Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Parental advice and young girls

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This is one of the results of a longitudinal study of young girls in Grades 7-12 who were then re-interviewed at ages 18-26.

It was found that 29% of these students had engaged in a casual sexual relationship, which they defined as ‘only having sex’ with that person instead of dating them. The researchers found that participants who had thoughts of suicide were much more likely to have had casual sex as young adults. They also found that casual sex was linked to mental health dwindling even further. Apparently, each additional casual sexual relationship increased the odds of suicidal thoughts by 18% – well, that’s specific. While thoughts of suicide increased with casual sex, depressive symptoms did not increase.

Adult society no longer protects the young as it once did. Parents no doubt try to dissuade their daughters from certain activities that the culture lures them into. It now appears that there are good reasons for such parental advice but some things you don’t know are a mistake until that one step too far has already been taken.

From Instapundit.

Heidegger and Hannah Arendt

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A movie review of Hannah Arendt, Hannah and Her Admirers which looks at the film’s errors with special emphasis on its philosophical discussions.

To state the obvious: in a film about ideas, about thinking, the quality of the thought—the truth or falsity of the ideas—has to be central. Von Trotta and Katz make as strong a case as can conceivably be made for these ideas, and if the thesis of Eichmann in Jerusalem seems right to you, it is likely that Hannah Arendt will sit well with you, too. Katz told an interviewer that ‘the intellectual goal of the movie for me was that people who perhaps didn’t have a philosophical background [could] read and understand what was meant by this oft-misused catch phrase “the banality of evil.”‘ But Katz has misconstrued the issue. The difficulty is not that Hannah Arendt CliffsNotes are in short supply, but that Arendt’s ideas in Eichmann, and the tone in which she chose to express them, are in fact extremely problematic. As the German historian Hans Mommsen, an admirer of Arendt’s, would put it, dryly but pointedly, in his preface to the German edition of Eichmann in Jerusalem: ‘The severity of her criticism and the unsparing way in which she argued seemed inappropriate given the deeply tragic nature of the subject with which she was dealing.’

How the far left really thinks

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Having been on the left and still having friends and associates on the left gives insights into a way of thinking that is not just foreign to most people on either side of the political divide but is literally incomprehensible. The following was picked up via Glenn Reynolds who, not surprisingly, thinks of it as a parody. But if it is, it is not an exaggeration. It is an exact copy of what people really do believe. And in this case there is every reason to think that this man, a professor at Harvard it seems, thinks exactly what he is says he thinks. You may also conclude when you read this that it’s a parody, but I have heard people say just these kinds of things in conversation. From a website called Diversity Chronicle:

‘If you are a white male, you don’t deserve to live. You are a cancer, you’re a disease, white males have never contributed anything positive to the world! They only murder, exploit and oppress non-whites! At least a white woman can have sex with a black man and make a brown baby but what can a white male do? He’s good for nothing. Slavery, genocides against aboriginal peoples and massive land confiscation, the inquisition, the holocaust, white males are all to blame! You maintain your white male privilege only by oppressing, discriminating against and enslaving others!’ Professor Noel Ignatiev, a tenured professor at Massachusetts College loudly proclaimed to his class last Monday, his final teaching day before retirement.

The good Professor’s sound and reasonable words resonate with every enlightened and progressive mind. They are indisputable and no one can debate them. They should not be controversial in the slightest, yet remarkably a few far-right extremists object to the Prof. Ignatiev’s advice. The Professor however, reported receiving ‘a standing ovation’ from his ‘largely white and middle class students.’

And this is an earlier story from The Washington Times about the same chap in an article titled, Harvard professor argues for ‘abolishing’ white race:

Mr. Ignatiev pledges in the essay that his journal, Race Traitor, intends to ‘keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females, too, until the social construct known as “the white race” is destroyed not “deconstructed” but destroyed.

And as noted at the link, “as we all know”, he writes, “this type of thinking is rampant in liberal academia.” Even this is not altogether an exaggeration. While it is not a majority view it is common enough to be influential. If you really want to understand Obama, these are the ideas you need to understand first. It helps to make coherent a series of policies that are otherwise incomprehensible.

[All this from Weasel Zippers.]

