Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Forcing people to pay other people’s bills

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A comment from Medicare for All at Powerline.

When we reached a point that it became acceptable to force people to help pay the Dr. & hospital bills of others it resulted in a huge loss of freedom for Americans.

The talk about ensuring that we don’t become a socialist country would be funny if it were not tragic because it’s already here. And has been for a long time.

It has become accepted that Americans owe other Americans financial assistance in paying for their medical care. It is one thing to assist with the 2% – 5% of the population with chronic medical conditions and limited financial resources. It is entirely different to subsidize everyone’s medical expenses. And likely those most harmed are the middle range of financial resources. The poor receive more than what they pay and the rich can afford more than what they pay.

A huge opportunity was missed by the GOP in 2017 when they did not Repeal Obamacare completely.

Personality traits academic achievement requires

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In order to calmly debate all ideas, you need to put emotion aside.

Similarly, new ideas, or being contradicted, will likely upset some people. But, in the pursuit of academic debate, you have to ignore this and calmly present both sides. Low in Conscientiousness (“rule-following”) and high in intellectual curiosity are useful personality ingredients. This means being better able to understand that the truth is ever more closely reached by being non-conformist—by questioning the current “truth.”

Academic achievement requires a combination of  high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness. This means being clever enough to solve a difficult problem, but also low in rule-following, while also being able to “think outside the box”. And, being low in Agreeableness, not caring about offending people, which original ideas always do.

An aspect of Agreeableness is empathy—being concerned with the feelings of others and being able to guess what they might be. People who are high in “systematizing” (with systematizing being vital to problem solving) tend to be low in empathy.

Universities, traditionally, have in essence been about giving geniuses a place in which they can attempt to solve their problems, working at their chosen problems for years on end.

Genius breakthroughs are only made, ultimately, by causing offence.

Giving geniuses a place in which they can attempt to solve their problems

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Now here’s a question: Are Women Destroying Academia?. In amongst the text we find this as part of the answer:

In order to calmly debate all ideas, you need to put emotion aside. But females are simply less able to do that than males because they are higher in Neuroticism—feeling negative feelings strongly. Thus, they more easily become overwhelmed by negative feelings, precluding them from logical thought. (Data on personality traits is drawn from Personality, by Daniel Nettle, 2007).

Similarly, new ideas, or being contradicted, will likely upset some people. But, in the pursuit of academic debate, you have to ignore this and calmly present both sides. However, this is more difficult for females, because they are more sympathetic, meaning that “not hurting people’s feelings” can become their highest ideal. Higher in Conscientiousness (“rule-following”) and lower in intellectual curiosity than males, females are also more conformist. This means they are less able to understand that, in academia, the truth is ever more closely reached by being non-conformist—by questioning the current “truth.”

Thus, argues DeGroot, female domination of academia will seriously damage academia as a place where ideas can be seriously debated.

Ed Dutton, in a video entitled “Do Female Reduce Male Per Capita Genius?” takes this critique of feminism even further. He argues that geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness. This means they are clever enough to solve a difficult problem, but being low in rule-following, can also “think outside the box,”. And, being low in Agreeableness, they don’t care about offending people, which original ideas always do.

An aspect of Agreeableness is empathy—being concerned with the feelings of others and being able to guess what they might be. Dutton shows that people who are high in “systematizing” (which males typically are compared to females, with systematizing being vital to problem solving) tend to be low in empathy. Thus, Dutton argues, you don’t get many women geniuses because their IQ range is more bunched towards the mean; and also because they are too high in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.

Universities, traditionally dominated by males, have in essence been about giving geniuses a place in which they can attempt to solve their problems, working at their chosen problems for years on end. But Dutton argues that female academics tend to be the “Head Girl Type” (chief prefect at all-girls schools in the UK) with “normal range” high IQ and high in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness—the exact opposite of a typical genius. Accordingly, once you allow females into academia, they will be promoted over genius males because they come across as better people to work with—more conscientious, easier to be around and more socially skilled. But this will tend to deny geniuses the place of nurture they need.

As females come to dominate, the culture of academia will feminize. High in Conscientiousness, women will create a rule-governed bureaucracy where research occurs through incremental steps and a certain number of publications must be presented every few years, rather than through genius breakthroughs. But geniuses typically work on huge problems for years. So this bureaucracy will make it impossible for them to do this and keep their jobs.

Women will also create a culture of co-operative “research groups,” anathema to the kind of anti-social loners who tend towards genius. And females will, of course, tend to create an atmosphere of emotion and empathy, the enemy of the unemotional, coldly systematic style of the genius—and, traditionally, of academia.

