An article on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos which discusses the respectable scientific argument for a purposeful universe without an actual purpose. It’s called “Where Thomas Nagel went Wrong which gives credit to the intelligent design people to have seen the flaws in the Darwinian story without having gone to a religious explanation. But you then end up with people really only choosing whether there is an outside will that determines our existence or it is a not quite foreordained outcome because of the blind nature of the universe unfolding as it must.

Nothing new here if I am anything to go by. I never understand the way people willingly retire, even making the choice themselves. A report by the IEA in London reached these conclusions:

In the past 50 years, labour market participation among older people has declined significantly though the trend has been reversed in
recent years. In the EU, about 70 per cent of people aged between 60 and 64 are inactive….

Whilst people have been retiring earlier on average, they have also been living longer. A 61-year-old man in 1960 had the same probability of dying within a year as a 70-year-old man in 2005.
‡
Healthy life expectancy at age 65 has also increased in the UK, although at a somewhat slower pace than regular life expectancy. This would suggest that people have the capability to work longer, though perhaps not to increase their working life on a one-for-one basis as life expectancy increases. Life expectancy at age 65 increased by 4.2 years for men between 1981 and 2006. During the same period, healthy life expectancy at age 65 increased by 2.9 years for men.
‡
Increases in the number of healthy years of life that we can enjoy is the case: people were working longer half a century ago.

If rising pension ages and labour force participation at older ages caused greater ill health then it would be a matter for concern. Most research on the relationship between health and working in old age has produced ambiguous results. Research in this area is difficult because just as the fact that retirement can influence health, health can influence retirement decisions.

To date, research has not generally examined the relationship between the number of years spent in retirement and health. This issue is important. It is possible that health will initially improve when somebody retires and then, after a while, start to deteriorate due to reduced physical activity and social interaction.
‡
New research presented in this paper indicates that being retired decreases physical, mental and self-assessed health. The adverse effects increase as the number of years spent in retirement increases.
‡
The results vary somewhat depending on the model and research strategy employed. By way of example, the following results were obtained:

– Retirement increases the probability of suffering from clinical depression by about 40 per cent
– Retirement increases the probability of having at least one diagnosed physical condition by about 60 per cent
– Retirement increases the probability of taking a drug for such a condition by about 60 per cent.

‡
Higher state pension ages are not only possible (given longer life expectancy) and desirable (given the fiscal cost of state pensions) but later retirement should, in fact, lead to better average health in retirement. As such the government should remove impediments to later retirement that are to be found in state pension systems.

[Via The American Interest who for reasons of their own seem cynical about the motives for producing the report and therefore somewhat sceptical about the results.]

These are so awful that it’s terrifying. A few of the best known individuals from history dressed up in modern drag. It’s that this is exactly how it would be that makes this so frightening.

Here Gary North goes after not one, not two but three amongst the many whose beliefs I find profoundly wrong. Here we are dealing with Popper, Keynes and that nonentity Nassim N. Taleb, author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. On Popper:

To Popper, the sophomore’s retort is appropriate, despite its sophomoric standing. ‘In what way is Popper’s hypothesis subject to falsification?’ He should have written a lot of pages presenting criteria for how his theory of falsification could be falsified. I guess I missed that article. It surely is not in any of his books that I have read.

I read the main one, The Open Society and Its Enemies, in 1963. In that book, which Hayek helped to get published, is an assumption: The truly free society is a society without permanent truths (other than the truth of falsification, of course). Taleb summarizes the book’s thesis: ‘An open society is one in which no permanent truth is held to exist; this would allow counter-ideas to emerge.’ Again, it’s time for the sophomore’s retort: ‘How about ideas that deny Popper’s theory?’

On Keynes:

Keynes’ final book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), is one of the most garbled, incoherent, and poorly argued books that has ever reached the level of universally acclaimed masterpiece. It remains as unread today as it was in 1936. It justified the growth of state power over the economy — just what the politicians wanted to hear in the Great Depression.

The best evidence that the book is a political tract is its incoherence. Keynes wrote compelling prose throughout his life — just not when he wrote to promote British economic policy. The very incoherence of The General Theory is the tip-off that the author was self-deluded in arguing for nonsense, namely, denying that sellers will lower their prices when they find that nobody will buy at a higher price. Keynes’ arguments rest on this bedrock presupposition: ‘Sellers really do believe that no income is preferable to some income.’ He believed in permanent gluts.

And on Taleb:

Taleb describes himself as a fool. This is the most accurate assessment in his book. He is a fool for the reason that he repeatedly says he is a fool. He is fooled by randomness.

He is fooled by a few statistically unpredictable oddities found in nature, including the human mind, into believing that there is no ethical cause and effect in the universe. He is exactly what he claims to be: a consistent Darwinist. ‘One must be either blind or foolish to reject the theories of Darwinian self-selection’ (p. 94). As such, he hates moralists above all, as he says. Why? Because he hates the idea that morality, not evolution through impersonal natural selection, governs the universe.

The fact that his book is a best-seller indicates just how far gone morally the intelligent public is. Yes, the book is clever. True, it has a useful bibliography. No question about it, it has some great one-liners. But at bottom, it is the work of a suicide bomber. His targets are people who still believe that there is a predictable relationship between honesty and success, between hard work and success, between thrift and riches. In short, it is a hand grenade against people who think that Warren Buffett got rich through decades of entrepreneurial service to consumers, not by statistically improbable luck.

On the plane back from Hawaii, I read Susan Faludi’s “Death of a Revolutionary” about how Shulamith Firestone helped to create a new society, the one we are actually living in. The Dialectics of Sex had a big influence on my life having been of the new left just as it was published. Gory personal details unnecessary here, but if you would like to see gory details, read the article. The personal is the political seems to be almost perfectly replicated in Firestone’s extremely sad life. Listening to Germaine Greer forty years after her glory days makes you appreciate just what a stupid bill of goods these people had for sale. When you remember that it was Richard Nixon who approved equal pay for women you can see how non-radical the sensible part of the feminist agenda was and is.