November 22, 1963

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It’s a date that remains edged in black for me always. Oddly, as incompetent as his execution was in many respects, John F. Kennedy, if he had the same views today that he had then, would have been a member of the Republican Party – and a very conservative member at that – because no modern Democrat has views as stridently pro-market and as militantly anti-communist as he did. His only stimulus was to cut taxes, not to increase spending. His brother Robert, the attorney-general in the Kennedy administration, worked for Senator McCarthy in the search for communists in the State Department.

He was shot down by a communist, a defector to the Soviet Union, a militant member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. But he was shot in Dallas, in the South, and so the story remains as told by the usual suspect sources that he was killed by those crazy right wingers. He was killed by a madman on the left, and a thousand conspiracy theories later, it remains firm in my mind that it was Oswald acting alone.

Ronald Reagan said that he hadn’t left the Democrat Party; the party had left him. Who can know what Kennedy would have done had he lived. The world is only partly shaped by the “forces of history”. It is also shaped by its great leaders. I still think of Kennedy as one of the great might-have-beens. It remains a tragedy that he died so young and so early before his promise could be fulfilled. Fifty years ago today.

‘This is going to be outright war,’ he said

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It’s now in The Australian. I have been following this for a while (see here), but matters, it seems, have now escalated:

TORONTO’S city council has voted to strip Mayor Rob Ford of most of his remaining powers, in further sanctions against him following admissions of crack smoking and binge drinking.

The move, which Ford vowed to fight, effectively makes the city’s chief magistrate a figurehead, which Ford vowed to fight. [“Vowed to fight” twice in a sentence; he must really mean it.]

Leading up to the vote, debate on the motion descended into farce as Ford taunted hecklers in the public gallery, calling them ‘punks’, and at one point accidentally bowled over a female councillor as he charged across the chamber.

The civic leaders of Canada’s largest city had already voted last week to curb Ford’s official duties and yesterday went further in order to ‘restore the confidence of the public in the government of Toronto’, according to the deputy mayor.

But Ford, who has apologised for his hell-raising lifestyle and for obscene public outbursts, has vowed to fight both in court and at the ballot box to keep his job.

‘This is going to be outright war,’ he said.

So not how it was, but then nothing is. And as James Delingpole reminds us:

In 2001 he proposed that city councillors should have their $200,000 personal budgets slashed: ‘If we wiped out the perks for council members, we’d save $100 million easy.’ True to form he paid his own expenses out of his salary. He was also one of only four councillors to vote against a hike in property taxes. As Mayor, he has continued in this tradition by slashing the city’s bloated public sector payroll in the teeth of strikes and protests from the unions.

You know what Lincoln said when told that General Grant was drinking whiskey.

Tell me what brand of whiskey that Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.

If you think the issue is that he was smoking crack and talking dirty you have obviously not been following politics over the last few years.

MY OWN VIEW: I probably should make it clear that my own view is that he is done for and must go as mayor. There are some lines that cannot be crossed and that is one. It is true that he was monitored perhaps smoking crack a year ago but the photographic evidence was ambiguous. Now that he has admitted it, however, he cannot stay in public life. Had he been on the other side, no one would ever have known, but he’s not on the other side so everyone now does know. These are the rules, and while they ought to be the same rules for both sides, that’s not how it is. But it is still remarkable to me that someone like him can become mayor of Toronto. It’s a very different place from how it was. Think of him as mayor of Melbourne, the Canadian version of Sir Les Patterson.

It’s simulations all the way down

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I find everything about this story tantalising. Tests could reveal whether we are part of a giant computer simulation — but the real question is if we want to know…. Basically, if we could do it ourselves, what’s to say others haven’t done it to us?

Making an imperfect copy of the universe that’s just good enough to fool its inhabitants would take far less computational power. In such a makeshift cosmos, the fine details of the microscopic world and the farthest stars might only be filled in by the programmers on the rare occasions that people study them with scientific equipment. As soon as no one was looking, they’d simply vanish.

In theory, we’d never detect these disappearing features, however, because each time the simulators noticed we were observing them again, they’d sketch them back in.

