[T]he combination of “Anglo-Saxon” economics (accepting the dynamism of open markets) and of “Anglo-Saxon” politics (governments as seriously responsible–British version–or accountable–Washington version–to their voters) is doubly subversive to the French elite’s entire modus operandi. The “Anglo-Saxons” provide an identity to define oneself against and, in the case of the US, a counterpoint to seek to surpass. (One cannot really say “rival” because the US fails to feel threatened by European unity–indeed, actively promotes it; which is, if anything, even more infuriating.) –Michael Philip
Form: Quote Commentary
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The Anglo-Saxon Subversion of French Elites
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Reality?
[R]eality Bites.You can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality — Ayn Rand via Emil Suric
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Reality?
[R]eality Bites.You can ignore reality but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality — Ayn Rand via Emil Suric
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Michael Philip on Malthus (Smart)
I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin’s theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices. He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists. To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws. But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal. I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament. He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.
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Michael Philip on Malthus (Smart)
I view Malthus as a tempered social revisionist who knocked down myths, thought in terms of social science mechanisms (he had both supply and demand and Keynesian macro in surprisingly sophisticated forms, not to mention an early form of Darwin’s theory of evolution), and was painfully aware of the importance of contingent human choices. He is one of the five most underrated, and also least understood, economists. To be sure, he favored small government and opposed the Poor Laws. But he was skeptical enough about the notion of a voluntary self-regulating order that I would not quite call him a classical liberal. I read his economics as starting with the Bible, and asking whether any mechanisms might bring us to a less tragic outcome than what is found in the Old Testament. He was never quite sure of the answer, and his mix of moralizing and skepticism later attracted Keynes.
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Taleb is On Board with Tribalism
Why GREECE, GREXIT, and “EUROPE” are an unnatural proto-Nazi “Aryan” construction — or why putting Teutons and Greeks together isn’t the smartest (and most stable) idea. Nor is it natural. The least *unnatural* union for Greece is some sort of *loose* Mediterranean League of City States (and another minor Balkan connection). But again, it would need to stay fuzzy –i.e., should you want to use history/culture, use them properly (“annales” style). + There are two natural cultural (eventually leading by mixing to ethnic) demarcations: butter vs olive oil (and eventually a third, the palm tree). The demarcation is robust: if people have the same food, they are the same (or eventually through mixing) become the same. Now if a nonblind but deaf Martian visited Turkey and Greece, he would think they are the same people (same with Lebanon and Western Syria). If words are different, body language in the Levant, Greece, Turkey and Southern Italy is similar. “Una faccia, una razza”. But a bureaucrat blinded by constructions would put the Greek in the same unit as the German, and bundle the Turk with the Huns in the Altai mountains near China. + But Mediterraneans are integrated as a socio-cultural unit. This is not just recent; the integration is 5000 years old in the East and 3000 in the West. The trend to “Europeanize” came with German scholarship which starting in 1820s (one Müller) tried to kill any Levantine/Babylonian connection to Greece, trying to give Germany some nobility in its historical roots, while French scholarship was until then considering Greece as deeply rooted in the Levant and Asia Minor, as a continuum from Babylon to the Phoenicians to classical Greece (mythology says that Europa herself was Phoenician). The rise of antisemitism played a part: the Teutonic cultural separation from the Levantine Canaanite race (the Jews and Phoenicians had near-identical language and ethnicity). + The Levant and what is now Greece spent at least 1000 years in the same political unit Rome-Byzantium and another few hunded in the Ottoman Empire; the Greeks and the Germans have now about 40 years together. + The nation-state started integrating the Mediterranean people. During the 19th Century only a few coastal cities such as Marseille and Toulon in Southern France spoke French, the rest spoke Provencal or Catalan. + The idea of a Mediterranean unit is not popular. Partly because it has been linked to Mussolini. + The Mycenians did not use a Semitic language (linear B). But the word Knossos (the capital) means “settlement” in Phoenician. + If a French person looks like a Mediterranean and speaks French, it is by colonization. The same applies to the “Aryanization” of Greece, to the “Turkification” of Asia Minor, and the “Arabization” of Syria or the “Aryanization” of India. Arian/Semitic/Hun is not a distinction beyond the language spoken. -
Taleb is On Board with Tribalism
Why GREECE, GREXIT, and “EUROPE” are an unnatural proto-Nazi “Aryan” construction — or why putting Teutons and Greeks together isn’t the smartest (and most stable) idea. Nor is it natural. The least *unnatural* union for Greece is some sort of *loose* Mediterranean League of City States (and another minor Balkan connection). But again, it would need to stay fuzzy –i.e., should you want to use history/culture, use them properly (“annales” style). + There are two natural cultural (eventually leading by mixing to ethnic) demarcations: butter vs olive oil (and eventually a third, the palm tree). The demarcation is robust: if people have the same food, they are the same (or eventually through mixing) become the same. Now if a nonblind but deaf Martian visited Turkey and Greece, he would think they are the same people (same with Lebanon and Western Syria). If words are different, body language in the Levant, Greece, Turkey and Southern Italy is similar. “Una faccia, una razza”. But a bureaucrat blinded by constructions would put the Greek in the same unit as the German, and bundle the Turk with the Huns in the Altai mountains near China. + But Mediterraneans are integrated as a socio-cultural unit. This is not just recent; the integration is 5000 years old in the East and 3000 in the West. The trend to “Europeanize” came with German scholarship which starting in 1820s (one Müller) tried to kill any Levantine/Babylonian connection to Greece, trying to give Germany some nobility in its historical roots, while French scholarship was until then considering Greece as deeply rooted in the Levant and Asia Minor, as a continuum from Babylon to the Phoenicians to classical Greece (mythology says that Europa herself was Phoenician). The rise of antisemitism played a part: the Teutonic cultural separation from the Levantine Canaanite race (the Jews and Phoenicians had near-identical language and ethnicity). + The Levant and what is now Greece spent at least 1000 years in the same political unit Rome-Byzantium and another few hunded in the Ottoman Empire; the Greeks and the Germans have now about 40 years together. + The nation-state started integrating the Mediterranean people. During the 19th Century only a few coastal cities such as Marseille and Toulon in Southern France spoke French, the rest spoke Provencal or Catalan. + The idea of a Mediterranean unit is not popular. Partly because it has been linked to Mussolini. + The Mycenians did not use a Semitic language (linear B). But the word Knossos (the capital) means “settlement” in Phoenician. + If a French person looks like a Mediterranean and speaks French, it is by colonization. The same applies to the “Aryanization” of Greece, to the “Turkification” of Asia Minor, and the “Arabization” of Syria or the “Aryanization” of India. Arian/Semitic/Hun is not a distinction beyond the language spoken. -
do we know about population and technological progress? A paper by Ashraf and Ga
http://www.nber.org/papers/w17037.pdfWhat do we know about population and technological progress?
