It was not just Madison’s personality that was deceptive; everything about his political ideology seemed to point to a man who disparaged strong leadership and bold action. Madison had been the single strongest proponent of the embargo as an alternative to military confrontation; as secretary of state he had talked Jefferson into it, clung to it through all its inconsistencies, defended it even when the tide of Republican party feeling rose against it and repeal became inevitable. Even when Albert Gallatin had concluded that all America had accomplished with its weakly enforced trade restrictions was to parade its pusillanimity before the world—“I had rather encounter war itself than to display our impotence to enforce our laws,” he had conceded to Madison in 1808—Madison clung to a belief that his policy of peaceful coercion would ultimately bring Britain to relent. In his public writings he had always been true to the Jeffersonian article of faith on the inherent evil of war, not so much because of the destruction and killing that war entailed but because of the threat it posed to liberty at home. “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded,” Madison wrote in 1795 in his Political Observations. “War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”
Saturday, February 29, 2020
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 89.
When claimed expertise is a mask for a lucrative business that produces no benefits
Apparently John Gottman is the Bees Knees of marriage counseling. He has done decades of research. He is widely cited. He is commercially successful.
He knows what he is talking about. He is the expert on fact-based marriage counseling.
Or not. From The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, a book review by Scott Alexander.
Another case of a self-appointed expert who is at best mistaken and at worst a con artist widely accepted by those in a position to know better. The core claim by John Gottman which Alexander is examining:
Most critically, regardless of what Gottman claims and what he thinks his research shows, when examined and tested by independent third-parties there is a big gap between claim and evidence.
He knows what he is talking about. He is the expert on fact-based marriage counseling.
Or not. From The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, a book review by Scott Alexander.
Another case of a self-appointed expert who is at best mistaken and at worst a con artist widely accepted by those in a position to know better. The core claim by John Gottman which Alexander is examining:
After years of research…I am now able to predict whether a couple will stay happily together or lose their way. I can make this prediction after listening to the couple interact in our Love Lab for as little as five minutes! My accuracy rate in these predictions averages 91 percent over three separate studies. In other words, in 91 percent of the cases where I have predicted that a couple’s marriage would eventually fail or succeed, time has proven me right. These predictions are not based on my intuition or preconceived notions of what marriage “should” be, but on the data I’ve accumulated over years of study.91% is impressively high and impressively precise. But is it impressively accurate?
Richard Heyman published the definitive paper on this in 2001, The Hazards Of Predicting Divorce Without Crossvalidation (kudos to Laurie Abraham of Slate, the only one of the journalists covering Gottman to find and mention this, and my source for some of the following). Heyman notes that Gottman doesn’t predict divorce at all. He postdicts it. He gets 100 (or however many) couples, sees how many divorced, and then finds a set of factors that explain what happened.Despite Gottman's claims about his knowledge, research, and expertise, its all nonsense and it has all the appearances that Gottman knows that it is nonsense.
Confused about the difference between prediction and postdiction? It’s a confusing concept, but let me give an example, loosely based on this Wikipedia article. The following rule accurately matches the results of every US presidential election since 1932: the incumbent party will win the election if and only if the Washington Redskins won their last home game before the election – unless the incumbent is black or the challenger attended a Central European boarding school, in which case it will lose.
In common language, we might say that this rule “predicts” the last 22 presidential elections, in the sense that knowing the rule and the Redskins’ record, we can generate the presidential winners. But really it doesn’t predict anything – there’s no reason to think any future presidential elections will follow the rule. It’s just somebody looking to see what things coincidentally matched information that we already have. This is properly called postdiction – finding rules that describe things we already know.
Postdictive ability often implies predictive ability. If I read over hospital records and find that only immunodeficient people caught a certain virus, I might conclude I’ve found a natural law – the virus only infects immunodeficient people – and predict that the pattern will continue in the future.
But this isn’t always true. Sometimes, especially when you’re using small datasets with lots of variables, you get predictive rules that work very well, not because they describe natural laws, but just by coincidence. It’s coincidence that the Redskins’ win-loss record matches presidential elections, and with n = 22 datapoints, you’re almost certain to get some coincidences like that.
Even an honest attempt to use plausible variables to postdict a large dataset will give you a prediction rule that’s a combination of real natural law and spurious coincidence. So you’re not allowed to claim a certain specific level of predictive ability until you’ve used your rule to predict out-of-training-data events. Gottman didn’t do this.
In his paper, Heyman creates a divorce prediction algorithm out of basic demographic data: husband and wife’s education level, employment status, etc. He is able to achieve 90% predictive success on the training data – nearly identical to Gottman’s 91% – without any of Gottman’s hard work. No making the couples spend days in a laboratory and counting up how many times they use I-statements. No monitoring their blood pressure as they gaze into each other’s eyes. Heyman never met any of his couples at all, let along analyzed their interaction patterns. And he did just as well as Gottman did at predicting divorce (technically he predicted low scores on a measure of marital stability; his dataset did not include divorce outcomes).
Then he applied his prediction rule to out-of-sample couples. Accuracy dropped to 70%. We have no reason not to think Gottman’s accuracy would drop at the same rate. But 70% is around the accuracy you get if you predict nobody will divorce. It’s little better than chance, and all of Gottman’s claims to be a master divorce predictor are totally baseless.
Most critically, regardless of what Gottman claims and what he thinks his research shows, when examined and tested by independent third-parties there is a big gap between claim and evidence.
What happens when people who aren’t Gottman evaluate the Gottman method? A large government-funded multicenter study testing a Gottman curriculum as well as several others found no effect of any on marital outcomes; control couples actually stayed together slightly more than ones who got marriage counseling. The Gottman curriculum seemed to do worst of the three curricula studied, although there were no statistical tests performed to prove it. I have no explanation for this.Alexander is usually pretty good at sorting wheat from chaff and he takes a lot of time and effort to discover what is true versus what is simply cognitive pollution.
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities— We cannot speak.
From Songs and Satires by Edgar Lee Masters
Silence
by Edgar Lee Masters
I have known the silence of the stars and of the sea,
And the silence of the city when it pauses,
And the silence of a man and a maid,
And the silence for which music alone finds the word,
And the silence of the woods before the winds of spring begin,
And the silence of the sick
When their eyes roam about the room.
