Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • Brad DeLong Watch: Terminological Nits with Caldwell

    Brad takes issue with Chris Caldwell’s assertion that the republican party is not where wealth votes:

    It takes a somewhat weird failure to look at the cross-tabs to arrive at the conclusion that the Democratic Party is the party of “billionaires, academics, minorities and single women” and the Republican Party is the party of “landscape gardeners, construction workers, truckers.” For one thing, landscape gardeners throughout much of the country are now overwhelmingly Hispanic, and less and less likely to vote Republican with each passing day…

    via Brad DeLong.

    But Brad is using a convenient play on words. High finance is in bed with the democrats, and big oil is in bed with the republicans. “Billionaires” was a bad choice of pejorative language. He should have said “high finance”. So brad is just feeding the fires of dishonest discourse rather than correcting it. That said Chris is still off-base. Republican party is becoming the white party. which is why there is a clock running on its future. And further, it’s why we are not going to have a peaceful resolution of our class warfare: because it’s going to become race warfare. The libertarians have a solution but it’s too late to enact it. Bush was the last president with the opportunity. When one republican defected and ruined his chances of reform, the die was cast. Sometime in the not too distant future it’s going to get very bad here in the states.

  • Brad DeLong Watch: Terminological Nits with Caldwell

    Brad takes issue with Chris Caldwell’s assertion that the republican party is not where wealth votes:

    It takes a somewhat weird failure to look at the cross-tabs to arrive at the conclusion that the Democratic Party is the party of “billionaires, academics, minorities and single women” and the Republican Party is the party of “landscape gardeners, construction workers, truckers.” For one thing, landscape gardeners throughout much of the country are now overwhelmingly Hispanic, and less and less likely to vote Republican with each passing day…

    via Brad DeLong.

    But Brad is using a convenient play on words. High finance is in bed with the democrats, and big oil is in bed with the republicans. “Billionaires” was a bad choice of pejorative language. He should have said “high finance”. So brad is just feeding the fires of dishonest discourse rather than correcting it. That said Chris is still off-base. Republican party is becoming the white party. which is why there is a clock running on its future. And further, it’s why we are not going to have a peaceful resolution of our class warfare: because it’s going to become race warfare. The libertarians have a solution but it’s too late to enact it. Bush was the last president with the opportunity. When one republican defected and ruined his chances of reform, the die was cast. Sometime in the not too distant future it’s going to get very bad here in the states.

  • Daily Krugman Watch: On Cato and the Kochs

    March 5th, 2012 Posted by CurtD Krugman jumps on the Kochs bandwagon today: I replied: Of the libertarian think tanks, Cato is the most policy oriented. The Kochs want to move it more into policy and further away from theory in order to help the republican party platform. (Which doesn’t necessarily bother those of us who are members of more radical think tanks.) While I understand that you have an agenda, it is perfectly reasonable to purge language that polls unfavorably. But you will rarely find a conservative engaging in deceptions on the scale that do liberals. Conservative have a higher standard. The public holds them accountable to a higher standard because they profess a higher standard. But that said, voter manipulation, association with global finance, violence, and systemic corruption are by far predominantly liberal activities. So are we supposed to hold you to the liberal standard? Or the conservative standard? Because you claim a high standard, but by your statements contradict it.

  • Daily Krugman Watch: On Cato and the Kochs

    March 5th, 2012 Posted by CurtD Krugman jumps on the Kochs bandwagon today: I replied: Of the libertarian think tanks, Cato is the most policy oriented. The Kochs want to move it more into policy and further away from theory in order to help the republican party platform. (Which doesn’t necessarily bother those of us who are members of more radical think tanks.) While I understand that you have an agenda, it is perfectly reasonable to purge language that polls unfavorably. But you will rarely find a conservative engaging in deceptions on the scale that do liberals. Conservative have a higher standard. The public holds them accountable to a higher standard because they profess a higher standard. But that said, voter manipulation, association with global finance, violence, and systemic corruption are by far predominantly liberal activities. So are we supposed to hold you to the liberal standard? Or the conservative standard? Because you claim a high standard, but by your statements contradict it.

