The new facebook profile has some nice features, but the new navigation is a catastrophe. I mean, they’ve hidden or lost the application settings menu item, and it’s impossible now to find anything.
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-06 00:10:00 UTC
Form: Short Note
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Trump? A person of interest in an economic debate? Yes, a few economists erroneo
http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2010/12/another-on-the-myth-that-isnt-manufacturing-jobs/Donald Trump? A person of interest in an economic debate? Yes, a few economists erroneously take Trump to task for suggesting that we need more manufacturing jobs. They’re wrong. He’s right. I state why – economists are confused.
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-05 17:55:00 UTC
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interesting conversation on the current state of criticism of mathematics in the
http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2010/12/a-response-to-gene-callahan-scientism-in-the-way-of-science/An interesting conversation on the current state of criticism of mathematics in the social sciences.
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-05 17:53:00 UTC
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Amanda thought it would be fun to dye my beard because of the advancing gray. I
Amanda thought it would be fun to dye my beard because of the advancing gray. I humored her. It was a rainy saturday afternoon and she was insistent. Now I look ten years younger, but I feel like I cheated on an exam. The things we do to entertain our loved ones.
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-05 14:23:00 UTC
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More weekend writing: “And I do not understand, why we grant particular grace to
More weekend writing: “And I do not understand, why we grant particular grace to current democracies – the merit of which is still in play, until we observe how we fare now that the rest of the world has adopted capitalist instituions, and erased our prior advantage. It certainly appears, that instead of Democracy, the award goes to capitalist institutions, calculation and incentives. Democracy is irrelevant.”
Source date (UTC): 2010-12-05 14:19:00 UTC
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The Liberal Gene
Researchers have determined that genetics could matter when it comes to some adults’ political leanings. According to scientists at UC San Diego and Harvard University, “ideology is affected not just by social factors, but also by a dopamine receptor gene called DRD4.” That and how many friends you had during high school. The study was led by UCSD’s James Fowler and focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Scientists matched the subjects’ genetic information with “maps” of their social networks. According to researchers, they determined that people “with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults.” However, the, subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence. “It is the crucial interaction of two factors — the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence — that is associated with being more liberal,” according to the study. “These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience,” said Fowler, who is a professor of political science and medical genetics. The researchers also said their findings held true no matter what the ethnicity, culture, sex or age of the subjects were. Source: Scientists Find ‘Liberal Gene’ | NBC San Diego
Some of the comments were humorous.
“So, we now have scientific proof that liberalism is a birth defect?” “That explains their total lack of logical thinking, they can’t help themselves. Probably explains why they’re so needy too. Do you think there will ever be a cure?” “Does this discovery bring us closer to a cure?”
We need both conservatives and liberals. Really. We need people who, out of ignorance or passion want to improve the existing order. We need people who out of understanding and investment, require that improvements to the order be meritocratic, and maintain group persistence, and are not simply attempts at taking power for power’s sake. The western dichotomy between church and state, between liberal and conservative, has been a very powerful combination. Our errors derive largely from the consequence of relying overmuch on our rather primitive rhetorical political process, the consequences of leaving the gold standard and adopting fiat money against conservative sentiments, and the opportunity to behave unwisely amidst the decline of the west, and prior to the rise of the east, and our foolish abandonment of the monarchical system, without understanding it’s strengths. But we need liberals. We just dont need them to have too much power.
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Privatization From Obama?
While the devil is in the details, and I have less than zero confidence in this president, he proposed a structural change in the way we ‘purchase’ infrastructure projects, that would effectively privatize the process, rather than continue the current (corrupt) process of relying upon earmarks. From The NYT:
Mr. Obama … called for what the White House is describing as an “infrastructure bank” that would focus on paying for national and regional transportation projects by pooling private money with public investment. He said the bank would eliminate a patchwork system in which transportation projects are financed through Congressional earmarks rather than based on merit.
From The White House
The President proposes to fund a permanent infrastructure bank. This bank would leverage private and state and local capital to invest in projects that are most critical to our economic progress. This marks an important departure from the federal government’s traditional way of spending on infrastructure through earmarks and formula-based grants that are allocated more by geography and politics than demonstrated value. Instead, the Bank will base its investment decisions on clear analytical measures of performance, competing projects against each other to determine which will produce the greatest return for American taxpayers.
Impressive. Now, let’s see it work.
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The BiPolarity Of Class
In response to The Tea Party is a Marxist movement on Half Sigma, I created this diagram.
