Curt Doolittle

Form: Mini Essay

  • Getting To Denmark

    This has a distinctly Chinese authoritarian tone to it. And that’s OK. If we can admire the Chinese for their current economy we can admire the rest of their political edicts too: Economists, social scientists, public intellectuals and politicians all use the Nordic Fallacy: the goal of making every country like Denmark. ie: a small homogenous germanic protestant country surrounded by other germanic protestants, with no exterior enemies and no need for self defense, and no strategic resources. We might ask, why we don’t ‘get to Switzerland’ which as a country has a far harder political problem. That said, here is how the average country can Get To Denmark:

    1. Any state larger than 10M must secede a territory sufficient to reduce it to 10M.
    2. Outlaw Consanguineous marriages out to three generations (This is the most important tactic one can take.)
    3. Outlaw non-english foreign web access, video, television channels, and literature. (english is Lingua Franca of business and science, that’s the only reason to grant it an exception.)
    4. Outlaw and eliminate non christian and or non-secular religious buildings, businesses, and associations.
    5. Raise the age of consent to 21, and the age of marriage to 25 with severe penalties, including prison or permanent deportation and tattooing.
    6. Require proof of sustainable income in order to have a child, with loss of the child, permanent imprisonment or deportation as the consequence.
    7. Enumerate all Property Rights within an immutable constitution, and require all legislation passed to demonstrate why it is permitted by the constitution.
    8. Use lottocracy rather than democracy to rotate political positions every two years.
    9. Outlaw job protection for anyone who directly or indirectly serves the government.
    10. Get a king and queen. The nordics have them. Monarchs are the only form of government people understand and the most common in history – and the tend to stop people from seeking too much political power, or being too ridiculously ambitious.
    11. Mandatory eduction in the western cannon for all citizens regardless of their age at immigration. Religion doesn’t matter as much as the western cannon does. It’s secular but the moral christian values are pervasive and unavoidable.
    12. Mandatory use of single language. Period. No exceptions. Give tickets for it if you have to.
    13. Mandatory civil service for women (delay marriage, and forcibly indoctrinate into cultural norms, with extended work, loss of fertility, and prison for abdication.)
    14. Mandatory military service for males (Forcible cultural indoctrination with physical punishment and loss of fertility for abdication.)
    15. Zero Tolerance Policy with 3 strikes life prison sentences. (Harsh prison sentences have been successful in the USA as a deterrent.)

    That’s what it will take to get to ‘Denmark’. Twenty years of that and you’ll have a solid polity with redistsrbutive instincts. That’s exactly what the european monarchies and nation states did. It’s what the Chinese are doing. And that’s why no one will get there. And in case find that list objectionable, I don’t usually do this but I’ll quote Rand:

    “It’s only human,” you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept “human” mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure–as if “to feel” were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not–as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not.

    In other words, the progressives forgive all possible depravity and call the coward, lazy and fools heroic. While those of us who work daily with discipline and courage are called selfish and inhuman. Nonsense. Time to be done with the cult of guilt: No guilt. No white guilt, no christian guilt, no colonial guilt, no male guilt. Take it back. Take it back now. We did the world the greatest favor since the domestication of plants and animals. Ask for respect not forgiveness.