  • Karl Smith Watch: Learning From Fables

    Crises, however, are not fables. They do not exist to teach us lessons or help us learn to mend our ways. The forces at work are utterly indifferent to the narratives we attach to them. Like everything else, they are simply a chain of events. One damned thing after another. Our task is to understand how this chain is likely to unfold and uncover what, if anything, we can do to mitigate the damage.

    via On Europe: Tyler and I « Modeled Behavior.

    To which I replied: Again, love you and your work. But you are artificially narrowing the scope of inquiry to suit your biases and calling it truth rather than preference. A longer time preference would argue for different policies, lower fragility, and better individual planning. You have a shorter time preference which suits your bias toward redistribution and allowing increasing birth rates among the lower classes. The average European as a lower IQ than in 1850 for a reason. You are the reason. Actually women are — but you’re a product of that thinking. (Ashkenazim have remained constant from the medieval average, while Europeans have declined.) There are hard conceptual barriers at 105, 122 and 140. And the composition of a population determines its possible norms. Ideas have consequences. In particular, your ideas have consequences.

  • Karl Smith Watch: Learning From Fables

    Crises, however, are not fables. They do not exist to teach us lessons or help us learn to mend our ways. The forces at work are utterly indifferent to the narratives we attach to them. Like everything else, they are simply a chain of events. One damned thing after another. Our task is to understand how this chain is likely to unfold and uncover what, if anything, we can do to mitigate the damage.

    via On Europe: Tyler and I « Modeled Behavior.

    To which I replied: Again, love you and your work. But you are artificially narrowing the scope of inquiry to suit your biases and calling it truth rather than preference. A longer time preference would argue for different policies, lower fragility, and better individual planning. You have a shorter time preference which suits your bias toward redistribution and allowing increasing birth rates among the lower classes. The average European as a lower IQ than in 1850 for a reason. You are the reason. Actually women are — but you’re a product of that thinking. (Ashkenazim have remained constant from the medieval average, while Europeans have declined.) There are hard conceptual barriers at 105, 122 and 140. And the composition of a population determines its possible norms. Ideas have consequences. In particular, your ideas have consequences.

  • Paul Krugman Watch: Framing The Divide As Foolishness Rather Than Strategy Serves No One

    Paul Krugman writes that the right wing strategy is based on false principles. But he misses the point:

    There were some technical problems with my earlier post on GOP deficit phoniness, although not in any way that changes the message. So, here’s an update. I use the intermediate-cost estimate from CRFB (pdf) for the four Republican plans, and for consistency, I use CRFB’s own estimate (pdf) for Obama. … So it remains true that all of the proposals, except maybe Ron Paul’s (which contains huge and probably impossible spending cuts) would lead to higher deficits than Obama, based on a common assessment. … So let me rephrase my question: what conceivable evidence would convince people that supply-side magic doesn’t work?

    Paul, 1) The conservative strategy is to starve the beast as the only hope of preserving their freedom and their culture. In that context, their approach is entirely rational for Schumpeterian reasons: in the battle between the public intellectual who would undermine their culture, and the entrepreneur who would preserve it, they are funding the entrepreneur. Again, this is an entirely rational strategy. It is absolutely straightforward. Just as it is rationally Schumpeterian that the public intellectuals like yourself seek to fund the state. 2) There is no community of common interest in the country any longer. The combination of immigration, relocation, the dissolution of the family, and the consequential abandonment of traditional values by the lower classes, when combined with the evolution of technology that rewards those who can process and use abstract rules and principles has guaranteed a permanent and irreversible conflict of values. This is a religious conflict. This era is a battle of the communal religion of the secular state, and the aristocratic religion of the traditional classical liberals. The left’s strategy is to enable the lower classes to have a beneficent lifestyle. The right’s strategy is to constrain the reproductive ability of the lower classes and concentrate investment in the middle classes. Even if they must suffer hardship to obtain their political ends. There is nothing new about this conflict of visions. Its the female sentiment and male sentiment writ large. Progressive economists are terrible historians and worse political philosophers. You cannot have consensus on policy in a divided electorate. Arguing over technicalities is simply a self congratulatory distraction. I cannot tell whether you are intellectually honest. You are framing the debate under a false assumption that is contrary to the data. Since you’re doing that, it’s either an accident or an intentional misrepresentation. I don’t know which. But by falsely framing the discourse, you do a disservice as a public intellectual, and hinder the resolution of the underlying conflict. Demographically, your side will win within thirty years assuming there is no unforeseen change. But it will not because you convince anyone.