The BiPolarity Of Social Class, And The Status Competition Between Them. I”ve posted a diagram that is in progress. It’s at: http://www.capitalismv3.com//srv/htdocs/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/BiPolarityOfClass-2010-08-29.png What I want to illustrate is the difference between people who exist in the market economy and people who exist in the bureaucratic economy, and their gender, class and cultural origins. Tea partiers are, in general, status seekers who participate in the non-clerical, market economy. They are white people who are remnants of the anglo saxon social order. Very “Burkeian.” Tea partiers are a status and power movement – a cultural movement that crosses classes. Most tea partiers appear to be middle class, or upper prole. Uppers and upper middle (like me) are not as status-challenged as middle’s are by cultural dissolution. In other words, in any cultural or racial group, the penalty for loss of political dominance by your elites is paid for by its middle and proletariat classes, who benefit from cultural network opportunities created by the dominant preferences. So it’s materially important: The prole risk status loss if they do not rescue their elites. Even as such, I’m not sure anglo saxons don’t have a bifurcated proletariat class: militial service in the west conveys social status, and anglo saxons are a militial society. This drives enfranchisement lower into the class system.
[callout]Tea partiers are a status and power movement – a cultural movement that crosses classes. Most tea partiers appear to be middle class, or upper prole. …. In any cultural or racial group, the penalty for loss of political dominance by your elites is paid for by its middle and proletariat classes, who benefit from cultural network opportunities created by the dominant preferences. So it’s materially important: The prole risk status loss if they do not rescue their elites.[/callout]
In our case, it so happens, that the tea partier social preference is for freedom, individualism, and capitalism, which also happens to be a material benefit to society. Even if they wrap it in religious doctrine. But they wrap it in religious doctrine because as a group they tend to create solid families, and solid families tend to be more religious. While religiosity increases as IQ decreases, the statement is open to erroneous interpretation. WIthin a people of similar values, the religious moral codes are equally justified among all the member classes. It’s just that the upper classes are more rational, the middle are more allegorical, and the lower are more sentimental. It’s just a matter of articulation – methodology – not one of differences in execution. The tea party movement relies upon sentimental arguments rather than rational arguments because conservatism lacks a rational social science to compete with marxism. While conservatives and libertarians have tried for over a hundred years, they have so far failed to articulate a social science that can compete with the combination of marxist sentiments, democratic secular humanism, and mathematical positivism. This is partly due to inter-temporal complexity, and our over-reliance on the analysis of money and redistribution rather than the status economy – an economy that humans are far m ore sensitive to than the monetary economy. (Intertemporal complexity is too complicated for here. But in general, conservatism is a longer time preference, that puts greatest emphasis on group persistence – it is a capitalization strategy for the future.) I think, Half-Sigma’s goal was to try to pull marxian class analysis into the tea party movement. And there is some truth to it. But it’s not a class movement. It’s a culture or race movement. Traditional whites are now a minority and they are losing their status symbols both domestically and internationally and this goes against their core reason for existence – self sacrifice, family, forgone opportunity, in exchange for group persistence, and they see that persistence under attack.
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Exasperation: Trading Miracles for Probabilism
A long day of reading. A long day of studying college course curricula from a dozen large universities. A long day of discovering that far too many feign scientific methods, and deliver theology. (No, really.) The university has become a vehicle for tradesmen. It is almost impossible to obtain a meaningful education. And worse, that it’s almost impossible to find courses where you can actually learn synthesis rather than (trivial) analysis. All the while, the American work place craves individuals who can synthesize and critique – solving problems in millions of meetings, held every day, where common dialogs, presentations and rhetoric are filled with sophistry and error, negating the speaker’s position. Confusion, deception, politics ensue, and sometimes shouting. All for want of basic understanding. I used to wonder, if we invented time travel, who was the one person you’d want to kill? And I thought it was Napoleon, because he ruined Europe. Or maybe Zoroaster, for creating scriptural monotheism. But today, I think it’s Rothschild.
[callout]We traded god and miracles for government and probability.And given the history of probability’s use in financial markets, it has the same record as magic and divinity: a failure.
[/callout]We traded god and miracles for government and probabilism. And given the history of probability’s use in financial markets, it has the same record as magic and divinity: a failure. The technology of probability employed for political purposes, in the course of credit, is the new magic or miracles, or divine command.
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The Dystopian Future Of Cities – Concrete And Rubble VS Star Trek
As I spend more of my time trying to understand the different ways by which the USA will degenerate from its position of trade-empire, I have been working on the future of cities, which will even more dominantly influence the future culturally, morally, economically and politically. There is a healthy literature on it. And it’s quite the opposite future that the libertarians fantasized about. Writings on our Dystopian Future: The Feral Cities Paper http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_56/ai_110458726/?tag=content;col1 (Local copy for reference)The Building Blog and Cities Under Siege http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/cities-under-siege.html The Books The Fires by Joe Flood Planet of Slums by Mike Davis Cities Under Siege by Stephen Graham Urban Nightmares by Steve Macek The Unheavenly City by Banfield
Mike Davis wrote in Planet of Slums, “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.”
The future of the world is the south american model. It is quite different from the future envisioned by the Protestants, Libertarians and liberals. It certainly isn’t the orderly civility and sterility of star trek – as if the upper middle class ran the world rather than the proletariat.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s oft-repeated remark that “the modern city is a place for banking and prostitution and very little else.”
Be careful what you wish and plan for, if what you wish and plan for is counter to human nature. The approach to Natural Law combined with heroic aspiration is different from the myth of equality and heroic aspiration. We’re going to see the south american model.