And I ask: For the depths
Of what use is language?
A beast of the field moans a few times
When death takes its young:
And we are voiceless in the presence of realities—
We cannot speak.
A curious boy asks an old soldier
Sitting in front of the grocery store,
"How did you lose your leg?"
And the old soldier is struck with silence,
Or his mind flies away,
Because he cannot concentrate it on Gettysburg.
It comes back jocosely
And he says, "A bear bit it off."
And the boy wonders, while the old soldier
Dumbly, feebly lives over
The flashes of guns, the thunder of cannon,
The shrieks of the slain,
And himself lying on the ground,
And the hospital surgeons, the knives,
And the long days in bed.
But if he could describe it all
He would be an artist.
But if he were an artist there would be deeper wounds
Which he could not describe.
There is the silence of a great hatred,
And the silence of a great love,
And the silence of a deep peace of mind,
And the silence of an embittered friendship.
There is the silence of a spiritual crisis,
Through which your soul, exquisitely tortured,
Comes with visions not to be uttered
Into a realm of higher life.
And the silence of the gods who understand each other without speech.
There is the silence of defeat
There is the silence of those unjustly punished;
And the silence of the dying whose hand
Suddenly grips yours.
There is the silence between father and son,
When the father cannot explain his life,
Even though he be misunderstood for it.
There is the silence that comes between husband and wife.
There is the silence of those who have failed;
And the vast silence that covers
Broken nations and vanquished leaders.
There is the silence of Lincoln,
Thinking of the poverty of his youth.
And the silence of Napoleon
After Waterloo.
And the silence of Jeanne d'Arc
Saying amid the flames, "Blessed Jesus"—
Revealing in two words all sorrow, all hope.
And there is the silence of age,
Too full of wisdom for the tongue to utter it
In words intelligible to those who have not lived
The great range of life.
And there is the silence of the dead.
If we who are in life cannot speak
Of profound experiences,
Why do you marvel that the dead
Do not tell you of death?
Their silence shall be interpreted
As we approach them.
I see wonderful things
Natural selection builds mechanisms that human engineers still struggle to match. Exhibit A: The neural structures underpinning head stabilization in this hawk. (Head stabilization has the same function as image stabilization in cameras: to maintain a steady view despite motion.) pic.twitter.com/G5fGDdJrdk
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) February 2, 2020
Friday, February 28, 2020
But I would much rather be in bed.
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 89.
At his inaugural ball the new president looked “spiritless and exhausted,” thought Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of the editor of the National Intelligencer and a keen early observer of Washington society. Jefferson was beaming, happy to pass on the office to a trusted colleague, but even happier to be formally free of the burdens of the job he had all but abdicated since the election, letting decisions drift as his eight-year policy of economic resistance to British outrages collapsed about him. When the managers of the ball appeared at the new president’s side to ask him to stay to supper, he wanly assented, then turned to Mrs. Smith and blurted out, “But I would much rather be in bed.”.
Free forums of expression spice up tired old chestnuts
Heh.
Some time ago I saw this posted from some simplistic thinker trying to score points with a cartoon rendering of a complex issue.
Click to enlarge.
OK fair enough. It is an old and tired Marxist kind of point but always worth a discussion if necessary. The key thing to notice is that the way the issue is framed constrains the possible solutions. There is an unstated implication that this is a problem for "someone" to solve. I.e. it almost mandates a coercive response by some authority, central or otherwise.
Classical Liberals and libertarians, more versed in public choice, economics, and in governance theory, would likely want to shift the frame towards - "What is the problem to be solved, who wishes to solve it, what are they willing to give up in order to solve it, and who has the agreed authority to resolve it?"
And sure enough someone eventually issues the call to look at this differently.
And in classic good humor, people do. Offering the positive framing
Click to enlarge.
As well as the more reality based framing
Click to enlarge.
If we are going to philosophy in social media and cartoons, this is actually kind of an entertaining way to do it.
Some time ago I saw this posted from some simplistic thinker trying to score points with a cartoon rendering of a complex issue.
OK fair enough. It is an old and tired Marxist kind of point but always worth a discussion if necessary. The key thing to notice is that the way the issue is framed constrains the possible solutions. There is an unstated implication that this is a problem for "someone" to solve. I.e. it almost mandates a coercive response by some authority, central or otherwise.
Classical Liberals and libertarians, more versed in public choice, economics, and in governance theory, would likely want to shift the frame towards - "What is the problem to be solved, who wishes to solve it, what are they willing to give up in order to solve it, and who has the agreed authority to resolve it?"
And sure enough someone eventually issues the call to look at this differently.
Would like to hear the libertarian/paleoconservative response to this. Equality vs Equity @ThomasEWoods @mises @RepThomasMassie pic.twitter.com/t2z8pDgnET
— 🔥 iroots.org (@irootsorg) February 17, 2020
And in classic good humor, people do. Offering the positive framing
As well as the more reality based framing
If we are going to philosophy in social media and cartoons, this is actually kind of an entertaining way to do it.
I see wonderful things
Why women live longer than men pic.twitter.com/GjMrUcaw7s
— Women Live Longer (@Hadtwohurt) January 31, 2020
Research - where would we be without it
Sexist men rated women with larger (D cup) breast sizes as more attractive. https://t.co/HmwbALrRuD pic.twitter.com/XGlyD9cImi
— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) February 28, 2020
Culture as the antidote to a spiral of corruption.
A rule of thumb which has been hard to measure and difficult to empirically validate but usefully true nonetheless - the more regulation, the more corruption. A paper attempts an analysis. From Does Greater Regulatory Burden Lead to More Corruption? Evidence Using Firm-Level Survey Data for Developing Countries by Mohammad Amin and Yew Chong Soh. From the Abstract.
I would love to see a similar type study at the city level in the US. As rich and prosperous as we are, my suspicion is that we might be 10-30% richer simply through regulatory reform, simplification and reduction of corruption at the city level.
Cities are disproportionate contributors to efficiency and therefore prosperity. Cities tend also to be disproportionate generators of crippling regulatory burdens which in turn breed corruption, strategic and tactical, personal and institutional.