  • A Followup On The Source of Western Individualism

    I should follow up on my last post with this thought: 1) For the fist time in western history, military leadership has been effectively denuded of political power. Our politicians are not only not required to have demonstrated military experience, but our generals are conspicuously absent from the political stage. Their departure is partly due to the change of the military’s focus from competition between tribes and states to the battle between consumer capitalism and world communism. A conflict which instead of pitting a group of classes against another group of classes, pitted classes within groups against one another. The pervasive fear of the military caused by the strategy of mutually assured destruction didn’t help reform military perception. And the cultural, regional, racial and religious factionalization of the USA combined with the leftist conquest of academia (sometimes by physical force) ((See Cornell University)) rendered the anti-martial sentiment a persistent property of the populist cultural norms. ALthough one feature of this change is interesting: The military as an institution has largely succeeded in maintaining the respect of the populace. The politicians are blamed for the misuse of military force. 2) If there are only three types of coercive political power: Force (the military and the militia), Moral (priests and public intellectuals), and Exchange (entrepreneurs and financiers), then one third of the balance of power has been removed from our political sphere. I would stipulate this is what instinctively troubles aristocratic conservatives. Not only are Whites becoming a minority, but their martial leadership has been ostracized from power. Social conservatives can still rally around the church for communal confirmation. But aristocratic conservatives cannot – they have no political venue. From antiquity until 1960, a male could seek status and acceptance through military service (and looting), familial provider-ship (and access to sex), religious conformity (demonstrated commitment to the community), and productive labor (craftsmanship), or at the very least, simply providing the service of his physical strength. Under agrarianism almost all of these venues are open to all men. Under industrialization the set is reduced. Under the information age, the male’s entire existence became materially undesirable. This is why the underclass males are abandoning marriage, religion, work, and even fear of imprisonment – they adopt a new version of mediterranean bravado. Upper class males are abandoning society altogether. The middle class and the upper proletariat fuss with the empire while its natural aristocracy revels in effete consumer decadence.) 3) I do not see a means of developing a natural aristocracy given the decline of agrarian self-sufficiency, the end of the regimental system in favor of conscription and state funding, and the rise of the majority of occupations that no longer participate in the market. Democracy is a slow road to totalitarian communism. And I do not see, absent some sort of extremely disruptive economic and geopolitical event, a way of altering this trend. WE will return to ignorance and poverty – or more likely, a two class system on the order of south america.

  • A Hobby Can’t Be A Market Failure

    On economics help, we get to see a how political failure is cast as market failure.

    Agriculture often appears to be one of the most difficult industries, frequently leading to some form of market failure. In the EU, agriculture is the most heavily subsidised industry, yet despite the cost of the subsidy, it fails to address issues relating to agriculture.

    Then the author compounds the error by stating that the volatility of weather creates a volatility in prices:

    The problem of volatile prices is that: 1. A sharp drop in price leads to a fall in revenue for farmers. Farmers could easily go out of business if their is a glut in supply because prices can plummet below cost. 2. Cobweb Theory. The cobweb theory suggests prices can become stuck in a cycle of ever-increasing volatility. E.g. if prices fall like in the above example. Many farmers will go out of business. Next year supply will fall. This causes price to increase. However, this higher price acts as incentive for greater supply. Therefore, next year supply increases and prices plummet again!. 3. Consumers can be faced with rapid increase in food prices which reduces their disposable income.

    To which I replied: Fascinating. Fascinating that you would consider any of these properties a market failure. 1) Farming has declined as an employer of people since 1900 to the point where it is now little more than a subsidized hobby industry that we support for purely aesthetic reasons. For that reason alone, it cannot experience ‘market failure’. It’s a commoditized industry. Farming is an industrial occupation for conglomerates. Everyone else in the business is in it out of love or habit not profit. 2) The US western expansion was created in an era of farming, and the land settled by farmers (and ranchers). The era of industrial expansion was created to support the expansion of farming. Now that farming has become mechanized and industrialized, people are leaving the breadbasket for the commercial and technological centers – that’s why those parts of the country are being depopulated. 3) It is impossible for farming to experience ‘market failure’. It is only possible for people to cling to an unproductive means of production, and to fail to develop alternative careers. The problem is political failure. Not market failure. Markets can’t fail. They can be insufficient to solve certain problems of capital concentration that only governments can accomplish. The political failure of attempting to persist farming is a failure because the market is telling us that farming is no longer valuable as an occupation. The political system is failing because it cannot develop alternatives to farming fast enough. It’s a problem of political failure not market failure. And it’s human failure. The romantic and luddite desire for antiquated means of production.

  • A Hobby Can’t Be A Market Failure

    On economics help, we get to see a how political failure is cast as market failure.

    Agriculture often appears to be one of the most difficult industries, frequently leading to some form of market failure. In the EU, agriculture is the most heavily subsidised industry, yet despite the cost of the subsidy, it fails to address issues relating to agriculture.