A paper by Ashraf and Galorm http://www.nber.org/papers/w17037.pdf concludes: “…population density in pre-industrial times was on average higher at latitudinal bands closer to the equator.”
Yet the countries closer to the equator did not end up being the drivers of industrial progress, even though they sometimes had higher rates of progress in agricultural times. Northern Europe, with the exception of the Dutch Republic, was never the star for population density. This paper also indicates that technology drives population growth — more than vice versa — and that “time elapsed since a region’s neolithic breakthrough” predicts later technological progress fairly well.
If you add an extra baby to most societies, ceteris paribus, the rate of expected idea generation does indeed go up in theory. But how important a factor is that, compared to other influences on ideas generation?
Source date (UTC): 2015-07-19 04:15:00 UTC
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“I generally do not follow socialistic thinking processes such as the concept of
—“I generally do not follow socialistic thinking processes such as the concept of trade between groups. Methodological individualism is, to me, the way to go, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out. So I am sorry I cannot agree with this analysis. Individuals trade, and individuals act. This idea of a group having some kind of living reality jump straight out of Plato and was debunked back in the Middle Ages by the philosophers called nominalists.”— Lawrence
Well, you have to create an argument other than ‘the way to go’. Because that’s not an argument. it’s an expression of taste. 🙂
Individuals cooperate. They form families. They form friendships. They form cooperative alliances. They form partnerships, corporations, armies, and nations. So empirically, that is what people do. And praxeologically we can easily explain why it is in their interest to do so. And we can explain praxeologicaly why it is against their interest not to do so.
Groups who cooperate out-compete groups that do not cooperate. Universally. And the higher the trust, the more truth, the faster the rate of economic and inventive velocity. The more competitive the group.
The west has successfully out-competed other groups precisely because we produced commons. Including the commons of property rights, rule of law, the common law, the militia, and truth telling. Even science was produced as a commons.
There are productive commons, and parasitic commons. it matters only whether the commons is productive (moral) or parasitic (immoral). A commons is, like violence, value neutral. Commons and violence can be use to create productivity or they can be used for purposes of parasitism.
So not only is cooperation at scale, and the production of commons methodologically individualistic, but it fails the test of methodological individualism to suggest people not seize the opportunity to cooperate to produce returns unachievable by individual action.
Cooperation exists and moral intuition exists to preserve cooperation, for the simple reason that the rewards of cooperation are disproportionately higher than the rewards of individual production.
So the only question is whether you can voluntarily participate and exit such commons, and if you have universal standing in defense from parasitism. If so, then only productive commons can be constructed. This is what we call the Civic Society.
But if you don’t participate, why will members of that Civic Society tolerate your presence? They usually don’t.
So you can’t be right. Praxeologically you can’t be right.
Just how it is.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev, Ukraine (London).
Source date (UTC): 2015-07-18 05:54:00 UTC
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“Democracy has brought us both the death of Socrates and the election of Hitler.
—“Democracy has brought us both the death of Socrates and the election of Hitler. It doesn’t get much better than that!”—
Women. Not “us”. Women. Not democracy per se. But women in democracy. The decline of the west was caused by the enfranchsement of women into the democratic process. Prior to their enfranchisement it certainly appears that the one family (man) one vote system functioned when there were houses for each class.
Since then, within one generation, women moved through democracy to devolve the west. And since then they have been “useful idiots” for communists, socialists, postmodernists, and feminists.
In the medieval era through the classical liberal era, we were evolving a market for the production of commons by the negotiated construction of trades between the classes, and our fascination with reason and equality led us to the fantasy of reasoned optimum decision making (monopoly rule), rather than merely constructing trades between classes.
I think this is the right analysis.
For high trust westerners, a market for commons is an extremely valuable competitive advantage.
But introduction of women into the polity allowed them to express their reproductive strategy – which the entire history of property rights evolved to suppress: parasitism.
I love women. But they are as cognitively blind to politics as men are cognitively blind to interpersonal relations.
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2015-07-18 05:40:00 UTC