There is a central paradox which makes corruption difficult to stamp out except by public morals.
The more money and power is concentrated within the state, the broader and deeper the spectrum of personal and institutional interests there are who wish to establish protected rents via government capacity to create regulatory protections. The justification is always in public interest terms.
Hopefully a reasonably neutral example - A green group advocates that every property development or land use change in city limits requires an environmental impact statement which costs $10,000. You can tell a good story about why this might be a good idea. The second order consequences are easy to ignore.
The reasonably direct corruption is that most environmental studies are done by allies of environmentalists. Environmental impact companies have a strong motivation to fund the campaign of environmentalists because the regulation will create a much larger and more stable demand for their services. They are seeking rents via well-intentioned regulation.
Obviously there is a direct but incidental corruption arising from this new regulation. However, the indirect costs are much harder to see but likely much more consequential.
On the demand side, in general, an additional charge of $10,000 to a $500,000 home will not have nearly as large a suppression on demand as will a charge of $10,000 on a home that costs $100,000 to build. The demand elasticity impact of a 10% increase in cost versus a 2% cost increase is much more consequential.
Therefore, such a regulation creates direct corruption by increasing market demand for something that is coercively imposed. It creates an indirect corruption by effectively subsidizing the high end home segment of the market and dramatically constricting demand for the low cost home market. You want housing inequality? Require an environmental impact statement.
The third order corruption arises when homeowners and property speculators begin circumventing the requirement for an environmental impact statement by either bribing the state inspectors or by resorting to low cost providers of environmental impact statements who may actually only be creating the certificate of statement rather than actually doing the environmental impact work itself.
The fourth order effect effect is to reduce small builders from the market (their finances are more fragile and they re less able to bear the burden of additional regulatory costs compared to the big, well-financed firms.
A fifth order effect is to start a new round of regulation in order to address the negative consequences of the first round of regulation. In this instance, the relative cost impact consequences of an environment impact statement reshape market demand so that poor people are forced out of the residential market. Complaints about an absence of affordable housing leads to either demands for rent control or to affordable housing set asides to big developers.
On ad infinitum the circles of corruption and unintended cost consequences spreads wider and wider with no one seeing or acknowledging the aggregating cost and failure. All because of a plausibly well-intended regulation. Everyone see the plausibility and rationale of the regulation and no one acknowledges the costs. The stakes are high and the money is there. Corruption and failure follows.
It seems to me that the states with the highest regulatory burdens also have the highest corruption levels and that in turn drives lower economic growth, productivity, higher resident exodus rates, etc.
The regulations seem like a good idea and no one is gauche enough to acknowledge the costs except gauche free-market enthusiasts, fringe small-government enthusiasts, etc.
The system of corruption incentives drives itself into the ground unless constrained by a strong shared framework of bourgeoise values such as integrity, thrift, responsibility, transparency, diligence, work ethic and the like. Things hard to legislate but absolutely critical to constraining the corruption cycle.
Regulation often creates opportunities for public officials to extract bribes. If this is true, deregulation offers a simple way to combat corruption. However, empirical evidence on the corruption and regulation nexus is limited. Further, the corruption indices used are based on experts' opinions, which may suffer from perception bias. The present paper attempts to address these shortcomings using firm-level survey data for 131 mostly developing countries on the experiences of the firms with bribery and regulatory burden. Exploiting within-country and industry-level variation in regulatory burden, the analysis finds a large, positive effect of regulatory burden on corruption. For the baseline results, the bribery rate is higher by about 0.03 percentage point for each percentage point increase in the regulatory burden. The finding is robust to several endogeneity checks.A lot of room for debate and quibbling but useful to have even preliminary data supporting what seems to be experientially patently true.
I would love to see a similar type study at the city level in the US. As rich and prosperous as we are, my suspicion is that we might be 10-30% richer simply through regulatory reform, simplification and reduction of corruption at the city level.
Cities are disproportionate contributors to efficiency and therefore prosperity. Cities tend also to be disproportionate generators of crippling regulatory burdens which in turn breed corruption, strategic and tactical, personal and institutional.
There is a central paradox which makes corruption difficult to stamp out except by public morals.
The more money and power is concentrated within the state, the broader and deeper the spectrum of personal and institutional interests there are who wish to establish protected rents via government capacity to create regulatory protections. The justification is always in public interest terms.
Hopefully a reasonably neutral example - A green group advocates that every property development or land use change in city limits requires an environmental impact statement which costs $10,000. You can tell a good story about why this might be a good idea. The second order consequences are easy to ignore.
The reasonably direct corruption is that most environmental studies are done by allies of environmentalists. Environmental impact companies have a strong motivation to fund the campaign of environmentalists because the regulation will create a much larger and more stable demand for their services. They are seeking rents via well-intentioned regulation.
Obviously there is a direct but incidental corruption arising from this new regulation. However, the indirect costs are much harder to see but likely much more consequential.
On the demand side, in general, an additional charge of $10,000 to a $500,000 home will not have nearly as large a suppression on demand as will a charge of $10,000 on a home that costs $100,000 to build. The demand elasticity impact of a 10% increase in cost versus a 2% cost increase is much more consequential.
Therefore, such a regulation creates direct corruption by increasing market demand for something that is coercively imposed. It creates an indirect corruption by effectively subsidizing the high end home segment of the market and dramatically constricting demand for the low cost home market. You want housing inequality? Require an environmental impact statement.
The third order corruption arises when homeowners and property speculators begin circumventing the requirement for an environmental impact statement by either bribing the state inspectors or by resorting to low cost providers of environmental impact statements who may actually only be creating the certificate of statement rather than actually doing the environmental impact work itself.
The fourth order effect effect is to reduce small builders from the market (their finances are more fragile and they re less able to bear the burden of additional regulatory costs compared to the big, well-financed firms.
A fifth order effect is to start a new round of regulation in order to address the negative consequences of the first round of regulation. In this instance, the relative cost impact consequences of an environment impact statement reshape market demand so that poor people are forced out of the residential market. Complaints about an absence of affordable housing leads to either demands for rent control or to affordable housing set asides to big developers.