    Then the author compounds the error by stating that the volatility of weather creates a volatility in prices:

    The problem of volatile prices is that: 1. A sharp drop in price leads to a fall in revenue for farmers. Farmers could easily go out of business if their is a glut in supply because prices can plummet below cost. 2. Cobweb Theory. The cobweb theory suggests prices can become stuck in a cycle of ever-increasing volatility. E.g. if prices fall like in the above example. Many farmers will go out of business. Next year supply will fall. This causes price to increase. However, this higher price acts as incentive for greater supply. Therefore, next year supply increases and prices plummet again!. 3. Consumers can be faced with rapid increase in food prices which reduces their disposable income.

    To which I replied: Fascinating. Fascinating that you would consider any of these properties a market failure. 1) Farming has declined as an employer of people since 1900 to the point where it is now little more than a subsidized hobby industry that we support for purely aesthetic reasons. For that reason alone, it cannot experience ‘market failure’. It’s a commoditized industry. Farming is an industrial occupation for conglomerates. Everyone else in the business is in it out of love or habit not profit. 2) The US western expansion was created in an era of farming, and the land settled by farmers (and ranchers). The era of industrial expansion was created to support the expansion of farming. Now that farming has become mechanized and industrialized, people are leaving the breadbasket for the commercial and technological centers – that’s why those parts of the country are being depopulated. 3) It is impossible for farming to experience ‘market failure’. It is only possible for people to cling to an unproductive means of production, and to fail to develop alternative careers. The problem is political failure. Not market failure. Markets can’t fail. They can be insufficient to solve certain problems of capital concentration that only governments can accomplish. The political failure of attempting to persist farming is a failure because the market is telling us that farming is no longer valuable as an occupation. The political system is failing because it cannot develop alternatives to farming fast enough. It’s a problem of political failure not market failure. And it’s human failure. The romantic and luddite desire for antiquated means of production.

  • Monetarists Picked The Wrong Ally in Keynesians

    Scott, Well, I’m in the middle of the Monetarist-Neoclassical-Austrian spectrum and I agree with the Monetarists and objects to the Keynesians. The unstated argument here is that: 1) The American people do not trust their government. All spending is suspect. And they would rather suffer in order to starve the beast than gain relief by feeding it. This isn’t going to change any time soon. Demographics guarantee it. Tilting at windmills is a waste of time. 2) The monetarists failed to make their case with the public. If the monetarists DID make their case with the public by stating that they would in no way expand the government, the public would have endorsed it. I blame this failure entirely on the monetarist public intellectuals who allied with the Keynesians instead of the Neo-classicals (improve industry) and Austrians (improve human capital) with whom most Americans are more sentimentally aligned – puritan ethics prevail.. 3) The public is justifiably angry at the financial sector as well as the government. Galbraith, myself, and to some abstract degree Arnold Kling, recommended that bypassing the financial sector entirely and paying down consumer debts was a radical idea, but would have won the hearts and minds of the citizenry, as well as avoiding worldwide price recalculation within the Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade, which is the result of the shock to people’s ability to forecast and plan. (I dont think anyone appreciates the value of Kling’s arguments as adding another tool to the neoclassical inventory.) This was a better solution than the Keynesian OR Monetarist solutions. And it would have astronomically cheaper. Keynesian spending only works if people trust the government and people only trust the government in small culturally and ethnically homogenous nation states. Monetarists SHOULD be politically neutral, but by allying with Keynesians they become untenable with the public. By allying with Neo-classicals and Austrians Monetarists can become politically neutral, and the public will accept their recommendations. The importance of this concept is significant – not only for monetarists, but for the country as a whole. Perhaps for the world.

  • Bryan Caplan’s Current Work On The Limited Benefits Of Education

    Bryan Caplan writes

    1. The vast majority of research on the [returns on higher] education – including IVs, RTCs, etc. – does not empirically distinguish between human capital and signaling. The better papers explicitly admit this. 2. Students spend a lot of time learning subjects irrelevant to almost all occupations (except, of course, teaching those very same irrelevant subjects). 3. Teachers often claim that they’re “teaching their students how to think,” but this goes against a hundred years of educational psychology’s Transfer of Learning literature. 4. When education researchers measure actual learning, it’s modest on average, and often zero. And yet employers still pay a big premium to e.g. college students who’ve learned little or nothing. The same goes for the return to college quality. It doesn’t seem to improve learning, but it substantially improves income. 5. There is a growing empirical literature using the El-SD (employer learning – statistical discrimination) approach to measure the effect of signaling. It usually finds moderate signaling, at least for non-college grads. It looks like you have to finish college to quickly get employers to reward you for measurable pre-existing skills. 6. The sheepskin literature finds large effects of merely finishing degrees. They eventually fade out, but it takes 15-25 years. This isn’t iron-clad evidence for signaling (what would be?), but it’s strongly supportive. My book will also argue that ability bias is a much bigger problem than the David Card consensus will admit, and that the positive externalities of education are overrated. So the social return to education turns out to be quite low. In terms of policy implications, I’m going to argue for large cuts in government spending on education, and a lot more vocational education on the German model.

