivated them to fight in the revolution, therefore that was the basic driving force behind the entire movement. This is false.
She also claimed that 1619 and not 1776 was a better metaphor for understanding the large scale narrative of the country and then backed away from that, but she just wanted to recenter the narrative of the role that African-Americans played in the American experiment.
Where are We As a Country?
The narrative about the American story, the American project is fundamentally important. Is this a good country? Or is this a country that is founded on genocide and slavery? The impact of Western settlement in the Western Hemisphere on the native population was devastating, there is not any doubt about that. And the commerce in chattel was of a huge scale mostly going to the Caribbean and South America and was monumental in world history and also monumental in the events that led to the American nation-state – there is not any doubt about that.
But the founding of the country – 1776, 1787, the creation of the United States of America, was a world historic event in which the Enlightenment ideals got instantiated in government institutions. And as a matter of fact with the century slavery was gone and you know what, the people who had been African chattel became citizens of the United States of America. Not equal citizens, not at first, it took another century, but they became in the fullness of time equals in the United States of America.
The United States of America fought fascism in Europe and fought fascism in the Pacific and saved the world. American Democracy became a beacon to “the free world” … we stood down under threat of nuclear annihilation the horror which was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We have had the greatest transformation in the social status of a serfdom people-which was what the Emancipation affected in the creation of the African-American that you can find anywhere in world history. 40 million strong! The richest people of African-descent on the planet … BY FAR.
This is a question of narrative. Are you going to look through the lens of the United States as a racist, genocidal, white-supremacist, illegitimate force, or are you going to see it for what it is? In the last 300 years it has been the greatest force for human liberty on the planet. That’s worth fighting about.
That these people at the New York Times lay down to a latter-day woke ideology and debase their country is despicable.
America is not your average country. And there is a reason that it is the number one destination for black and brown migrants in particular across the world. It is not a coincidence. Because there is something about America that is especially open, liberal in the classical sense, and that those values have had good consequences for diverse peoples from all across the world to ascend from third-world poverty to first-world poverty to President of the United States.
When you hear a rags-to-riches story in America, you don’t even bat an eye, you take it for granted because it happens so often.
Of course we need to teach global history. Be honest about our flaws. Balance the history. A lot of people have no idea about the world-wide institution of slavery for thousands of years. It is a uniquely global sin. Humans have been cruel. So do we compare America to the ideal nation in your head according to your 2020 morality. Right now China is lecturing us about systemic racism while committing something bordering on ethnic cleansing with the Uighur Muslims.
What other country … can you picture China or India or Turkey or Russia having a 1619 project? Even reflecting on their own history in any negative way whatsoever? What about Howard Zinn’s People’s History? Can you envision a Chinese version of that?
And that in a sense speaks to our commitment to self-criticism, to freedom of speech, this is a novel idea in the long view of history.
Ultimately it is an ignorance of the rest of the world that leads people to unreflexively be anti-American.