I would count clubbing as not lost time too, if I had done any. I haven’t. Not even one seal.
– Guy Herbert.
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September 20th, 2010 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Paul Krugman is often described as a winner of the Noble Prize for economics – Mr Noble set up no such prize, but let that slide (after all good people have sometimes been awarded this prize over the years). However, he is in fact not an economist at all – he is just someone who is called an “economist” because he has the position of “Professor of Economics” at a university (as if a job title describes knowledge). Paul Krugman has for decades sneered at the idea that economics is about reason and logic – that it is (as the “Austrian School” claims) an a priori subject. On the contrary, Paul Krugman claims that economics is an empirical subject – all about understanding empirical evidence and making predictions. The links given in this Cafe Hayek featured article show that Paul Krugman does not understand empirical evidence and makes predictions that are wildly wrong – i.e., by his own definition, he is not an economist. Of course there is an alternative view: This would be that Paul Krugman does have some grasp of economics – but chooses to support an ever more interventionist government for reasons of political ideology, in spite of the economic harm he knows such a line of policy will cause. For example, Paul Krugman does not predict that the Obama “Stimulus” spending orgy will succeed (on top, please remember, of all the wild “Stimulus” spending by President Bush) – on the contrary Paul Krugman admits the “Stimulus” absurdity will fail – however he claims that this is because it is not big enough. Almost a trillion Dollars is “not enough” – and however many trillions of Dollars were spent it would still be “not enough”. Any failure of statism is explained away as the result of there not being enough statism. Would anyone still like to claim that Paul Krugman is an economist? September 20th, 2010 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is a new film out, with a fairly strong, leftie vibe about it, called Made in Dagenham, celebrating the campaign by women factory workers in the late 1960s to get the same pay as their male counterparts. It sounds such a self-evidently just cause that no doubt any film-goers will come out of the cinema nodding to themselves about the rightness of the cause and the evil of the chauvinist, exploiter bastards who presided over the previous, unjust state of affairs. Throw in lots of period costumes and some nice background music and this is a sort of feelgood movie, in a way. The trouble is, as I suspect readers will tell, is that the situation is not quite as simple as all that. As Tim Worstall occasionally likes to point out, a lot of the supposed injustice involved in lower pay for women for doing the same jobs as men has a perfectly rational basis, however politically unpalatable it might be to say so. Here is another one of his articles over in the Guardian (brave man, is Tim). In part, it is worth remembering that in the far more unionised labour market of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, a lot of the resistence to women entering the workforce to do the same work as men came from male trade union members, not from the firms. And companies, realising that many women are as talented, if not a damn sight more so, than the men, obviously realised that they could attract such workers willing to work for a slightly lower wage than their male counterparts. Outside unionised businesses, such a difference was likely to be even more marked. It reminds me of the fact that the labour movement, with such features like the closed shop, has often been at odds with the Left’s alleged concerns for things such as equality between the sexes and races. I would be interested to know if this aspect of the labour movement comes out in the film. I suspect that, absent labour market restrictions such as closed shops and other deliberate barriers to entry, women’s pay would have approached that of the men much faster than it did, but for reasons adduced by the likes of Tim Worstall, there will remain gaps which cannot be blamed on the free market. September 20th, 2010 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
I knew next to nothing about this woman but if the statist right and left attack someone as hard as they have her, I get a strong suspicion I might like her a lot. Listen to this interview of her on Pajamas TV before the primary which she has handily won. Make up your own mind. She certainly hits the Austrian economics and small government buttons in my soul. Libertarians need to get behind this woman in November. If you are in Delaware, volunteer. You can make a really big difference for a small amount of effort. The media are going to attack her mercilessly. In no time at all the MSM will be telling us horror stories about the loathsome habits of her pet fish (if she has any). Consider this your inoculation against them. If I can forgive her for belonging to a clan that warred with one side of my family (the O’Neill’s) centuries ago, so can you! I just have to add this Firefly clip noted by Glenn Reynold: September 20th, 2010 | 154 comments - (Comments are closed)
An honest leftie? In the American MEDIA? Who’d a thunked it!