That realization makes creating virtual universes eerily possible, even for us. Today’s supercomputers already crudely model the early universe, simulating how infant galaxies grew and changed. Given the rapid technological advances we’ve witnessed over past decades — your cell phone has more processing power than NASA’s computers had during the moon landings — it’s not a huge leap to imagine that such simulations will eventually encompass intelligent life.

The economics equivalent of Godwin’s Law

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This is a correspondence that began on the Societies for the History of Economics (SHOE) website that originally dealt with wages and productivity. But as the thread developed, the issues drifted over towards Keynesian economics, and not I emphasise because of anything I had contributed. So on November 15, there was the following contribution which began with a quote from something that had been written by James Ahiakpor:

It was with much amusement that I read Michael Ambrosi’s comments. Amusement because I remain puzzled as to why some historians of economic thought can’t seem to shed their Keynesian beliefs in the face of analysis clearly contradicting them … I’m getting to the point of accepting that some people just can’t be helped with arguments or clarifications. It’s just a waste of time. Would that I did not encounter them in the academic refereeing process …

Following which the following question was asked:

There are ex-Marxists and ex-Keynesians: where are the ex-Austrians?

So on the very same day, I wrote the following response:

Rob asks an interesting question which I think is worth a thread of its own:

‘There are ex-Marxists and ex-Keynesians: where are the ex-Austrians?’

Austrian economics was one strand of pre-Keynesian classical economic theory but an important strand today since it is the only strand that survived the Keynesian Revolution. I don’t classify myself as an Austrian but as a classical economist which gives me an overlap of around 75% with the Austrian School and about 10% with modern neoclassical macro. And there is almost nothing in Mises and Hayek I ever find myself in serious disagreement with.

There are, no doubt, ex-Austrians but I suspect none of them end up in any of the modern strands of economic theory. I often mention Mill but a more modern and accessible version of the classical school can be found in almost any text pre-1930. My favourite for a variety of reasons is Henry Clay’s 1916 Economics: an Introduction for the General Reader but there are many to choose from. Haberler’s Prosperity and Depression published in 1937 moves you closer to the depth and breadth of the classical theory of the cycle.

I have for many years found Keynesian demand side analysis utterly wrong but where was the evidence? Now we have had a radical experiment in economic policy across the world and if it is not obvious beyond argument that a Keynesian stimulus will not work then I don’t know what conceivable evidence there could ever be that would convince anyone just how poorly structured the underlying Keynesian theory is. Y=C+I+G in my view and the view of many others provides no insights into either the causes of recession nor what to do when they happen.

There are therefore no ‘ex-Austrians’ in the same sense as ex-Marxists or ex-Keynesians because the world continues to behave more or less as we classical/Austrian economists expect it to. Classical theory does explain and it does provide policy answers which we are seeing put in place under the name of austerity as an attempt to restore balance after the Keynesian excesses of the past five and more years. Those who are taking this road are guided by intuition without textbook answers but are doing pretty well what a classical economist would have recommended. That is, they are doing exactly what the UK, Australia and others did to take our economies out of the Great Depression.

A series of responses followed this, some reply to Rob and others to me. But the largest complaint about what I had written was not about Keynesian theory but whether I had gone to far in stating that the failures of the Keynesian stimulus had been “obvious”. That the stimulus has made things worse in every economy it has been tried seems so self evident that I still don’t know how the obviousness of the mess the stimulus has caused can be question. Nevertheless, this is what I wrote in reply on 16 November:

I should not have said ‘if it is not obvious beyond argument that a Keynesian stimulus will not work etc etc’ since it is not obvious. But even here in Australia, where for a variety of reasons we probably experienced the least damaging downturn following the GFC, the general assessment is that the stimulus has left us with massive problems that will require a repair job going over many years. No one goes around talking about how well the stimulus turned out and even as unemployment has now returned to its post-GFC high and still heading north, our new government is attempting to cut spending and bring the budget into balance just as the previous government attempted to do. And on this we are not alone.

So it is not obvious what went wrong, merely a conundrum: this is what it says in the textbooks and this is what we feel we need to do. Why are they different?

Every economist seems to be in some ways eclectic. They put their own worldviews together built around one of the existing frameworks that for individual reasons appeal to themselves. And over time they shift and change as they learn more and observe. But with macro just about everyone starts from AS-AD which has now become a major dividing line. Keynesians versus Austrians is the way it is often portrayed but this is a short form which leaves out much of what is relevant.