    We are not paid for our knowledge. We are paid for the rate at which we assimilate and adapt to information and circumstances. We are paid to quickly and inexpensively solve problems in dynamic economy. Universities successfully filter for those people able to assimilate and adapt to information and circumstances. People who pass the filter are more likely to adapt to the shock of entering the work force and quickly learn the nuances of both organizations and business processes. Since IQ is largely an expression of the RATE someone is capable of learning, the data should show that universities essentially sort by IQ. And it appears to show just that. I am not convinced (and I think you’ve come to the same conclusion) that people learn anything of value in university other than work discipline. (Sowell has been saying this for years.) It also appears that people eventually sort by IQ in the work force regardless of their education. So, it would seem that an education is a means of temporarily increasing your earning capacity at the median, and a way of shortening your access to income at the top. But at the bottom higher education’s a waste of time, and a burdensome debt. Americans try to educate everyone to join the upper middle class, and it’s a waste of effort and produces an incompetent working class. instead, we should, as the Germans do, focus on creating a superior working class, because the upper 20% will succeed as long as we don’t impede them too much. As you’ve stated elsewhere, and as the economic evidence shows, the German model is a superior education system, and perhaps the Finnish model is the best primary school system. For certain, boys should start school later than girls. and should be physically active despite the risk of ‘being boys’.

  • DANGER OF EXCLUSIVITY IN ECONOMETRICS Economists, like all methodologists, extra

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/01/how-to-save-economics.htmlTHE DANGER OF EXCLUSIVITY IN ECONOMETRICS

    Economists, like all methodologists, extrapolate the conclusions they draw from their methods beyond the scope of their methods. (See Kahneman.)

    Psychologists place extraordinary emphasis on the meaning of emotional stimuli, rather than the outcomes that would be achieved by training emotions to favor more beneficial outcomes in the material world. Cognitive psychologists reverse this preference.

    Liberals extrapolate their bias for nesting and care-taking, and their preference for consensus, to the ability of humans to plan, and cooperate on the scale of a state or economy.

    We are all prisoners of our methods and biases, and our only the mastery of the methods of multiple fields of inquiry makes us critical enough of our abilities.

    The Austrians are largely correct in their analysis of micro, as well as the impact of modern macro. We do not really know if the various permutations of MMT will work or not. But it is abundantly clear that modern macro applies only to small homogenous societies. And in diverse heterogeneous societies, micro and social behaviors are more influential than the power of monetary and fiscal policy to compete with.

    Humans act consistently over time. Humas vary greatly. And the less on of the greeks, and the mandate in western aristocratic tradition, is the ever present and inescapable frailty of human reasoning, and the consequential warning against human hubris, the only solution to which is competition and the balance of power demonstrated by commercial and military success.

    In other words – actions are scientific and theories are not.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-25 11:48:00 UTC

  • DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF? Why do people talk to themselves? The humorous response

    DO YOU TALK TO YOURSELF?

    Why do people talk to themselves? The humorous response is “So that I have someone intelligent to talk to.” But humor aside, the traditional psychologist’s argument has been that by involving more senses, verbalization helps to block out distractions, and to focus our thinking – especially when alone, and when under stress or when we want to plan.

    But in Daniel Kahneman’s language, it means “System 2’s intentional system can more easily take control of System 1’s automatic system”. I tend to think of it as intentionally inserting stimulation into system 1.

    System 1 is very, very loud in my head. That’s why I like to be around people. They keep me linked to the real world despite the bright and intense mental reality that emerges from System 1, in someone who has such exceptional memory. I think all mild “Aspies” have this problem, and all Autistic people are complete victims of it.

