Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Experimental economics – a case study

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I’ve often thought about an experiment by asking students if they feel that incomes should be shared, and then asking after that whether the students with the highest marks would like to give some of their marks to students with the lowest marks. Not really practical, never mind the problems with an ethics committee. But this, on the other hand, did the same thing in a much more effective way.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an ‘A’”… (substituting grades for dollars — something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a ‘B’. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little. The second test average was a ‘D’!

No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the new average was an ‘F’.

As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

These are possibly the 5 best sentences you’ll ever read and all applicable to this experiment:

1. You cannot legislate the poor into Prosperity by legislating the Wealthy out of prosperity.

2. What one person receives without working for, anotherperson must work for without receiving.

3. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.

4. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it!

5. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

Whether it is a true story I cannot say, but no one would doubt that things would work out more or less just like it says.

[My thanks to Peter S. for passing this along.]

The latest news from 1984

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hitler store

Is this photo not news of some kind? Where in the world would one name a store after Adolf Hitler and expect to do a land office trade, that is, where else but in Gaza? And the clothing merchandise is advertised with a knife in hand to go along with the latest attacks on Jews in Israel. At least it shows up on the net, but in the news, not a chance. We are used to it but is there any particular reason that this doesn’t hold some kind of general interest?

But the bit of news that I was hoping to catch up on are the latest developments in relation to the Russian airliner that may have been blown up by ISIS. Not a word on Drudge, as there was earlier today, and not a word about it in Friday’s Oz, at least not obviously evident online. It was mentioned by Andrew Bolt which comes with a link to an earlier story from CNN, Russian plane crash: U.S. intel suggests ISIS bomb brought down jet. But now there’s nothing. Isn’t this a story worth following up? We do live in a 1984-world and there really is a memory hole.

But there is this small story at Drudge which might interest a small few, although probably not really.

‘ISLAMIFIED’ EUROPE ROAD TO RUIN…
3 MILLION MORE REFUGEES ON THE WAY… [by the end of 2016]

Now back to Game of Thrones.

It’s different when it’s someone else’s mother

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It’s not merely hypocritical, which would be bad enough. It is the essence of the socialist mindset, where you are happy to arrange matters one way for the masses and another way for yourself. This is about Peter Singer, the ethicist as he is called, when he had to deal with his own mother and not some anonymous person known only to their own children and not to him:

When Singer’s mother became too ill to live alone, Singer and his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after her. Singer’s mother has lost her ability to reason, to be a person, as he defines the term. So I asked him how a man who has written that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for private care for his mother. He replied that it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money. That is true. But it does provide employment for a number of people who find something worthwhile in what they’re doing.”

…Singer has responded to his mother’s illness in the way most caring people would. The irony is that his humane actions clash so profoundly with the chords of his utilitarian ethic.

That doesn’t surprise Bernard Williams. “You can’t make these calculations and comparisons in real life. It’s bluff.” Williams told me, “One of the reasons his approach is so popular is that it reduces all moral puzzlement to a formula. You remove puzzlement and doubt and conflict of values, and it’s in the scientific spirit. People seem to think it will all add up, but it never does, because humans never do.”

Singer may be learning that. We were sitting in his living room one day, and the trolley traffic was noisy on the street outside his window. Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”

These people are disgusting and depraved. They can reason but they have no understanding of the human side of issues. His own action are inexplicable even to himself. We should never take advice from such people, which is easier said than done. How do we stop them from making the rules for the rest of us?

Fit young men not fleeing danger

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Ron Liddle trying to reason with people on the left, that is, trying to reason with people whose heads are filled with cement. They are literally only able to emote about the poor suffering humanity, even if they are neither poor, suffering or, given the infiltration by ISIS, humane. Here are the key facts:

A largely Muslim charity recently reviewed the work its people had been doing to relieve the misery and squalor on the Sangatte refugee camp in Calais. A worker with the Human Relief Foundation visited the notorious ‘Jungle’ encampment and concluded, with some alarm, that 97 per cent were economic migrants rather than refugees. Further, they were almost exclusively fit young men who were not fleeing danger at all and were not in the least desperate.

An executive added: ‘I thought they had a valid reason [to be there]. They do not have a valid reason.’ The charity immediately curtailed its relief efforts. But present these facts to those who simply scream ‘Let them in!’ and ‘We must do more!’ and it makes not the slightest difference to their point of view; it washes over them without leaving so much as a trace.

And here is Liddle trying to reason with historian Simon Schama:

What I realised after that edition of Question Time is that the facts, the practicalities, the realities of the situation, do not matter one jot. There is a small minority of British opinion — the polls suggest that the overwhelming majority of the population, suburban scum that they are, do not wish to see more migrants entering the country — which is absolutely impervious to the facts which show that letting more people in the country will make things worse both for them and for us. And clearly anyone who doesn’t agree is unaware that the migrants are ‘human beings’ and is thus a borderline psychopath, as well as being suburban. And yet ask them for a course of action and none is forthcoming.

