http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-s-zombie-banks-and-the-current-recession-by-daniel-grosEUROPE’S ZOMBIE BANKS
(Like Japan’s Zombie Corporations)
(Like American Zombie social programs.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-15 11:24:00 UTC
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-s-zombie-banks-and-the-current-recession-by-daniel-grosEUROPE’S ZOMBIE BANKS
(Like Japan’s Zombie Corporations)
(Like American Zombie social programs.)
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-15 11:24:00 UTC
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0983258406/ref=tsm_1_fb_lkFILLING THE HOLES IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT WILL KILL OFF POSTMODERNISM?
(Quote:)
“Showing that a [Postmodernism] leads to nihilism is an important part of understanding it, as is showing how a failing and nihilistic movement can still be dangerous.
“Tracing postmodernism’s roots back to Rousseau, Kant, and Marx explains how all of its elements came to be woven together. Yet identifying postmodernism’s roots and connecting them to contemporary bad consequences does not refute postmodernism. What is still needed is a refutation of those historical premises, and an identification and defense of the alternatives to them.
“The Enlightenment was based on premises opposite to those of postmodernism, but while the Enlightenment was able to create a magnificent world on the basis of those premises, it articulated and defended them only incompletely. That weakness is the sole source of postmodernism’s power against it.
“Completing the articulation and defense of those premises is therefore essential to maintaining the forward progress of the Enlightenment vision and shielding it against postmodern strategies.”
(FROM: Hicks, Stephen R. C. – Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault)
COMMENT
This is the last page of Stephen Hicks’ exceptionally accessible work on Postmodernism.
But for those in the Dark Enlightenment, and for those of us trying to articulate why the western social model produced the high trust society, and how we can preserve that high trust society against both the state and the errors of the enlightenment vision, that task is much harder than it sounds.
The reason being that we are not as marginally indifferent as the enlightenment philosophers argued. We are not separated by will and resource, but we are separated by ability, necessity, and preference, and that separation is irreconciliable with the institutions that the classical liberals gave us as an inheritance. We are saddled with multiple conflicts, and a rapidly diverging set of cultures, under an imperial bureaucracy, that is so well funded it is impossible to break, but equally impossible to use to cooperate.
Some of us are trying to develop institutions that will allow heterogeneous peoples with conflicting moral codes to cooperate as peacefully in the production of commons as they do in the market.
But the Postmodern vision is to empower tyranny in pursuit of a homogenous equalitarian utopia. which for the top and bottom may be attractive. But for the rest it is a net loss in all that we can desire, hope for and imagine.
SKEPTICISM
I am skeptical that it is at all possible to repair classical liberal institutions under representative majority rule. That system was invented to secure and hold power. But the question is, who will hold that power, and what will they do with it.
That is even more frightening than another dark age created by yet another version of an irrational religion.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-13 06:50:00 UTC
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/07/08/horror-story-rude-awakening-awaits-western-economies/LIKE I SAID: NO STAR TREK 🙂
A horror story instead. The new normal: Its normal.
A series of windfalls is a series of accidents. And the USA has had many windfalls.
We thought windfalls were a new normal that was the result of our virtues. We built a social, political and economic system that cannot meet its promises.
Now we pay the price for boomer idiocy.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/07/08/horror-story-rude-awakening-awaits-western-economies/?mod=WSJBlog
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-09 04:14:00 UTC
THE LONG TERM IMPACT OF DYSGENIC REPRODUCTION ON ECONOMICS AND NORMS UNDER DEMOCRACY
(Work in progress.)
If under manorialism, the breeding rate of the underclass is suppressed while the middle class increases, and under consumer capitalism, and redistributive socialism, the middle class suppresses its reproduction while the lower class increases its reproduction, in the aggregate we should see declines in middle class traits and increases in lower class traits.
The social classes under consumer capitalism sort even more effectively than under agrarianism due to the flexibility of labor and movement.
The social class distribution is highly correlated.with IQ. The beneficial distribution of british IQ for example is limited to the british middle class and there is very little rotation in and out of that class. Given that intelligence regresses toward the mean, in-class reproduction must be in place.
While the flynn effect appears to produce a demonstrated improvement in test taking because of the universal environmental presence of scientific knowledge, it also appears that northern europeans should have been on par with askenazim only 150 years ago, but due to a return to unconstrained breeding, and highly constrained breeding in the middle and upper middle classes under consumer capitalism and social democracy, that we are in fact, in the aggregate, six or so points “dumber”. Which is approaching one half of a standard deviation in intelligence: 7.5 points. This fact correlates with the reproductive rates of the classes. Which is why Flynn has been investigating it and writing about it.
Now the reasons that I care are:
1) Corruption increases rapidly aggregate IQ declines. So does mysticism.
2) It appears that it requires an IQ of about 105 to articulate ideas or repair a machine.
3) Any norms in any society are dependent upon the distribution of ability to adopt them. Rationalism cannot exist or function as a norm if there are insufficient numbers of people capable of rationalism.