On ad infinitum the circles of corruption and unintended cost consequences spreads wider and wider with no one seeing or acknowledging the aggregating cost and failure. All because of a plausibly well-intended regulation. Everyone see the plausibility and rationale of the regulation and no one acknowledges the costs. The stakes are high and the money is there. Corruption and failure follows.
It seems to me that the states with the highest regulatory burdens also have the highest corruption levels and that in turn drives lower economic growth, productivity, higher resident exodus rates, etc.
The regulations seem like a good idea and no one is gauche enough to acknowledge the costs except gauche free-market enthusiasts, fringe small-government enthusiasts, etc.
The system of corruption incentives drives itself into the ground unless constrained by a strong shared framework of bourgeoise values such as integrity, thrift, responsibility, transparency, diligence, work ethic and the like. Things hard to legislate but absolutely critical to constraining the corruption cycle.
Thursday, February 27, 2020
He worked best not merely in committee but in secret
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 88.
James Madison was an easy man to underestimate. At five foot four, the fourth president of the United States stood a foot shorter than Washington or Jefferson and weighed little over a hundred pounds. He habitually dressed in sober black, which made more than one observer think of “a schoolteacher dressed up for a funeral.”30 More comfortable in his own company than in society, given to hypochondriac anxieties about his nerves and health, he was forty-four before he again summoned his courage to approach a woman after having been jilted twelve years earlier on his very first attempt. Even on this second try he had sent Aaron Burr to act as an intermediary, to inquire if the twenty-seven-year-old widow Dolley Payne Todd might be interested in him. To his infinite relief she was, and they made a devoted if odd couple, she enthusiastically fulfilling the social duties that he always dreaded.
Madison had a thorough and logical mind; he was able to master the most complex subjects, develop ideas, invest countless hours writing and rewriting; but as the historian Garry Wills observed, he always preferred to let others get the attention: “He worked best not merely in committee but in secret.” He was the anonymous voice of the most persuasive papers of The Federalist that rallied public opinion in favor of the Constitution, the unnamed author of pamphlets that bolstered Jefferson’s presidency; he had even ghostwritten George Washington’s first inaugural address, the House’s reply to Washington’s address, and then Washington’s thank-you reply to the House. He had, said political friends and enemies alike, the naivety of a man who, unacquainted with the world, works out the perfect solution at his desk and is baffled when the world does not agree.
Best of the Bee
Grizzly Bear Shatters All Pro Wrestling Records After Identifying As Human https://t.co/WTVNdHR72J
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 26, 2020
UPDATE: Purely coincidental juxtaposition - World's Greatest Eater vs. Grizzly!
Double click to enlarge.
I think I'll sleep, there is no sweeter thing
The epitaph on his grave of Edgar Lee Masters.
It is from his longer poem, To-morrow is My Birthday which is worth a read.
Good friends, let's to the fields…
After a little walk and by your pardon,
I think I'll sleep, there is no sweeter thing.
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.
I am a dream out of a blessed sleep-
Let's walk, and hear the lark.
It is from his longer poem, To-morrow is My Birthday which is worth a read.
Only when we ensure the free flow of information in a democracy can we construct a healthy society.
From The Coronavirus Outbreak: How Democratic Taiwan Outperformed Authoritarian China by Victor (Lin) Pu.
Armed with transparent and sufficient information on the coronavirus epidemic, Taiwanese people actively follow the government’s policies and take actions to curb the spread of virus individually by washing hands and wearing masks. Therefore, even though the self-ruled island is very close to China, the number of infection cases in Taiwan is still low (32 cases, as of February 26) compared to neighboring countries like South Korea (1,261 cases) and Japan (885 cases). Even though the community spread of the virus in Taiwan is looming and seems inevitable, the Taiwanese government and people have shown that they are determined to work together to fight against COVID-19.
However, these contrasting situations between China and Taiwan have not only resulted from their different governance methods. Most importantly, the disparity is because of the totally contrary political logic found in a democracy versus an authoritarian state.
To authoritarian ruler, the first and primary goal of governance is maintaining regime stability and survival to ensure their predominance. When social protest or rebellion happens, the common reaction is to surveil and suppress the dissidents. However, when it comes to natural disasters like earthquakes or floods, the authoritarian government also provides disaster relief, similar to a democratic government. Autocratic leaders can rapidly mobilize national resources into disaster relief works, as seen in the Chinese government’s immediate response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, with massive medical teams and troops gathered within one day. But this type of mobilization might not work for curbing an epidemic.
The critical factors for tracking and controlling the spread of a virus are time and information. To collect information about the infectious patients’ location and their TOCC (travel, occupation, contact, and cluster) requires rapid reports from individuals, hospitals, and local governments to the central command center. This helps the government control the epidemic and take responsive policies as quickly as possible. In other words, controlling the spread of a virus requires the free flow of information and public information sharing, which runs contrary to an authoritarian regime’s specialty of resource mobilization. Instead, what happens in authoritarian countries tends to follow this pattern: the local government hides the truth from the central government to avoid blame, and the central government also lies to its people to deflect public criticism at the beginning of an outbreak. As a result, measures to control the disease are delayed and eventually in vain.
Some might argue that China, as the digital authoritarian powerhouse, has the cutting-edge AI technology and surveillance system to track all its people, not to mention infectious patients. Indeed, these high-tech tools are used to monitor and surveil people in the cities under lockdown. But that does not translate to public knowledge. As the number of infectious cases climbs, China’s government ramped up propaganda, covering pro-government and pro-Chinese Communist Party stories, rather than communicating with the public. Due to the lack of transparency and accountability, the authoritarian regime’s propaganda and regulatory departments tend to take actions to censor and control information. And the results prove that this is definitely not the best public health strategy.
To counter and control a viral epidemic, both government and civil society need sufficient information. The characteristics of a democratic society are openness and transparency, which promise the public access to information. On the other hand, a democratic government also has to take responsibility for communicating with people because leaders are accountable to the public. Only when we ensure the free flow of information in a democracy can we construct a healthy society. Besides its strong public health infrastructure, Taiwan proves that the democratic strategy is successful in curbing the spread of the new coronavirus – which is why Taiwan is outperforming its authoritarian neighbor, China.