True enough. September 19th, 2010 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
This is an idea with logical force, many practical attractions and great philosophical appeal. It is courageous. It is clever. It stands, in short, no chance of success. – Matthew Parris, underlining that practical politics runs on interest, not intellect. September 19th, 2010 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
The author of this article, “An alternative to the new wave of ecofascism”, Micah White, is rightly horrified by the ideas of Pentti Linkola. Note that the url of that link, which seems supportive of Linkola although I do not know if it is his own, describes him as an ecofascist. The page of quotations seems to back up that description fairly well, and it will not come as a surprise to readers of this blog that Mr Linkola advocates that we learn alike from “the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades.” It is sad, then, that Micah White’s own article, though certainly expressing nicer opinions than Mr Linkola’s, itself advocates the suppression of speech that Mr White does not like. Emphasis added in the following quotes:
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September 18th, 2010 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Once you accept the practical necessity of relying heavily on second hand information, you have to modify your view of what a reasonable person would believe to take account of what those around him believed. If you have no training in science and your only information on biotech comes from the popular press, it may not be obvious that a story on mice with human brains cannot be right. If you have devoted your time, energy, and intelligence to living your own life, doing your job, dealing with those around you, it isn’t all that unreasonable to accept as truth what those around you believe about wider issues less directly observed, such as the existence of God or the weakness of the case for evolution. What applies not only to people in the past who couldn’t have known the evidence for evolution but to people in the present who could have but in all probability don’t. I long ago concluded that most people who say they do believe in evolution, like most who say they don’t, are going mostly on faith. As I pointed out in a post some years back, many of those who say they believe in evolution, most notably people left of center, have no difficulty rejecting even its most obvious implications when those clash with their ideology.” David Friedman, speculating on what is the right way to decide if a person is, or is not, a nutcase. September 18th, 2010 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Oh, it’ll change. We must always strive to avoid the common misconception that we live at the end of history. Humanity has a very long time ahead. In the shorter term, there will be a reaction against the current hegemony. The key thing for us now is to strive to be the ideologists of it when it happens; last time that role was grabbed by the marxists. We’ll win this thing one day. Not next week. But we will win. We will win because liberalism is the only ideology compatible with sustainable advanced civilisation; all the competing ideologies, of Left and Right, are holdovers from more primitive social/technological stages of existence. We may never see it (but we may; history moves faster than we think) but our descendants surely will. Without running away anywhere. – Redoubtable serial commenter Ian B September 17th, 2010 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jeff Randall states the bleedin’ obvious…
The lunatics took over the asylum many years ago and all that has changed is that a different bunch of lunatics are in charge now. How could anyone have expected anything else from someone like that jackanapes Cameron? Moreover he has been making the fact he never intended to shrink the state perfectly clear to anyone who has actually been paying attention for quite some time.  September 17th, 2010 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Asks Virginia Postrel in this article. Yes, there are public policy issues involved – such as the declining ratio of workers vs retirees in many developed countries – but she gives a typically constructive, even optimistic take on the issue. Recommended. September 17th, 2010 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
Watching the re-make of Battlestar Galactica I came across a thought-experiment in practical ethics that seems to me far more interesting than the rather trite runaway-train examples I knew from university ethics classes. The situation for the thought-experiment is this: The last remnants of the human race are fleeing their robotic exterminators. Owing to what the (human) military commander perceives as a poor tactical decision, the lawfully-elected civilian President has been incarcerated and martial law has been declared. With the support of civilian and enlisted sympathisers, the President has escaped immediate custody and is on the point of disappearing into hiding amongst the populace, supposedly accompanied by her immediate staff and a few abettors amongst the military. Up until this point, by the nature of television drama, the focus has been on the President herself and senior military officers, both sympathetic and antagonistic. At the last moment, however, it is made clear that even flunkies and acting extras have an independent moral choice, when the President’s principal aide unexpectedly reveals his personal moral dilemma. “Madam President. I understand what you’re trying to do…but, it’s going to divide the fleet. At the very best it’s going to create an insurgency against [the military commander]; at the worst, civil war. Taking part in that is a line that I will not cross.” This strikes me as troubling, but far from unrealistic. I am genuinely unsure what is the morally correct action here. For the sake of this thought experiment, let us accept without question the idea that our protagonist fully believes the President is the rightful and best leader for the human race. Let us assume he is convinced that the best outcome, both morally and practically, would be for the military dictator to quietly step aside and reinstate the President. Let us also assume he genuinely believes that that will not happen, and that internal opposition will materially reduce the prospects of survival for the remainder of the human race. If we left it at that, most people would agree that he had no choice but to submit to the military in the interests of the survival of our species. However, this character is clearly thoughtful and reasonable, so let us add in another opportunity for dilemma. Let us suppose, as is strongly hinted at, albeit not explicitly stated in this drama, that although he genuinely believes all the above, he recognises the possibility that he might be wrong. This creates a genuinely realistic and sophisticated moral dilemma. His best outcome would be for the President’s insurrection to be swiftly and painlessly successful. The worst outcome would be a protracted civil war. Should he give precedence to his admittedly fallible assessment of the President’s chances, betray her, side with the military dictator he considers illegitimate, in order to swiftly put down the President’s opposition, in the hope of avoiding the total destruction of humanity at the cost of casting humanity into autarky for the foreseeable future? Or in the alternative, would it be better to be true to his convictions and back the President, in the hope of preserving a free society, even though he believed that in doing so he was placing the survival of our species at greater risk, but recognised that he might be in error in this assessment? In short, the question is not the commonly poses but simplistic one of “should the moral or the pragmatic choice prevail?” but its more sophisticated child: “Given uncertainty about the future, should we cleave to moral certainty despite grave fears of the likely outcome, or betray our preferences for fear of utter calamity?” To me, these ten seconds in Battlestar Galactica seem far more interesting than almost anything in my undergraduate ethics course. But if this seems too obscure, or too adolescent, treat this posting instead simply as a comment that there is more serious ethical debate in ten seconds of a popular commercial sci-fi drama than in a month of ‘Newsnight’ interviews. September 16th, 2010 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
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