4) Under the “Pareto rule if thumb”, 1% of people create all the marginal value and 19% propagate that idea, and that 20% controls 80% of the property and resources in the society. As such the distribution of ability of that group must stay above 105 in order to maintain the high trust society, which is the source of the western economic advantage in risk taking.
5) it appears that the benefit of industrialization has been equilibrated – been fully utilized. It appears that vast numbers if people mist subsist on service jobs. It appears that while aggregate human intelligence was wasted on the farm and enabled by industrialization, that the 105, and perhaps 110 levels are downward limits to calculative ability, and all jobs in society of value require calculation “that which we cannot sense without measurements and formulae as a proxy”.
6) People demonstrate that they overwhelmingly prefer to reproduce, associate and work in homogenous groups by race, class and culture – except at the margins. Further, these groups maintain their own identities, mythologies and signaling economies, such that in group status signals are discounted cost in relation to out-group status signals. And the vote that way. As competing blocks seeking status. (Rents). Furthermore the distribution if ability in these groups means that reproductive rates under consumer capitalism, social status, economic productivity, and opportunity will increase in friction.
7) for these reasons, diversity decreases trust and increases the scope of the state under democracy. (Unlike under parliamentary nationalist monarchy. )
In other words we aren’t insulated by our sentience from evolutionary biology. And the net result is indeed “dysgenic”, conflict inducing, and a threat to the goal of a positive egalitarian society.
The only evidence we have suggests that small homogenous states in grat variety will allow us to produce through cultural competition what political cooperation will actually prevent.
Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 07:21:00 UTC
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139464/j-bradford-delong/the-second-great-depressionFINALLY THE LEFT CALLS THIS THE SECOND GREAT DEPRESSION.
sigh.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-25 14:00:00 UTC
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/emerging-markets-hitting-a-wall.htmlTHE PROGRESSIVE VISION WILL NEVER COME TO FRUITION
Because it cant.
Industrialization is over.
The world will be divided like spain and catalonia. The northeast and the heartland. West and east ukraine. Protestant and catholic europe.
Logic would suggest nation states return to city states but the military value of debt, and strategic value of resources will prevent it.
These increases in economic diversity will continue to expand.
—–
“Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, refers to the internationalization of the supply chain as “globalization’s second unbundling.”
“He sees the new world as one of “development enclaves,” in which parts of countries will stand out as advanced or wealthy, without fundamentally transforming the entire economy.”
See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/emerging-markets-hitting-a-wall.html?
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-23 07:46:00 UTC
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57589534-71/woz-this-is-not-my-america/STEVE WOZNIAK AGREES
“This is not my America”
That’s right Steve. That’s why I left.
Let’s see.
1) The IRS can take over your entire life by fiat if you make paper profits that you will never see, but you can walk into the country and become a dead weight on the rest of us without penalty.
2) If you are a white male you are assumed to be a defacto white collar criminal, prone to violence, a nascent sexual predator, and you resist the assumption that the purpose of your life is to be a source of funds for vampire females. 🙂
3) The government can invade your privacy without limit or recourse – they can storm your house and kill you and your pets at will. They can sieze your home and your bank accounts without juridical defense.
Anything can be justified as the ‘common good’. Thats why the ‘common good’ is never a reason allow the state to do anything. All rights are property rights, and only property rights can be rights. Therefore without property rights you have no rights. – period.
The common good is just a license for tyranny.
There is no common good.
Because there is no ‘We’ in “Diversity’.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-17 04:13:00 UTC
http://www.france24.com/en/20130608-assange-us-rule-law-suffering-calamitous-collapseAMERICAN RULE OF LAW SUFFERING CALAMITOUS COLLAPSE
Well, that started when the liberals undermined the constitution through the 14th amendment. At that point, we lost rule of law. It’s just taken this long to go from originalism: the constitution is a binding legal document – to ‘it’s a living document’ which is code for, it means whatever we want it to mean – to it’s a guideline for us, but a democratically elected government can pass any law it desires to – to there is no law, only whatever we can get away with.
Source date (UTC): 2013-06-09 08:43:00 UTC
http://cnsnews.com/blog/terence-p-jeffrey/obamas-america-will-become-detroitLOOK AT THE STATISTICS IN THIS ARTICLE ON DETROIT
This is our future.
Source date (UTC): 2013-05-14 00:02:00 UTC
http://potlatch.typepad.com/weblog/2013/04/brezhnev-capitalism.htmlREAD IT. READ SCHUMPETER. READ HOPPE.
We do know what to do next.
Propertarian reasoning tells us this: Civilizations collapse when a sufficient number of people urbanize that the systems of calculation and incentive are no longer capable of functioning as an information system for the purpose of managing scarce resources.
Davies’ post correctly identifies the financialization of our civilization under Keynesianism as the threat. Even if he does not know that THE PROBLEM OF SOLVING CALCULATION AND INCENTIVE ALONG WITH REDISTRIBUTION IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE.
Source date (UTC): 2013-05-11 09:51:00 UTC