The wages of ignorance

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I have been following this business about wages with no little amazement. Here is the story that sums it up but it was in all the papers today:

A demoralised government put in a dismal performance in parliament today. In Question Time and the debate that followed, Malcolm Turnbull was constantly on the defensive on an issue that is a gift for Bill Shorten — pay cuts for workers.

There was a time when I was Chief Economist for the Chamber of Commerce that a decision like this would have been recognised by a Coalition Government as a reprieve for the economy and very good news for workers. Naturally, the Labor side would have talked about workers losing pay etc, but the government would have stood there with small business and the unemployed, reminding everyone that economic growth and higher wages can only come from a stronger economy. So let’s look at some more of this story and then come back to the issues again.

The government looks frozen in the headlights as this dire political threat approaches. Unions are mobilising with a potent message to ordinary workers — whether there are 700,000 or 285,000 hurt by the cuts.

This was a shared humiliation for the Coalition. Barnaby Joyce was difficult to understand, despite his volume. Julie Bishop offered a mundane answer about strong exports from Western Australia, doing nothing to turn pressure back on Labor. Scott Morrison went through the economic growth figures but barely stirred the backbench.

Turnbull had no answer on penalty rates other than to attack Shorten’s history at the AWU. The Prime Minister seemed to be losing his voice as he ploughed on through Question Time and the suspension motion. He was also losing traction.

And the Coalition backbench did nothing to help. Staring at their mobile phone screens or their paperwork, MPs and ministers barely offered a murmur of support. There were no cheers, no interjections. It was a huge contrast with the Labor benches, where MPs are fired up over penalty rates.

In the month of the GFC the unemployment rate was recorded at 3.9%, which I always remember since it was the first time I had seen it fall below four in all the years I had been in Australia (the number has since been revised to 4.2%). The latest unemployment rate is much higher, at 5.7%, and real earnings are falling. A fall in penalty rates is an unmitigated good thing for the economy. It might end up being a minor retreat for a relative handful of employees but looking at the larger story, it is all to the good. It will make our industry stronger, create more jobs, and add to future prosperity. If nothing else, it is a decision that not only can be defended, it ought to have been.

The long faces on the Liberal side is the most comprehensive sign that these people have more than lost their way. They have no idea this side of the next Newspoll which way is up, with the Prime Minister the worst of the lot. They stand for nothing and most definitely do not stand for private sector growth. This is a decision that they ought to have embraced and welcomed, not run from. That they have no idea why living standards are falling – to them it’s in spite of the NBN and not because of it – tells me how far out in the economic wilderness they are.

“The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking”

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I really notice this in discussions of global warming and replacement technologies: The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking. A very interesting article from which you find:

Too many everyday things are already indistinguishable from magic to the average man. Four centuries ago everyone knew how everything in their village worked. Even a hundred years ago an intelligent person could figure out how anything he would likely encounter, even the steam locomotive. But today people are surrounded by things about whose workings they haven’t a clue. Medical devices, synthetic pharmaceuticals, designer pathogens. The proportion of those who can explain the world is gradually shrinking.

Cell phones, robots, mesh nets, remote imaging, data mining, stealth, invisible lethal chemicals and contagious diseases exist cheek by jowl with ox drawn carts, subsistence agriculture, illiteracy and fanaticism around Mosul and in other global cities.

I used to ask all my engineering type friends if they could explain to me what happens when I push the number 5 on a calculator and then multiply it by 7. They would all explain it in similar ways but nothing ever made true sense. They understood, but I was a primitive. And while my knowledge and skills are sufficient for me to earn a living today, if I were transported back to 1000 A.D. I would have nothing I could tell them that would be of the slightest use to them in raising the standard of living or deepening their knowledge of the world.

“We will keep our promises to the American people”

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I have provided a more compact version of the speech. A true show stopper! Here’s how it starts.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Members of Congress, the First Lady of the United States, and Citizens of America:

Tonight, as we mark the conclusion of our celebration of Black History Month, we are reminded of our Nation’s path toward civil rights and the work that still remains. Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a Nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.

Each American generation passes the torch of truth, liberty and justice –- in an unbroken chain all the way down to the present.

That torch is now in our hands. And we will use it to light up the world. I am heretonight to deliver a message of unity and strength, and it is a message deeply delivered from my heart.

A new chapter of American Greatness is now beginning.

A new national pride is sweeping across our Nation.

And a new surge of optimism is placing impossible dreams firmly within our grasp.

What we are witnessing today is the Renewal of the American Spirit.

Our allies will find that America is once again ready to lead.

All the nations of the world — friend or foe — will find that America is strong, America is proud, and America is free.

And I do have to say I am amazed at the Democrats who do not applaud a single statement made by the President. You can find the full text here.

UPDATE: I will only mention this report of Trump’s speech that is featured at Drudge because it has the following passage:

Putting some policy meat on the bones, he proposed introducing an Australian-style merit-based system to reduce the flow of unskilled workers — and held out the prospect of a bipartisan compromise with Democrats on root-and-branch immigration reform.

We led the world and the world is now following our example. I will just say that if our Liberal Party can somehow manage to lose the next election in an international environment that ought to be exactly what they ought to have hoped for, they will be remembered as the most incompetent bunch of dimwitted losers in the history of politics.

On the other hand, maybe these people are just insane

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The election results, the Superbowl and now the Academy Award results apparently lead to the conclusion DID THE OSCARS JUST PROVE THAT WE ARE LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?. From The New Yorker.

Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order. The recent Super Bowl, for instance. The result, bizarre on the surface—with that unprecedented and impossible comeback complete with razzle-dazzle catches and completely blown coverages and defensive breakdowns—makes no sense at all in the “real” world. Doesn’t happen. But it is exactly what you expect to happen when a teen-ager and his middle-aged father exchange controllers in the EA Sports video-game version: the father stabs and pushes the buttons desperately while the kid makes one play after another, and twenty-five-point leads are erased in minutes, and in just that way—with ridiculous ease on the one side and chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panic infecting the other. What happened, then, one realizes with last-five-minutes-of-“The Twilight Zone” logic, is obvious: sometime in the third quarter, the omniscient alien or supercomputer that was “playing” the Patriots exchanged his controller with his teen-age offspring, or newer model, with the unbelievable result we saw.

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win? How would they react?” “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!” And then it happened. We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

So why worry? Wait for the reset and you can have the universe just the way you like it.

Energy illiteracy a subset of economic illiteracy

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And it’s not just energy illiteracy, fewer and fewer any longer know much of anything about how products come into existence and then find their way to buyers. I’ve just had my first class of the semester which I always begin with a presentation which includes this:

In 1900 there were no cinemas in England. In 1914 there were more than 5000. What had to happen for those 5000 cinemas to come into existence?

Here is the wrong answer: cinemas came into existence because there was a demand for movies and more entertainment.

The video is from Canada via Small Dead Animals. And if like that you might like this.

The dumb terminals of the left

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Got into an argument with someone on the left the other day about Donald Trump. So I asked what in particular that Trump is doing doesn’t he like? Just name anything at all, just tell me what it is and what it is you don’t like. Could not elicit a single statement of any kind about any issue. So I said, what do you think of the wall? Do you think that the United States should just let anyone enter the country without checking who they are or whether it might be to the advantage of Americans that these non-Americans be allowed to settle where they please and then live off the welfare state. So he said he was against walls. So I said, well what about the wall that separates Israel from Hamas in the Gaza? No, there should be no walls, he replied. Does that also include Egypt who has also put a wall between itself and Gaza? But you know nothing went any further.

And here is the thing. The terminology is a bit old fashioned, but it finally occurred to me that in discussing anything with anyone on the left, you are dealing with a dumb terminal. From Wikipedia:

A dumb terminal is a computer terminal that consists mostly of just a display monitor and a keyboard (and perhaps a mouse as well). It has no internal CPU (central processing unit), and thus has little or no processing power. Sep 2, 2005

The definition goes back to 2005 so far as computers go, but so far as people on the left it’s as modern as this morning. There is some central body of thought which everyone subscribes to without any independent personal contribution of their own. It’s not ignorance since there cannot be any doubt that as far as no walls in Gaza is concerned, the consequence would mean the immediate destruction of Israel. And there is no doubt an answer to what the left believes about the Gaza and the border but since he didn’t know what it was, he was damned if he was going to concede and inch. Independent thought and an ability to be responsive in an open discussion is impossible.

Blind, dumb and stupid; just attached to the left’s cpu for all answers to all political question. This is the great benefit of being on the left since one never ever has to think through any single issue on one’s own.

The non-existent evidence that Trump is a Russian mole

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The article is titled, Trump Isn’t Sounding Like a Russian Mole and here are the telltale signs that might indicate he is.

Trump might for example acquiesce in a greater Russian presence and say in the Middle East. He might limit U.S. fracking, helping to prop up Putin’s oil price. He might seek to reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles in ways that give Russia badly needed economic relief from an arms burden that daily pressures the country more, and that accepts a permanent parity between the US and Russian nuclear arsenals, leaving America perpetually hostage to a nuclear balance of terror with a much weaker Russia. He might slash military spending and procurement; rather than steadily building the gap between Russian and American military capabilities, he might slow down and allow the Russians and others to dream of catching up.

In other words, if President Trump really is a Putin pawn, his foreign policy will start looking much more like Barack Obama’s. Will the New York Times and the Washington Post really have the brass to call Trump a traitor for pursuing a mix of policies which came right out of Obama’s playbook?

More to the point:

Obama’s chosen anti-Russia policy mix was as weak and hesitating as such policy can be. The sanctions were a way of pretending to ourselves that we had a Ukraine policy more than offering an actual path to forcing Russia to disgorge its gains. Trump’s policies of fracking and big military build up are more anti-Russian without sanctions than Obama ever thought was practical or wise. . . .

Trump’s actual foreign policy hardly suggests a president in thrall to the Kremlin, and excessive dovishness is unlikely to be the besetting sin of the Trump administration. The more the media locks itself into the narrative of Trump the appeaser, the harder its job will become when the real difficulties of the Trump presidency begin to take shape.

Which leads to this conclusion:

America needs an intellectually solvent and emotionally stable press to give this president the skeptical and searching scrutiny that he needs. What we are getting instead is something much worse for the health of the republic: a blind instinctive rage that lashes out without wounding, that injures its own credibility more than its target, that discredits the press at just the moment where its contributions are most needed.

The left agenda in general and its media shills in particular are in the process of revealing just how hollow and shallow it all is. It can no longer be hidden, and with Trump turning out to be more sure footed than we ever had a right to hope, perhaps this really is a revolutionary moment in the history of the West.