In this atmosphere, “not causing offence” will become much more important. But genius breakthroughs are only made, ultimately, by causing offence.

They are broken, loonies even, complete crackpots

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I thought this was one of the most on-the-money posts I’ve seen at Instapundit: Denying the sky is blue because Orange Man Bad. This was some of it:

italian1

Yes, America is only 243 years old. But by the same token Italy is only 138 years old.

In any case, if you’re rolling your eyes at Trump’s statement – and thinking that the Italian interpreter is too – you’re missing the point, which is that countries like the United States and Italy – and Great Britain and Australia and Germany and Poland and Spain and Slovenia and so on – do indeed share a cultural and political heritage dating back to ancient Rome (and further back in time). It’s called the Western civilisation. You might hate it, but you’re still in it.

This is what got me right in where I found it at Instapundit!!.

OCTOBER 18, 2019

TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Denying the sky is blue because Orange Man Bad. “If Trump – or Obama or Scott Morrison or Hillary Clinton – saying that 2 + 2 = 4 makes you automatically deny the math because your bête noire simply cannot be correct, you might want to take a deep breath or two and reflect on your approach to life. You’re broken. Don’t be that person.”

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Oh they are broken, loonies even. Complete crackpots. What kind of people live in places like Australia and want to get rid of air conditioning? Nutters through and through.

The Australian anti-family court

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The complete post from The Other McCain: Proving @RationalMale Right Again.

In Australia, there has been an uproar since Pauline Hanson of the right-populist One Nation party asserted that false accusations of domestic abuse are a problem in child-custody cases. This is relevant to proposals to reform Australia’s family court system, and Hanson’s remarks have prompted outrage from feminists and the Left generally, where the Women Never Lie Myth is sacrosanct. This mirrors the Left’s position on “rape culture,” where mere accusation is considered tantamount to proof.

The dispute over Australia’s family court system highlights something Rollo Tomassi (@RationalMale on Twitter) has noted: “Child support is the defining feature of our modern family model, since it is the replacement for marriage whether or not a wedding has occurred.”

Own-yay-gee-ah-kah@Tiffany_Ezinwa
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How is feminism to blame for men not wanting to be active parents in their child’s life? Clearly kids in single parent homes are dealing with parental abandonment which is a huge factor in emotional issues. Not sure how that’s a woman’s fault https://twitter.com/RationalMale/status/1027360819049259008 …

Rollo Tomassi@RationalMale

Children from single parent households (overwhelmingly single mothers) account for 80% of rapists motivated by displaced anger.

Congratulations feminism, you’ve literally bred and raised the ‘rape culture’ you claim to fear.

View image on Twitter

Rollo Tomassi@RationalMale

By actively creating a social order that incentivizes the removal of men from the home as the default. Look up the Duluth Model of feminism. We’ve socially engineered a society that shifted from marriage as the norm to child support as the norm.

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Because of the desanctification of marriage in our secular, sexualized, feminist-dominated culture, wedding vows now come with asterisks next to them, pointing to footnotes that in essence declare, “We don’t actually mean all this stuff about ‘death do us part’ and so forth.”

Every couple now goes to the wedding altar under the threatening shadow of potential divorce, and it is generally acknowledged that divorce is a punitive procedure by which aggrieved women are authorized to obtain a sadistic revenge against their ex-husbands. Because accusations of abuse give women greater leverage in divorce proceedings, we should not be surprised that (a) such accusations are often exaggerated or even sometimes fabricated from whole cloth, and (b) anyone who expresses skepticism toward these accusations will be accused of being anti-woman, an enabler of male violence against women.

Rollo’s comment about the Child Support Model of family structure, where it is more or less assumed on the wedding day that the couple will eventually divorce, highlights how radically our society’s basic institutions have been altered. Between the startling rise in illegitimate births and the frequency of divorce, a majority of children in most Western countries will not be raised in a traditional family. This in turn has produced what Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, in her book The Divorce Culture, has called the “Love Family” ideology, a mentality in which the loyalties once demanded by permanent ties of blood or marriage are replaced by an imagined system of kinship based on mere sentiment.