But however you would like to describe the nature of this divide, we as economists should in my view be having some kind of in-house review on the relevance of AS-AD to the formation of policy. It’s true that AS-AD is a very seductive concept, not obviously wrong. But still, starting from casual empiricism and then working through the econometric work of Alesina, say, but also others, and with theoretical considerations also then brought into this discussion, alternatives to AS-AD might eventually emerge in our textbooks. In the meantime, ever fewer policy makers are willing go near AS-AD to work out what ought to be done in the real world. That much anyway is obvious. Given that our economic texts ought to be a guide to economic policy, all this should be seen as something of concern to the profession.

The only reply since then has been to say this:

If I may offer just one more quote from some people who care about the evidence. Jordà, Òscar and Alan M. Taylor, 2013:

The Time for Austerity: Estimating the Average Treatment Effect of Fiscal Policy

[W]e have a measure of the multiplier that explicitly accounts for failures of identification due to observable controls. Our estimates … suggest even larger impacts than the IMF study when the state of the economy worsens. … It appears that Keynes was right after all.

As Steve now allows, it is *not* obvious that the fiscal responses to the Great Recession invalidate Keynesian claims about the role of aggregate demand. Not in the least.

To prove using a Keynesian model that Keynesian theory delivers the goods in the face of the massive disasters that ought to be the unarguable evidence that the US economy is sinking, only proves there are some people who cannot see because they will not see.

There really needs to be an equivalent to Godwin’s Law in economic discussion. Whoever is the first to bring empirical results into an argument about economic theory automatically loses.

Girls and boys going out to play

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A fascinating article by Stacey McCain on the moralities of our age. This is how the article ends, edited to limit outraged sensibilities, mostly my own. But a very interesting and sober read from start to finish. This is the finish:

If we are heading toward ‘a culture of complete anarchy,’ why? Because we have rejected ‘a God who makes law,’ so that the law is whatever we want it to be, including a law that compels insurance companies to let you stay on your parents’ policy until you’re 26, including a law that compels pro-life Christians to pay taxes used to fund abortion and contraception for irresponsible women who don’t want to pay for the consequences of their degenerate lifestyle. . . .

The ‘narcissism and entitlement’ celebrated in Lena Dunham’s Girls — is defended by feminists for the same reason ProgressNow Colorado promotes ‘independence . . . based on sexual promiscuity.’ Democrats know who votes for them and why, and they know that “a culture of complete anarchy,” without morality or religion, will yield more votes for Democrats.

Of course, this culture will also destroy America as we know it, but destroying America as we know it is what Democrats are all about.

The Amy Otto article on “millennial” voters adds more to the story which is where Stacey McCain began from. This is what he quotes:

Since the central conceit of feminism (that one is owed a man’s attention) cannot be questioned — yet results in women being quite incapable of sustaining a relationship — we must pretend that obtaining said relationship is no longer important. We wouldn’t want to dispute the tenets of feminism:

He should love you and put up with any behavior you throw at him. Its “quirky” and not deranged that you question him about everything he feels at every moment.

You don’t have to be particularly accomplished or worthy of his time. Being a woman is enough. You go, girl!

You are as beautiful as a supermodel no matter who you are — and men who dare to seek out a woman of similar or slightly higher attractiveness are craven idiots. You deserve a man as handsome as you would like him to be.

If it’s something that females experience, everyone else should pay for it too.

Corporations purposely pursue “sexist” strategies to exclude 50% of the market. Society is so inherently sexist that profit comes after the deliberate exclusion of women.

I have no idea if the mentality described is accurate, but if this is even a close approximation it sounds like a wilderness to me.

This isn’t satire – it’s a real ad!

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obamacare ad 131108

I’ve seen it a few times but am finally coming round to see that the ad is not satire but is supposed to help market the Affordable Care Act (a name that is also not supposed to be satirical). Since it part of a series, and this article points out that the ad assumes that the age group this is supposed to appeal to ought to be insulted by being portrayed as such imbeciles, then maybe they really are just as clueless as the people who made these ads think they are.