  • Paul Krugman Watch: Framing The Divide As Foolishness Rather Than Strategy Serves No One

    Paul Krugman writes that the right wing strategy is based on false principles. But he misses the point:

    There were some technical problems with my earlier post on GOP deficit phoniness, although not in any way that changes the message. So, here’s an update. I use the intermediate-cost estimate from CRFB (pdf) for the four Republican plans, and for consistency, I use CRFB’s own estimate (pdf) for Obama. … So it remains true that all of the proposals, except maybe Ron Paul’s (which contains huge and probably impossible spending cuts) would lead to higher deficits than Obama, based on a common assessment. … So let me rephrase my question: what conceivable evidence would convince people that supply-side magic doesn’t work?

    Paul, 1) The conservative strategy is to starve the beast as the only hope of preserving their freedom and their culture. In that context, their approach is entirely rational for Schumpeterian reasons: in the battle between the public intellectual who would undermine their culture, and the entrepreneur who would preserve it, they are funding the entrepreneur. Again, this is an entirely rational strategy. It is absolutely straightforward. Just as it is rationally Schumpeterian that the public intellectuals like yourself seek to fund the state. 2) There is no community of common interest in the country any longer. The combination of immigration, relocation, the dissolution of the family, and the consequential abandonment of traditional values by the lower classes, when combined with the evolution of technology that rewards those who can process and use abstract rules and principles has guaranteed a permanent and irreversible conflict of values. This is a religious conflict. This era is a battle of the communal religion of the secular state, and the aristocratic religion of the traditional classical liberals. The left’s strategy is to enable the lower classes to have a beneficent lifestyle. The right’s strategy is to constrain the reproductive ability of the lower classes and concentrate investment in the middle classes. Even if they must suffer hardship to obtain their political ends. There is nothing new about this conflict of visions. Its the female sentiment and male sentiment writ large. Progressive economists are terrible historians and worse political philosophers. You cannot have consensus on policy in a divided electorate. Arguing over technicalities is simply a self congratulatory distraction. I cannot tell whether you are intellectually honest. You are framing the debate under a false assumption that is contrary to the data. Since you’re doing that, it’s either an accident or an intentional misrepresentation. I don’t know which. But by falsely framing the discourse, you do a disservice as a public intellectual, and hinder the resolution of the underlying conflict. Demographically, your side will win within thirty years assuming there is no unforeseen change. But it will not because you convince anyone.

  • Liberty And Violence

    Liberty is purchased with the tip of a spear, the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun. It is maintained by a hard constitution, the common law, and the mastery of the violence required to prevent its subversion. Righteous indignation is litte more than sound and fury signifying nothing, and those who congratulate themselves on their conviction are merely hiding behind a facade of convenience and cowardice. Violence is a virtue not a vice. We lend our leaders our violence in exchange for liberty. If they do not give us our liberty we must take back our wealth of violence and use it until we can give it again to those who will.

  • Liberty And Violence

    Liberty is purchased with the tip of a spear, the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun. It is maintained by a hard constitution, the common law, and the mastery of the violence required to prevent its subversion. Righteous indignation is litte more than sound and fury signifying nothing, and those who congratulate themselves on their conviction are merely hiding behind a facade of convenience and cowardice. Violence is a virtue not a vice. We lend our leaders our violence in exchange for liberty. If they do not give us our liberty we must take back our wealth of violence and use it until we can give it again to those who will.