Prometheus meets the Gods of the Copybook Headings
Woof. This strikes me as doubling down. From Cognitive Enhancement and Network Effects: how Individual Prosperity Depends on Group Traits by Jonathan Anomaly & Garett Jones. From the Abstract:
Can't help but feel that this is dangerous territory and that pride is becoming before a fall.
A central debate in bioethics is whether parents should try to influence the genetic basis of their children’s traits. We argue that the case for using mate selection, embryo selection, and other interventions to enhance heritable traits like intelligence is strengthened by the fact that they seem to have positive network effects. These network effects include increased cooperation in collective action problems, which contributes to social trust and prosperity. We begin with an overview of evidence for these claims, and then argue that if individual welfare is largely a function of group traits, parents should try to preserve or enhance cognitive traits that have positive network effects.Feels very promethean. Not sure we are ready for this. Indeed, pretty sure we aren't ready. But ready or not, it is likely coming and therefore important for the conversations to occur while we figure out exactly what it is we are talking about.
Can't help but feel that this is dangerous territory and that pride is becoming before a fall.
Are gender quotas worth $60 billion in lost wealth?
It sounded like a good idea in committee . . . From Do board gender quotas affect firm value? Evidence from California Senate Bill No. 826 by Daniel Greene, Vincent J.Intintoli, and Kathleen M.Kahle. From the Abstract:
We examine stock market reactions, direct costs of compliance, and board adjustments to California Senate Bill No. 826 (SB 826), the first mandated board gender diversity quota in the United States. Announcement returns average −1.2% and are robust to the use of multiple methodologies. Returns are more negative when the gap between the mandated number and the pre-SB 826 number of female directors is larger. These negative effects are less severe for firms with a greater supply of female candidates, and for those that can more easily replace male directors or attract female directors. For small firms, the annual direct cost of compliance through board expansion is non-trivial, representing 0.76% of market value. Following SB 826, firms significantly increase female board representation, and the increase is greater for firms in California than control firms in other states.They estimate the loss of valuation for the affected firms at $60 billion. That's a pretty high price tag for over-riding market freedom to achieve an outcome which is mere window-dressing and solves no real public problem.
I see wonderful things
Australian bushfires are no joke. Within 3 minutes, the whole place is engulfed in flames. pic.twitter.com/ugEAq2RRkh
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 30, 2020
Get on with it, already.
An entertaining fisk of the education establishment. From The New York Times States The Obvious: A Literacy Fisk by Lori Janeski. The arguments are familiar as is the critique of the education establishment. A bunch of ideological shills protecting their sinecures while emoting over the fate of others. And for whom Loranksi has little time or sympathy.
She is loaded for bear from the very start. The NYT in italic and Loranski in bold.
And all in prose which shows no art, no empirical evidence, and no logic. Not even artful rhetoric. It is tiresome bilge which Loranski keeps spraying with classical disinfectant.
But still the NYT unicorn view of the world and the NYT fantasy writing dominates and pragmatic creation and art struggles.
She is loaded for bear from the very start. The NYT in italic and Loranski in bold.
On a bright July morning in a windowless conference room in a Manhattan bookstore, several dozen elementary school teachers were learning how to create worksheets that would help children learn to write.The NYT goes downhill from there and Loranski battles uphill, taking position after position. Every sycophantic postmodernist critical theory indulgence is on display and catered to by the NYT "writer." Every downy dreamy desire that the world should be idyllically different than it is.
I thought this was an article for a respectable (sort of) news organization, not a fluffy fanfic piece. Get on with it, already.
And all in prose which shows no art, no empirical evidence, and no logic. Not even artful rhetoric. It is tiresome bilge which Loranski keeps spraying with classical disinfectant.
But still the NYT unicorn view of the world and the NYT fantasy writing dominates and pragmatic creation and art struggles.
Wednesday, February 26, 2020
A bitter class and cultural divide that gave their disagreements an increasingly ugly tone
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 85.
In the 1808 U.S. elections the Federalists doubled their seats in the House of Representatives, and though still a minority, the party was riding a rising a tide of New England resentment over the embargo. Behind the parties’ differing economic and regional interests lay a bitter class and cultural divide that gave their disagreements an increasingly ugly tone. Federalists looked at Jefferson’s supporters and saw an irresponsible—and hypocritical—rabble that spouted stock phrases about egalitarianism while defending slavery, that was always willing to rattle the sabers toward Britain but never willing to raise taxes to pay for the navy, and that had replaced the virtuous selflessness of the Revolutionary generation with a politics of crude and self-interested demagoguery.
The Republicans for their part saw the Federalists as Anglophile elitists out to impose “monarchical” tyranny upon America, and could point to the Federalists’ own glaring hypocrisies. Though they had borne the brunt of Britain’s seizure and impressment policies, New England’s merchants also had the most to lose from war with Britain and the total loss of trade that would result, and so were constantly making excuses for Britain’s actions. Federalist writers even tried to claim that only a handful of American sailors had ever been impressed, or that it was the nefarious doing of a few American merchant captains who connived to have their sailors pressed toward the end of a voyage to avoid paying them.
Still, between the Federalists who wanted a navy but not to oppose Britain with and the Republicans who wanted to oppose Britain but not with a navy, enough votes emerged between the two parties to override Gallatin’s furious objections and approve a modest naval expansion. In January 1809 Congress passed “an act authorizing the employment of an additional naval force” that tripled the number of seamen to 3,600 and the number of midshipmen to 450, and ordered four of the frigates that had been in ordinary for years immediately fitted out and made ready for sea to join the frigates Constitution and Chesapeake in active service. Sixteen Republican senators and some forty House Republicans, largely from New England, joined the Federalists in passing the measure. Gallatin fumed about “the navy coalition of 1809, by whom were sacrificed … the Republican cause itself, and the people of the United States, to a system of favoritism, extravagance, parade, and folly.”
Selective Scandal Syndrome
I have commented on this oddity a number of times. Brian Cates puts it nicely in The ‘Wrong Scandal’ Keeps Winning.
The dying media clutch at Russiagate, turning a blind eye to the increasingly obvious Spygate scandal.