How do we crowds at the bottom of the pile make our elected representatives pay attention to our wishes? It cannot be done and we will endure the arrival of masses from the third world who do not speak our languages nor understand our culture.

And this comment at Tim Blair really does capture just how much danger there is where they are departing from:

Two women made less sense than Simon Schama – the first who argued that it was perfectly sensible for the young men to be the first wave, not realising her argument suggested it was safe for women and children to stay where they were and that the young men are clearly the beachhead for a much larger wave to follow.

The second loon justified England opening its borders as if it wasn’t for migration out of Africa 60,000 years ago “we wouldn’t be here”. That is all the reason she needs to open her arms to illegal economic migrants from goodness knows where. Odd really but it does sum up the leftist mindset.

The women in danger are where they are coming to, not where they are coming from.

[Via Tim Blair]

Europe’s “catastrophic error”

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The headline writer chose this, Europe must follow our lead on turnbacks: Tony Abbott but the first sentence says what he was really trying to say:

Europe is heading towards a “catastrophic error” that could change it forever and must instead study and adopt Australia’s policy to turn back the tide of asylum-seekers, Tony Abbott said today.

Delivering the second ­Thatcher Lecture at London’s Guildhall, the former prime minister also called for more to be done to strike Islamic State terrorism “at its source” and said it was a pity a recent summit by world leaders looked only at countering violent extremism and not the ­inspiration for it.

In his first significant speech since he was toppled by Malcolm Turnbull six weeks ago, Mr Abbott said his invitation to give the lecture “suggests there was at least a hint of Thatcherism about my government in Australia”.

For some, a hint of Thatcherism is the kiss of death. For others, who have some idea of the stakes involved, there cannot be enough of Mrs Thatcher and what she stood for. What he and she understood is the difference between right and wrong. Now it is the difference between good and evil, and even so the left is blind to it all. And here’s the advice:

Europe should study how Australia had stopped the boats and restored border security as “the only compassionate thing to do”.

“This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go,” he said.

“It requires some force; it will ­require massive logistics and ­expense; it will gnaw at our consciences — yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever.

“The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in.”

In the meantime, it can only be hoped that Malcolm gets the message before we end up in the same boat as Europe. Abbott is world class, one of the deepest thinkers ever to rise to high office in this country. It’s only a shame that what he saw and understood was too difficult, not just for the media and the left in general, which is to be expected, but for the people who he had to deal with in cabinet and in his own party room.

AND CONTINUING: This has been cross-posted at Catallaxy and the comments thread is quite interesting. Hard for me to imagine people who would disagree with Abbott on these issues but, I guess, with much of the right self-identified as “libertarian”, and therefore open-borders, perhaps it’s not that surprising after all. I have added two comments of my own. First this:

Abbott was all Thatcher but where was his Keith Joseph? And Margaret didn’t have to put up with a creep like Turnbull who relentlessly stalked his own PM to the extent that nothing debated in cabinet was not the next day being aired on the news. But Margaret was famous for her foreign policy even more than the economics. She with Ronald Reagan and the Pope stared down the Evil Empire, not to mention Argentina and the Falklands. I only wish we had a Margaret Thatcher somewhere in one of the major countries of the West. Instead we have Obama, Merkel and Malcolm. There is some potential in Cameron but he, too, is no Margaret Thatcher.

And then this:

Dealing with migration and the Islamic State is the issue of our time in the same way that dealing with the Soviet Union was the issue of her time. Who besides Tony gets it? As for economics, this is from her first budget in 1979:
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The 8 and 12.5 per cent VAT rates were unified at 15 per cent, putting around 3.75 per cent on the RPI. There was also a 7p increase in petrol duty, adding 10p to a gallon when VAT was added in. (For RPI reasons, alcohol and tobacco duties were left untouched.) The oil companies were tapped: Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT) was increased from 45 to 60p and BNOC lost its exemption from the tax.

Let us compare with Joe defending his first budget in 2013:
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An emotional Mr Hockey described his first budget, which included the now-dumped GP co-payment, plans to uncap university fees and increased fuel and income taxes, as too courageous for the Parliament.

We will see as time goes by who will be as courageous as Joe and Tony were then. I suspect there is no one around who will take these issues on, least of all the current incumbent, who was probably leaking as furiously as he could to all his mates at the ABC.

This Abbott Derangement Syndrome truly is a form of insanity. People who think politics is no more difficult than agreeing with your friends while sitting around your dining room ought to get out once in a while. Abbott had a right to expect some slack from those who understand what the other side represents but political sophistication is as rare as a modern economist’s understanding of the operation of a market economy.

