Monthly Archives: April 2016

You can be whatever you want to be

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The heading is Dictatorship Of The Dimwits but it’s much much worse than that. Before you watch the video, find out first what you will witness.

This is an extraordinary short video making the rounds. A 5’9″ white guy goes onto the University of Washington campus and asks students to explain why he isn’t a 6’5″ Chinese female child in first grade. They can’t do it. They are so afraid of being judgmental, and offending against the sacred dogma of Self-Definition that they are unable to deny anything he claims about himself. (Not strictly true: one woman of the bunch politely doubts that he is 6’5″.) You have to watch this:

Since they all know he is not a 6’5″ first grade Chinese female student what does it mean that they will not say so?

The very model of a modern econ-illiterate

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Joe Stiglitz, that is. Here the article is on What’s Wrong With Negative Rates? But first, this admission.

I wrote at the beginning of January that economic conditions this year were set to be as weak as in 2015, which was the worst year since the global financial crisis erupted in 2008. And, as has happened repeatedly over the last decade, a few months into the year, others’ more optimistic forecasts are being revised downward.

So even he can see that our economies are going nowhere. But why is that, you may ask?

The underlying problem – which has plagued the global economy since the crisis, but has worsened slightly – is lack of global aggregate demand.

I’m afraid that is a capital-F Fail. Wrong, wrong, wrong!!! These Keynesians don’t get it, since it never seems to dawn on them that aggregate demand can only rise if there has first been an increase in value adding aggregate supply. It’s the value adding bit in particular they don’t get, whose absence in their analyses renders everything they say about the economy completely wrong and nauseating. The are creating the poverty they say they wish to end. Hopelessly wrong on every aspect of how an economy works.

But as it happens, the article is about interest rates in particular. And as I have tried to explain time and again, as every classical economist understood, keeping interest rates unnaturally low will SLOWS THE ECONOMY AND DOES NOT SPEED IT UP. This, too, he doesn’t know, so he cannot make sense of what he sees right before his eyes. And this is what he sees right before his eyes:

In many economies – including Europe and the United States – real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates have been negative, sometimes as much as -2%. And yet, as real interest rates have fallen, business investment has stagnated. According to the OECD, the percentage of GDP invested in a category that is mostly plant and equipment has fallen in both Europe and the US in recent years. (In the US, it fell from 8.4% in 2000 to 6.8% in 2014; in the EU, it fell from 7.5% to 5.7% over the same period.) Other data provide a similar picture.

He never said don’t do it before, but now that it hasn’t worked, here it comes. He has only an ad hoc explanation for why low rates haven’t worked, but it is such nonsense that it is painful to read. You know, I do despair at such stuff. If you want to understand these things more clearly, you should go to my text, now in its second edition. If nothing else, you can at least find out what Joe doesn’t understand, why expenditures must be value adding and interest rates need to rise.

The tribalisation of the West

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From Victor Davis Hanson, Sleeping Dogs Are Waking, the sleeping dogs of ethic and racial division.

The Obama era has reawakened ethnic chauvinism and multiculturalism in a way we have never quite seen before in recent American history. Who would have thought that in 2009, the racist firebrand, tax-delinquent, anti-Semite, former FBI informant, and conspiracist Al Sharpton would become the chief presidential advisor on race, or that the attorney general would refer to blacks as “my people” and the rest of the country as “cowards,” or that the president would urge Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or that something chauvinistic called “Black Lives Matter” would consider a corollary ecumenical “All Lives Matter” as racist, or that “white privilege” would be a slur hurled against the largely working white classes by mostly minority and white elites in academia, politics, journalism and the arts?

Coupled with years of open borders, a failure to enforce immigration laws, hostility to integration and assimilation, and racial preferences in hiring and admissions, the Obama administration in just over seven years has nearly achieved its aims of racializing the American experience to such a degree that everyone must now belong to his particular tribe first, and begrudgingly remain an American a distant second.

Obama may be the worst president ever, but only those of us with enough historical memory can even tell. Soon all that will be gone, and the whiners who write the history will think their new civilisation of ethnic identity and tension is a higher achievement than what will by then have completely gone. His final words are “far, far worse is on the horizon” and on this score he is almost certainly right.