And astounding demonstration of a shared institutional article of faith defying actual abundant evidence.
There’s no longer any real competition between the two major political scandals that emerged following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.Russiagate, the fake scandal, the zombie article of faith of the mainstream media, staggers on in its last death rattle while Spygate, the real scandal, gathers steam.
Proponents of the first scandal, commonly referred to as “Russiagate,” claim that the man who had just won the election was an undercover agent who took orders straight from Moscow.
The other one that emerged held that Russiagate was always a false construct of the rival Hillary Clinton campaign and its politicized allies within the federal government’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This second scandal came to be called “Spygate.”
One of these scandals was indeed fake and the other was very real.
Most of the U.S. media went all-in on the proposition that the fake scandal was real and the real scandal was fake.
However, the scandal that was endlessly promoted by mainstream news outlets turned out to be a hoax, as shown by the investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller and Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Meanwhile, the scandal they dismissed as a “wild conspiracy theory” turned out to be real.
That means all the mainstream news media organizations, with their vast budgets and massive manpower, managed to get the major story of the 2016 presidential election exactly backward.
The dying media clutch at Russiagate, turning a blind eye to the increasingly obvious Spygate scandal.
And astounding demonstration of a shared institutional article of faith defying actual abundant evidence.
When they make it easier and more pleasant to leave than to stay
Well . . . That's kind of incredible. As a management consultant, I would short AT&T.
Been a client of AT&T for the better part of twenty years with a full package of their services. Four months ago, our router died and after a week or two we got a new one from AT&T. Internet speeds were abysmal and with frequent interruptions. Wait times when talking with Helpdesk were multi-hour. Two replacement routers and three technician visits later, the problem was still not solved.
I value stability and am disinclined to change suppliers but after that experience I finally went online to look at what Xfinity had to offer. 15 times the internet speed at 60% of the cost. OK - for that, I will change providers.
Transfer of service wasn't seamless but was reasonably good.
Now it is time to turn off the AT&T services. I give them a call.
Compared to nearly a dozen phone interactions over the past four months, each lasting 30 minutes to a couple of hours, leaving AT&T was far easier than remaining with them.
Turn-off call took about five minutes, involved a single person (no phone transferring), and had no unexpected issues.
I cannot imagine any business having good prospects when the leaving of them is by far the most positive customer service interaction.
Been a client of AT&T for the better part of twenty years with a full package of their services. Four months ago, our router died and after a week or two we got a new one from AT&T. Internet speeds were abysmal and with frequent interruptions. Wait times when talking with Helpdesk were multi-hour. Two replacement routers and three technician visits later, the problem was still not solved.
I value stability and am disinclined to change suppliers but after that experience I finally went online to look at what Xfinity had to offer. 15 times the internet speed at 60% of the cost. OK - for that, I will change providers.
Transfer of service wasn't seamless but was reasonably good.
Now it is time to turn off the AT&T services. I give them a call.
Compared to nearly a dozen phone interactions over the past four months, each lasting 30 minutes to a couple of hours, leaving AT&T was far easier than remaining with them.
Turn-off call took about five minutes, involved a single person (no phone transferring), and had no unexpected issues.
I cannot imagine any business having good prospects when the leaving of them is by far the most positive customer service interaction.
Data talks
[THREAD]
— A New Radical Centrism (@a_centrism) January 28, 2020
1/ A huge meta-analysis (92 studies with 87,418 participants) found that changing implicit biases has no impact on explicit bias or actual behavior. https://t.co/dvB6cMvPXh
But the multi-billion dollar per year implicit bias training industry keeps rolling along. https://t.co/HTuZpGLj9E
I continue to think we put way too much stock in complex correlational studies
From Long-lasting Effects of Suspensions? by jkaufman.
But does the research really show what is claimed? Kaufman thinks not.
I recently read "The School to Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime" (Bacher-Hicks et. al. 2019, pdf, via Rob Wiblin) which argues that a policy of suspending kids in middle school leads to more crime as an adult.Much research seems determined to show the value of an intervention rather than dispassionately trying to find what is true or not and what works or not.
Specifically, they found that after controlling for a bunch of things, students who attended schools with 0.38 more suspensions per student per year were 20% more likely to be jailed as adults:
A one standard deviation increase in the estimated school effect increases the average annual number of days suspended per year by 0.38, a 16 percent increase. ... We find that students assigned a school with a 1 standard deviation higher suspension effect are about 3.2 percentage points more likely to have ever been arrested and 2.5 percentage points more likely to have ever been incarcerated, which correspond to an increase of 17 percent and 20 percent of their respective sample means.This is a very surprising outcome: from a single suspension in three years they're 20% more likely to go to jail?
But does the research really show what is claimed? Kaufman thinks not.
This sort of problem, where there's some kind of effect outside what you control for, which leads you to find causation where there may not be any, is a major issue for value-added models (VAM) in general. "Do Value Added Models Add Value?" (Rothstein 2010, pdf) and "Teacher Effects on Student Achievement and Height" (Bitler et. al. 2019, pdf) are two good papers on this. The first shows that a VAM approach yields higher grades in later years causing higher grades in earlier years, while the second shows the same for teachers causing their students to be taller.THIS
I continue to think we put way too much stock in complex correlational studies, but Bacher-Hicks is an illustration of the way the "natural experiment" label can be used even for things that aren't very experiment-like. It's not a coincidence that at my day job, with lots of money on the line, we run extensive randomized controlled trials and almost never make decisions based on correlational evidence. I would like to see a lot more actual randomization in things like which teachers or schools people are assigned to; this would be very helpful for understanding what actually has what effects.
I see wonderful things
This is the highest-resolution footage of the sun ever takenhttps://t.co/XH7toms5KY
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) January 29, 2020
"The cell-like structures – each about the size of Texas – are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface." pic.twitter.com/7mxRd8P5oK
Love and Tensor Algebra
Bridging Snow's two cultures.
Love and Tensor Algebra
from "The Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Bools or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not - for what then shall remain?
Abscissas some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
the product o four scalars is defines!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
Snow landscape at dusk, 1924 by Vaylerius de Saedeleer
Snow landscape at dusk, 1924 by Vaylerius de Saedeleer
Click to enlarge.