The problem of under-regulation

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I’m at a Writing Retreat where I hope to finish off my “Classical Criticisms of Keynesian Theory”. And as it happened, this piece of writing by Tom Butler-Bowden arrived just last night. If you don’t know Butler-Bowden and his 50 Classics Series you really should. He started with self-help books, moved onto philosophy and politics in his last two and next will be Economics and Wealth Creation. He analyses and explains in about half a dozen pages the central message of each of these books, and I have to say that his ability is uncanny. On all the authors I know I have never had a quibble about his insight and balance so I feel I can trust him on the others. This is on what it takes to move from an idea to actually finishing a project. I won’t give away anything by telling you that what it requires is concentrated WORK.

The epiphany problem

My initial motivation to write was a desire to understand what made people successful. The earlier books in particular, covering self-help, success and psychology, were the public result of a private investigation into possible ‘secrets’ which, if followed, would virtually guarantee that one’s wishes would become reality. From this project came two things:

1) A distrust of inspiration.
2) An appreciation of time in achievement.

Being inspired is the starting point of anything great, and the moment of inspiration itself is highly pleasurable. But such intellectual highs don’t help us get things done. This ‘epiphany problem’ is becoming better appreciated now, and I enjoyed a recent blog by Peter Shallard on the subject.

Peter mentions Allan Wheelis, a psychoanalyst who noted that there was a point in the 20th century when Freudian therapy no longer seemed to work. The therapy had not changed, so why exactly did it stop working? Wheelis argued that what had changed was people’s capacity for self-control. Freud’s early patients had come of age in the late Victorian era, a time when people were arguably more self-reliant and disciplined, and if Freud told them to make some change, they jolly well did so. But as the 20th century progressed, the capacity for self-regulation and self-discipline waned, just as our exposure to ‘inspiration’ increased. The result: more epiphanies, and less ability to turn them into measurable change.

BaumeisterWillpower

Shallard refers to Roy Baumeister, the social psychologist and author of Willpower (2012), who describes self-regulation failure as “the major social pathology of our time.” In less intellectual terms, and speaking to his entrepreneur audience, Shallard writes:

“If you’re someone who feels like you’re going crazy experiencing breakthrough after breakthrough, but you’re STILL not getting the results in life and business that you know you’re capable of… well, you might have a Self-Regulation problem. More epiphanies won’t help you. Building your self control muscles will.”

Most days I work in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. People are working on lengthy dissertations on Virgil’s poetry, or researching Descartes’ mind-body problem, or getting to the nub of Augustine’s City of God. There is good Wi-Fi in the building, but I’m always struck how little time people seem to spend checking Facebook, or catching up with the news, or shopping on Amazon. When they have decided they are going to work on something, they do it. This ability to self-regulate, I would venture, has played an important part in getting them to a top university and increasing their chances in life. You may be very talented or smart, you may have perfect material conditions to pursue a goal, but none of this counts if you are not able to control your behavior and work habits to an extent that you can get things done.

By the way, I am not claiming to be great at self-control myself; there are so many things that take our attention these days and I can easily waste a morning on trifles! But at least I know that epiphanies don’t last, and that ultimately what gets achieved is thanks to work. The world is full of good ideas, what is rarer is good execution.

My Dad, bless him – it would have been his 98th birthday today – used to tell me the same thing by quoting Thomas Edison: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”. It’s the same with all ideas that turn into profitable enterprise. It’s not the idea of itself but the commercialisation that makes it happen. Ideas are dime a dozen, but the ability to turn ideas into products that can be profitably produced is something else again.

Global warming – that is, its absence – properly displayed

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temperatures in fahrenheit

The diagram is from Steve Hayward at Powerline which he includes in a post he titles, The Only Global Warming Chart You Need From Now On. A tad over-optimistic about the AGW crowd actually paying attention to facts and data, but it really is quite an interesting perspective. He writes:

What if you display the same data with the axis starting not just from zero, but from the lower bound of the actual experienced temperature range of the earth? I had never thought of this until an acquaintance sent it along today.

A little hard to get worked up about this, isn’t it? In fact you can barely spot the warming. No wonder you need a college education to believe in the alarmist version of climate change. No wonder the data (click here for original NASA data if you want to replicate it yourself) is never displayed this way in any of the official climate reports.

If this chart were published on the front page of newspapers the climate change crusaders would be out of business instantly.

Alas, it is the people who decide what goes onto the front pages who are most enthralled by climate change. They won’t report anything that fosters a more judicious consideration of the facts because not only do they not believe any of this on principle, they are also unwilling even to discuss any of it in an open forum with those who actually could take them on – Ian Plimer say. For myself, I would prefer that there really were facts to go with the scare than that we should live at such a time when something as obviously untrue as this is so widely believed, and especially by those who are supposedly well educated and are, in theory, trained to take a more sceptical look at issues such as this.