    Does this sound like I’m happy to intellectualize talking to myself? It does. It also explains why I’m more likely to do it when I’m tired and surrounded by a lot of stimulation: the need to crowd out the sensory data so that I can focus on whatever it is I’m trying to concentrate upon. Most Aspies and all Autistics cannot as easily filter stimuli as well as normal people.

    Perhaps I’ll feel a smidgen less guilty about talking to myself when I’m trying to plan the rest of my day from now on – but I doubt it.

    =====

    PLEASE READ

    Please read “Thinking Fast And Slow”. For those people who haven’t kept up with research in psychology, he’s condensed the past half century into a few narratives which will help you understand our world better. And most importantly for conservatives and libertarians, he’s helped explain why conservatives are right in their concern about human hubris in everything – because we are intuitive more than rational and our intuition is terrible at statistics. In fact, the fact that we need the field of statistics is an attempt to overcome our incompetence in judgements about complex relations.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-23 11:01:00 UTC

  • FUTURE NOIR The world is a beautiful place. The essence of Conservatism is joy a

    FUTURE NOIR

    The world is a beautiful place. The essence of Conservatism is joy at present happiness over future utopian perfection. The minute and subtle improvement of the existing art and artifice over the crass flatulence of dramatic public assaults on our senses. The self knowledge of contribution, over the attention seeking of public recognition. It is the politics of the private. The harmony of uncoordinated achievement, made possible by uncoordinated plans.

    NYC is a declining, decaying memory of it’s Anglo Dutch past. It has become the mirror of the extended slum of Los Angeles, separated only by the architecture and order of it’s anglo heritage, and the interdependence between it’s financial sector and the war machine that is washington DC. The city’s gothic legacy is obscured by the implicit praise of temporal consumption and the consequential irrelevance of a mandate for production. It is a society only in that it is so perversely anti-social.

    There is nothing beautiful about it. Nothing to be learned from it. It is the expression of consumer sedition. The brightly burning flurry of consumption by locusts. It’s a dead carcass being feasted upon by every passing scavenger, and attracting vermin by the scent of its decay.

    The world has moved on. No civilization in history has survived urbanization.

    Although we did not know why until recently. The formal institutions of economic calculation we call ‘property’ which require that we act, and the informal institutions of manners, ethics, morals which constrain us from acting, can no longer operate in concert. We have made significant progress in the development of our formal institutions, by implementing credit ratings – the equivalent of ‘reputation’. Credit is an institutional memory of our formal and informal adherence to the social contract.

    But it is not enough. When combined with easy credit, consumption increases without corresponding increases in productivity. And from that one act, men become locusts, and the fecundity of the upper classes is consumed by the malthusian fertility of the lower classes.

    And over time, only the most durable monuments of stone leave a record of our having existed at all.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-23 10:24:00 UTC

  • WRITING SKILLS Online writing has improved significantly since that paper was wr

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/01/how-well-can-you-communicate-over-email-or-blog-posts-how-about-in-person.htmlONLINE WRITING SKILLS

    Online writing has improved significantly since that paper was written. We err. We fail. We get slapped around. And we learn.

    Or at least, most people do.

    The three biggest problems with online discourse are: a) that it’s very difficult to negotiate a contract on the meaning of terms, and as such, most debates are eristic or autistic. b) that the medium does not tolerate the level of exposition needed to convey vast differences in the categories and judgements that are under discussion. c) almost no one, even the very best people, are able to articulate their positions by other than allegorical means, or without relying on the assumption that the methodology underlying their reasoning, is merely a convenience, not a representation or means of identifying true statements. (My glossary is fifty pages long. and it’s not anywhere near complete.)

    Conservatives are the worst offenders because they rely on sentimental, historical and allegorical concepts, which if fully articulated as human actions, are demonstrably true. But since they’re so poorly expressed, usually as post-religous moral statements, they are all but useless in debate.

    FWIW: I am absolutely nothing like my online persona, and everyone who meets me in person comments on it. Interpersonal relations are, well, personal. Debate online is political – purposeful. If I learned anything from the 20th century its that Friedman’s and Rothbard’s antagonistic relentlessness was more successful than Hayek’s modest civility.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-01-20 17:20:00 UTC