A Thrush In The Trenches by Humbert Wolfe
A Thrush In The Trenches
by Humbert Wolfe
Suddenly he sang across the trenches,
vivid in the fleeting hush
as a star-shell through the smashed black branches,
a more than English thrush.
Suddenly he sang, and those who listened
nor moved nor wondered, but
heard, all bewitched, the sweet unhastened
crystal Magnificat.
One crouched, a muddied rifle clasping,
and one filled grenade,
but little cared they, while he went lisping
the one cleat tune he had.
Paused horror, hate and Hell a moment,
(you could almost hear the sigh)
and still he sang to them, and so went
(suddenly) singing by.
Tuesday, February 25, 2020
It looked like extortion because it was extortion.
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 84.
Meanwhile, foreign depredations on American shipping intensified. Despite endless diplomatic negotiations in London and Washington, Britain had only escalated its clampdown on American trade. Since 1807 a series of orders in council—proclamations issued by the British government through royal prerogative—had in effect abrogated Britain’s adherence to the international law of neutrality by barring all neutral trade with the Continent. The only exceptions were for merchant ships that first put into a British port and obtained a British license to proceed. Napoleon retaliated with edicts banning neutral vessels from calling at French-controlled ports if they had touched first at a British port. American shippers were now damned if they did and damned if they didn’t. Each of the warring European powers admitted that its act was contrary to the law of nations, but justified it as a retaliatory response to the other’s illegal acts. By the end of 1811 the total number of American ships seized since 1803 was approaching the 1,500 mark, divided roughly two to one between Britain and France.
What made it all the more obnoxious was that, in practice, the orders in council only seemed to reinforce the obvious conclusion that Britain’s real aim was not so much to deny France trade but to make sure Britain benefited from whatever trade occurred. The British government sold as many as twenty thousand licenses a year to shippers who wanted to trade with the French Empire; bought and sold on the open market, they fetched up to £15,000 apiece. The blockade, justified as a military necessity, was looking an awful lot like a system simply of legalized extortion.
Best of the Bee
New York Times Publishes Guest Editorial By Emperor Palpatine https://t.co/8lEYxa3BGS
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 25, 2020
Data talks
Infectious disease is a multi-front war: Sanitation removes germs from the environment. Vaccines provide immunity. Antibiotics fight active infections.
— Jason Crawford (@jasoncrawford) January 28, 2020
But historically, what mattered most? I was surprised when I started digging into the data:https://t.co/1Sd63crBho
I see wonderful things
Dads are superheroes.
— Jenan Moussa (@jenanmoussa) January 27, 2020
A girl fell on to train tracks in Egypt. Her dad jumped behind her, hugged her and shielded her little body till the moving train passed.
They both survived. @akhbarpic.twitter.com/bwdSwvb9vW
Juvenal writing about the debauched governing class of Imperial Rome sounds like a modern blogger
Rereading Juvenal's Satires, it is hard not to see Juvenal as a modern day blogger. Especially Satire I in which he lays out the case that satirical comment is not only an option but almost a necessity given the fallen state around him.
For every example of his catalog of social climbers, chancers, grifters, cheaters, dodgers, etc. there are obvious modern equivalents among academia, media, Deep State leakers, Third-wave feminists, pederast-enablers, cancel culture, woke Hollywood, and other such bad-actors. Juvenal, faced with this plethora of pitiable behavior, cannot stop himself from his tart commentary.
Babylon Bee, Carpe Donkum and their ilk - all children of Juvenal.
For every example of his catalog of social climbers, chancers, grifters, cheaters, dodgers, etc. there are obvious modern equivalents among academia, media, Deep State leakers, Third-wave feminists, pederast-enablers, cancel culture, woke Hollywood, and other such bad-actors. Juvenal, faced with this plethora of pitiable behavior, cannot stop himself from his tart commentary.
Babylon Bee, Carpe Donkum and their ilk - all children of Juvenal.
Must I always be stuck in the audience, never get my own backBrought to mind while reading this indictment were
for all the times I’ve been bored by that ranting Theseïd
of Cordus? Shall X go free after killing me with his farces
or Y with his elegies? No come-back for whole days wasted
on a bloated Telephus, or Orestes crammed in the margins,
spilling over on to the verso, and still not finished?
I know all the mythical landscapes like my own back-room –
the grove of Mars, Vulcan’s cave near Aeolus’ rocky island;
what the winds are up to, which phantoms Aeacus
is tormenting, from where old what’s-his-name’s carrying off
the golden fleecelet, the size | of those ash-trees the Centaurs hurled –
rich Fronto’s plane-trees and quivering marble statues
echo such rubbish non-stop: recitation cracks the columns.
You can expect the same from established | poets as from tyros.
I too have winced under the cane, concocted ‘Advice
to Sulla’: The despot should now retire into private life,
take a good long sleep. When you find such hordes of scribblers
all over, it’s misplaced kindness not to write. The paper
will still be wasted. “Yet why drive my team down the track
which the great Auruncan blazed? If you have the leisure
to listen and reason calmly, I will enlighten you.
When a flabby eunuch marries, when well-born girls go crazy
for pig-sticking up-country, bare-breasted, spear in fist;
when the barber who rasped away at my youthful beard has risen
to challenge good society with his millions; when Crispinus –
that Delta-bred house-slave, silt washed down by the Nile –
now hitches his shoulders under Tyrian purple, airs
a thin gold ring in summer on his sweaty finger
(‘My dear, I couldn’t bear to wear my heavier jewels’) –
it’s harder not to be writing | satires; for who could endure
this monstrous city, however | callous at heart, and swallow
his wrath? Here’s a new litter, crammed with that shyster lawyer Matho.
Who’s next? An informer. He turned in his noble patron,
and soon he’ll have gnawed away what little remains on the bone
of nobility. Lesser informers, terrified, stroke him with bribes:
nervous actors send their wives round to do the stroking for them.
We find ourselves elbowed aside by men who earn legacies
in bed at night, who these days scale the heavens
via that best of all routes – a well-fixed old trot’s bladder.
Her lovers divide the estate: Proculeius gets one-twelfth,
but Gillo the rest, a fair match for the size of their – services.