The Great Dictator returns

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Charlie Chaplin’s grand-daughter is alive and attacking Merkel. This is The Great Dictator brought back to life:

Jan Böhmermann faces up to five years in prison for insulting a foreign head of state, after Mrs Merkel gave permission for him to be prosecuted under Germany’s controversial lese-majeste law.

Before I say anything, I better check whether it would be legal to say something uncomplementary about the German head of state. This is not, however, a laughing matter, but our reality right now.

Modern education

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Somehow these two stories belong together. First this: University students are struggling to read entire books. And then this, Professional Educator: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy:

While the traits listed [being rigorous and punctual, speaking grammatical English] may simply be regarded as positive traits for success in the modern world, Dr Heather Hackman described them as traits chosen and emphasised to favour whites to the detriment of non-white groups, who are forced to assimilate ‘white’ traits such as good discipline and goal orientation or else be left behind. Hackman’s solution, then, is to train teachers to move away from all these aspects of ‘white privilege’ in education. She routinely touted the benefits of collective assessments (measuring student learning at the class level instead of determining whether each student knows the material), as well as eliminating all school grades entirely.

There is more craziness in the world than you can ever believe and it is getting worse and not better.

The media and political lying

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We all know this, but what is anyone going to do about it? What can anyone do about it?

Poll: Vast majority of Americans don’t trust the news media

We all lie, scientists say, but politicians even more so

The cynicism of the media-favoured side of the political class knows no bounds because they know there is nothing you can do and no matter what you know and believe, they have the power and you don’t.

Mantoux and his criticisms of Keynes

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The issue of Keynes’s complicity on the road leading to World War II has been raised in another post. So I have now added my own contribution.

At this stage, there is no point discussing the rights and wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles. But there is no doubt that Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace was one of those Al Gore-type treatises of incontrovertible truth that brought out into the open a particular variety of criticism. The book was, as you would expect, a non-starter in France but a runaway best seller in Germany. It helped solidify grievances inside Germany that did help foster World War II but how far you can go is impossible to say, although I would say it was close to none at all. On how much Keynes mattered, the book that has had lasting significance was an attack on Keynes by the French economist, Etienne Mantoux, in his Carthaginian Peace: the Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes, which you can download here. Mantoux had also published a trenchant attack on The General Theory right after its publication, whose English translation can be found in Henry Hazlitt’s The Critics of Keynesian Economics.

What is indisputable is that The Carthaginian Peace made Keynes an international superstar so that by the time he published The General Theory in 1936 he was far and away the most famous economist in the world. Without the first book, the second book would likely have been a nine-day wonder, about as influential as any of the other Depression-era texts written at the time.”>a post that has brought my name into the issue.

Who has to read when you already know everything?

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A fascinating story with the title, University students are struggling to read entire books. Books are so slow motion, and require such concentration, why should anyone be surprised? But there were two bits at the end that addd to the pleasure of the story. First, there was this from someone who was described as “chair of Universities UK’s mental well-being working group”:

“I think most students do thoroughly enjoy the challenge of reading,” said Ms Francis. “I remember having to read Derrida and thinking I’d lost the plot – but these materials are supposed to be engaging and difficult.”

Yes, lost the plot, but more to the point how distorted a worldview must ultimately arrive if you finally think you have unscrambled Derrida. In fact, it leads very nicely into the very last quote in the article:

Lizzy Kelly, a history student at Sheffield added: “Students might be more inclined to read what academics want them to if our curricula weren’t overwhelmingly white, male and indicative of a society and structures we fundamentally disagree with because they don’t work for us.”

Our future leaders. She already knows at 19 what is best. A history student, yet, with no sense of history. Why she even needs to go to a university is beyond me.

A case study in media deceit

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For the history of this bizarre attempt at a set up, you can go here. If you would like a longer, more extended version of these events, Stefan Molyneux is the one for you.

But really, this is the central issue: you cannot trust the media to tell you the truth. The story that would have been the final nailed down version would have been Fields’ version of having been thrown to the ground by some thuggish Trump employee. It is only because the evidence has been so overwhelming showing she is a complete liar that his critics – and they were both Democrat and Republican – have reluctantly had to back down. Open and shut in this case. In the others, you are with certainty being manipulated and your views shaped by a media with a very left-of-centre perspective who are personally opposed to everything Donald Trump stands for: a strong America, with closed borders who will defend the interests of the West against all comers. He may not have the nuance of running for office exactly down pat, but he would be a formidable president in the sense that he could and would get things done.