The problem with the celebration of “love” as a basis for social organization is that human emotions can be ephemeral, and that “love” can be so easily exploited by selfish and dishonest people. For years, I have disavowed any accusation that I am a “men’s rights activist” (MRA) because, in the first place, I reject the identity-politics formula of group “rights.” Secondly, however, I recognize that most MRAs bring a particular axe to grind against women. Many MRAs — if not a majority, certainly an influential plurality — are men who have gone through the ordeal of divorce and custody disputes which are no part of my direct experience and, I pray to God, never will be. Yet while I am not an MRA, this doesn’t mean that they have not made important points about male-female relationships, especially in regard to how divorce has become a state-sponsored instrument to punish and humiliate men. And this is such a fundamental and relatively sudden shift in our culture that most older people (I’m 60 now, and certainly qualify as such) have no idea what absolute hell many young men now face in their relationships. Statistics showing a decline in men’s willingness to commit to marriage, accompanied by a significant drop in birth rates, testify to how the institutions of marriage and fatherhood have been made into something like a medieval torture device to inflict punishment on men. No matter how much a woman may profess to “love” a man, he must take into consideration that if his relationship leads to marriage and fatherhood, he will be at risk of personal destruction if her “love” ever fades.

Quite often, it seems, women seeking divorce view child custody as a weapon to wield in an all-out war to destroy their ex-husbands. It is not enough, for such women, to be free to pursue their own lives; instead, they develop an appetite for revenge against the man they once vowed to love until “death do us part.” Those of us who have been fortunate enough to avoid such a hell-on-earth are generally horrified to watch our friends or relatives endure the ordeal of divorce. We don’t enjoy the pressure to choose sides in the kind of interminable warfare that goes on between divorcing couples, but our court system seems to enable (and indeed, to encourage) the scorched-earth tactics so commonly employed in these disputes. Pauline Hanson has provoked controversy in Australia by saying aloud what everybody actually knows, i.e., that some women will invent or exaggerate incidents of abuse in order to “win” court proceedings against their ex-husbands. This threat hovers like a shadow in every divorce involving children: If her ex tries to dispute custody, or if he doesn’t make child-support payments in a timely manner, he may find himself facing accusations of abuse, and such accusations generally amount to a “he-said/she-said” conflict, where the real matter at issue is the credibility of the accuser. Feminists tend to deny that women ever make false accusations, or else contend that false accusations are so rare that we can disregard the possibility that a woman might be lying, and therefore feminists must destroy Pauline Hanson.

It doesn’t have to be like this. There is no objective reason why men and women should view each other as eternal enemies, but unless and until we are willing to take a hard look at how public policy now offers incentives for male-female conflict — especially including divorce — we are doomed to endure the continuing destruction of our society.

 

The radical left is an infectious disease

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I have just been reading Alan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind which I first read when it was published in 1987. It is remarkable for many things, but most incredibly how none of it has aged in the years since it was written. Things are, of course, worse since academics like Bloom have almost completely disappeared, but the cowardice of the academic world seems to have been a constant. This is from the chapter on “The Sixties” an era I know only too well.

To be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. There were not in general strong men [or women], although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were – that they alone manned [guarded] the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned victorious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy.” (Bloom 1987: 318)

We are not there yet, and there is plenty of reason to hope we might still get past the latest green-socialist disease. But there is also plenty of reason to think we may not. There is also no one else to defend our way of life other than us. I have paid attention to the ongoing discussion about the Kurds and how PDT has given them away and etc etc etc, all with further laments about who will ever again be able to trust the US etc etc etc. This from the people who surrendered in the Vietnam War in 1975, giving up on a won position and thereby causing the horrors of Cambodia. These are the kinds of decisions presidents are asked to make and it may be right and it may be wrong, but none of us is likely to know. Should this decision cause anyone to move even a milli-smidgeon towards not supporting Trump in 2020 would demonstrate only how shallow their understanding of current events is and how vast the dangers we face actually are.

So let me come back to Alan Bloom who is writing about the world we are in today, even though he published the book in 1987. Following the passage above, he discusses a conversation he had had with an academic at Cornell who had been party to surrendering to a violent student uprising in 1969.

The “social contract,” he averred, was about to be broken, and we would have returned to “the state of nature,” the war of all against all, the worst evil, so that anything to keep that from happening was justified. He proved therewith that he had never understood what he had been teaching, for the contract theorists all taught that the law must never be broken, that the strength of the law is the only thing that keeps us away from the state of nature, therefore that risks and dangers must be accepted for the sake of the law. Once the law is broken with impunity, each man regains the right to any means he deems proper and necessary in order to defend himself against the new tyrant, the one who can break the law.” (Bloom 1987: 319)

Despite what these self-important know-nothing demonstrators may think, we are not in Nazi Germany, which they understand perfectly well. None of them really believe that the world will come to an end in twelve years or even in their own lifetimes. None of them believe there is a single thing Australia can do to lower carbon emissions when China is building coal-fired power plants at a prodigious rate.

But what they do not understand is that the West, the only place where democratic, free and prosperous institutions have ever taken root, will disappear if these ignorant youths are able to shift public opinion enough to put the lever of power into the hands of the people who lead them on these demos.

This has happened before. There is no reason to think it cannot happen again, or that it cannot happen here.

Piketty returns ignorant as ever

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This is a review of Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology. From The Financial Times in London, demonstrating that the capitalist class has no concerns about the jerks who write articles where the final para reads, “Advocates of inequality will come up with the usual justifications. But now is the redistributionists’ best chance.” What chance that is I have no idea.

The thing is that a billionaire has virtually nothing to distribute. Their billions comes from owning businesses that produce things like iron and steel or caustic soda, not from having a mountain of consumer goods stashed away that they keep to themselves and refuse to share with others. What they do own are the means of production with which the goods and services sought are produced. There is plenty of sharing the wealth that goes on already, especially with many who do nothing themselves to help create that wealth, living quite all right. The writer of this article is a typical modern twit with no idea about anything at all, even though he works for the financial press. The Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world must laugh themselves silly at the pretension idiocies these people write.

Of course, for many the surest way to wealth, often their only way to wealth, is to enter politics on the left. I think there is a need for psychiatric evaluation for the people who vote for socialists, although oddly every psychiatrist I have ever met has been on the left themselves. Here’s the article.

Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital and Ideology, appears in English translation next March. But I got a sneak preview by walking into my local Parisian bookshop and handing over €25 for the French edition. My conclusion: the 1,200-page tome might become even more politically influential than the French economist’s 2013 overview of inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Helped a little by that book, inequality has soared up the left’s agenda, especially in the particularly unequal US and UK. Now Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the most redistributionist US president since Franklin D Roosevelt, while an electable post-Corbyn Labour leader could achieve similar in Britain.

Piketty explains why this could be the moment for a turn to equality, and which policies could make that happen.

His premise is that inequality is a political choice. It’s something societies opt for, not an inevitable result of technology and globalisation. Whereas Marx saw history as class struggle, Piketty sees it as a battle of ideologies.

Every unequal society, he says, creates an ideology to justify inequality. That allows the rich to fall asleep in their town houses while the homeless freeze outside.

In his overambitious history of ­inequality from ancient India to today’s US, Piketty recounts the justifications that recur throughout time: “Rich people deserve their wealth.” “It will trickle down.” “They give it back through philanthropy.” “Property is liberty.” “The poor are undeserving.” “Once you start redistributing wealth, you won’t know where to stop and there’ll be chaos” — a favourite argument after the French Revolution. “Communism failed.” “The money will go to black people” — an argument that, Piketty says, explains why inequality remains highest in countries with historic racial divides such as Brazil, South Africa and the US.

Another common justification, which he doesn’t mention, is “High taxes are punitive” — as if the main issue were the supposed psychology behind redistribution rather than its actual effects.

All these justifications add up to what he calls the “sacralisation of property”. But today, he writes, the “propriétariste and meritocratic narrative” is getting fragile. There’s a growing understanding that so-called meritocracy has been captured by the rich, who get their kids into the top universities, buy political parties and hide their money from taxation.

Moreover, notes Piketty, the wealthy are overwhelmingly male and their lifestyles tend to be particularly environmentally damaging. Donald Trump — a climate-change-denying sexist heir who got elected president without releasing his tax returns — embodies the problem.

In fact, support for redistribution is growing even faster than Piketty acknowledges, especially in the US. Twice as many Americans now feel more distrust than admiration for billionaires, according to a HuffPost/YouGov poll. Millennials are especially suspicious of success.

More American adults under 30 say they believe in “socialism” than “capitalism”, report the pollsters Gallup. This generation owns too little property to sacralise it.

Centre-right parties across the west have taken up populism because their low-tax, small-state story wasn’t selling any more. Rightwing populism speaks to today’s anti-elitist, anti-meritocratic mood.

However, it deliberately refocuses debate from property to what Piketty calls “the frontier” (and others would call borders). That leaves a gap in the political market for redistributionist ideas. We’re now at a juncture much like around 1900, when extreme inequality helped launch social democratic and communist parties.

Piketty lays out a new redistributionist agenda. He calls for “educational justice” — essentially, spending the same amount on each person’s education. He favours giving workers a major say over how their companies are run, as in Germany and Sweden. But his main proposal is for wealth taxes.

Far from abolishing property, he wants to spread it to the bottom half of the population, who even in rich countries have never owned much. To do this, he says, requires redefining private property as “temporary” and limited: you can enjoy it during your lifetime, in moderate quantities.

He proposes wealth taxes of 90 per cent on billionaires. From the proceeds, a country such as France could give each citizen a trust fund worth about €120,000 at age 25. Very high tax rates, he notes, didn’t impede fast growth in the 1950-80 period.

Warren (advised by economists who work with Piketty) is proposing annual taxes of 2 per cent on household fortunes over $50m, and 3 per cent on billionaires. She projects that this would affect 75,000 households, and yield revenues of $2.75tn over 10 years. Polls suggest most Americans like the idea.

Paradoxically, the plutocratic US may be ideal terrain for a wealth tax. Mark Stabile, economist at Insead, points out that, first, rich Americans now have so much wealth that even if Warren captures just a small proportion, it could add up to a lot; second, Americans are taxed on their passports, so moving wealth abroad won’t save them (and Warren would slap hefty exit taxes on anyone giving up citizenship); last, thanks to SwissLeaks and the Panama Papers, we’ve learnt a lot about how the rich hide money.

Advocates of inequality will come up with the usual justifications. But now is the redistributionists’ best chance.

Distributing incomes to match what each of us deserves

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I received a very kind note from someone I had spoken with at the Historians of Economics conference the other day which I had discussed here. She sent me two articles, one from the economist Greg Mankiw, and the other from a philosopher, Peter Bauman. Mankiw was trying to justify the distribution of income in a market economy, and the philosopher, oddly, was almost trying to defend Mankiw. Neither, however, satisfied me, so this is what I wrote back.

Had a quick read of the two articles. Mankiw was such superficial nonsense I could barely stand it. I was pleased that the reply by the philosopher picked out some of what I thought. It was not what I thought you had meant since we were talking about pricing in a market economy, which does have a major ethical dimension since if you try to manage an economy without using the market mechanism you end up like Venezuela. Not understanding that and having such folly turned into national policy has left millions destitute and in the hands of tyrants everywhere.

As for distribution of income, the core issue of an economy is how do you get people to undertake the various jobs that need to be done, such as cleaning blocked sewage pipes. And then if you are looking at questions like how do we make economies grow and how do we get innovation, well there are additional questions that need to be answered.

As a first approximation, which you may not like, as I was reading the articles, it occurred to me that the greatest injustice – far beyond anything related to incomes – is the injustice that the teams each of us follow almost never win the Grand Final. Some people therefore get fantastic pleasure in life while the rest of us have to get by supporting losing teams, often for years and years on end. Seems very unfair to me. You may not think that is much of an analogy, but it is closer than you think. As Bauman was trying to point out, the nature of the world makes it difficult to relate economic contribution to reward.

I see all those folks who read Marx when he was first published for whom nothing could have even possibly been done at the time to make their lives one tenth more prosperous and less difficult than lives turned out to be half a century later, although these were different lives. And lives became even better half a century after that by 1960, and then half a century later we are where we are today, living much better than anyone in the 1860s. And still so many are dissatisfied. Income distribution is a misery index with no practical value since however you slice it, the distribution of income in a market economy is closely related to the production of goods and services. Disturb the first and you disturb the second, and not only is no one better off, but tens of millions become much worse off. Did I mention Venezuela?

The politics of envy has ruined more lives than almost any other human trait, other than the lust for power.

Dealing with the resistance

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Spent the night in hospital because of an infection. I had gone to my GP last Monday with a very red and painful infection on my leg, which he looked at and put me straight onto a course of antibiotics. He said it should clear up in about a week. By Saturday it had become much worse and so I took myself off to the hospital which put me straight onto an anti-biotic drip which will now continue until whatever it is goes away. Looking to next Thursday at the earliest for this to finally be under control.

The twenty-first century will have its share of problems to deal with many of which are already visible. Included in this is the growing resistance of bacteria to anti-bacterial diseases of various kinds. Koch and Pasteur at the end of the nineteenth century put tools into the hands of doctors that allowed them for the first time in the history of the medical profession actually to cure disease and not just set bones and cut out diseased tissue (and let me remind you here of the blessings of anaesthetics).

This was a personal experience of what will be a problem of the highest order if we are not able to maintain our ability to control such diseases into the future. It is literally only a century ago that millions died from the influenza epidemic at the end of World War I.