All that sweat deserves some reward: they’re both as pallid
as though they’d trodden barefoot on a snake, or were waiting
their turn to declaim, at Lyons, in Caligula’s competitions.
Need I tell you how anger burns in my heart when I see
the bystanders jostled back by a mob of thugs, whose master
has debauched and defrauded his ward? The verdict against him
was a farce. What’s infamy matter if you keep your fortune?
Exiled, the governor drinks | the day away, revels in heaven’s
wrath: it’s his province that suffers, though it won its case.
Are not such themes well worthy of Horace’s pen? Should I
not attack them too? Why rehash Hercules’ labours, or what
Diomedes did, all that bellowing in the Labyrinth, or the legend
of the flying craftsman, and how his son went splash in the sea?
In an age when each pimp-husband takes from his wife’s lover
(if she can’t inherit by law): and is adept at watching the ceiling,
or tactfully snoring, still wide awake, in his wine,
will such things suffice? When a rake who’s lost his family fortune
on racing-stables still reckons to get his cohort? Watch him
race down the Flaminian Way like Achilles’ charioteer,
reins bunched in one hand, showing off to his mistress
who stands beside him, wrapped in his riding-cloak!
Don’t you want to cram whole notebooks with scribbled invective
when you stand at the corner and see some forger carried past
exposed to view on all sides, in an all-but-open litter,
on the necks of six porters, lounging back with the air
of Maecenas himself? A will, a mere scrap of paper,
a counterfeit seal – these brought him wealth and honour.
Do you see that distinguished lady? She has the perfect dose
for her husband – old wine with a dash of parching toad’s blood.
Locusta’s a child to her; she trains her untutored neighbours
to bury their blackened husbands, ignore the gossip.
If you want to be someone today, dare acts that could earn you
prison or island exile. Probity’s praised – and freezes:
gardens, palaces, furniture, those antique silver cups
with their prancing repouss̩ goats Рcrime paid for the lot of them.
Who can sleep easy today? Avaricious daughters-in-law
and brides are seduced for cash, schoolboys are adulterers.
Though talent be wanting, yet indignation will drive me
to verse such as I – or any scribbler – can manage.
All human endeavours, men’s prayers, fears, angers, pleasures,
joys and pursuits, make up the mixed mash of my book.
Since the days of the Flood, when Deucalion first ascended
that mountain-top in his vessel, and looked for a sign,
and slowly the hard stones warmed into living softness,
and Pyrrha confronted those early | males with their naked mates,
when has there been so abundant a crop of vices? When
has the purse of greed yawned wider? When was gambling
more frantic? Today men face the table’s hazards
with not their purse but their strong-box open beside them.
Here you’ll see notable battles, with the croupier for squire,
stakes for arms. Isn’t it crazy to lose ten thousand
on a turn of the dice, yet grudge a shirt to your shivering slave?
In the old days who’d have built all those country houses, or dined
off seven courses, alone? Now citizens must scramble
for a little basket of scraps on their patron’s doorstep.
He peers into each face first, scared stiff that some imposter
may give a false name and cheat him: you must be identified
before you get your ration. The crier has his orders:
even the Upper-Ten must answer his summons, they’re scrounging
along with the rest. ‘The praetor first, then the tribune –’
but a freedman blocks their way. ‘I got here first,’ he argues,
‘Why shouldn’t I keep my place? Oh, I know I’m foreign:
look here, at my pierced ears, no use denying it – born
out East, on the Euphrates. But my five shops bring in
four hundred thousand, see? So what’s in a purple border,
what’s it really worth, if a Corvinus is reduced
to herding sheep up-country, while I have more in the bank
than any Imperial favourite?’ Then keep the Tribunes waiting,
let money reign supreme; we can’t have a Johnny-come-lately,
the chalk just off his feet, flout this sacrosanct office!
Why not? Of all gods it’s Wealth that compels our deepest
reverence – though as yet, | pernicious Cash, you lack
your own temple, though we’ve raised | no altars to Sovereign Gold
(as already to Honour and Peace, to Victory, Virtue
and Concord – where storks’ wings rattle as you salute their nest).
When the Consul himself tots up, at the end of his year,
what the dole is worth, just what it adds to his income,
how are we poor folk to manage? Clothes and shoes must be bought
from this pittance, and food, and fuel. But a throng of litters
gets in line for the hand-out; a husband even, sometimes,
will go the rounds with a sickly or pregnant wife in tow,
or better (a well-known dodge) pretend she’s there when she isn’t,
and claim for both, displaying a curtained, empty sedan.
‘My Galla’s in there,’ he says. ‘Let us through! You doubt me? Galla!
Put out your head! Don’t disturb her – she must be sleeping –’
The day’s marked by its prescribed and fascinating routine.
Dole first: then attendance down in | the Forum, where Apollo-
as-jurisconsult surveys the Law Courts, and triumphal
statues abound, including a jumped-up Egyptian Pasha’s,
whose effigy’s only fit for pissing on – or worse.
Experienced clients follow their patron home again,
hoping in desperation (what expectancy lasts longer?)
for that invitation to dinner which never comes: worn out,
they drift away, poor souls, to buy cabbages and kindling.
But their lord meanwhile will loll alone at his guestless
dinner, scoffing the choicest produce of sea and woodland.
These fellows will gobble up whole legacies at one sitting,
off the finest, the largest, the rarest | antique dining-tables:
soon there won’t be a parasite left. But who could stomach
such meanness in gourmands? What gross greed it takes to dine
off a whole roast boar – a creature meant for banquets!
But you’ll soon pay a heavy price, when you undress and waddle
into the bath, still full of undigested game-meat –
hence sudden deaths, and old age interrupted.
The story goes round as the latest dinner-table joke,
and your funeral procession draws mocking cheers from your ‘friends’.
To these habits of ours there’s nothing more, or worse, to be added
by posterity: our grandsons will share our deeds, our longings.
Today every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So hoist
your sails, cram on all canvas! But where, you may wonder,
is a talent to match the theme? and where our outspoken
ancestral bluntness, that wrote at burning passion’s behest?
‘Whose name do I dare not utter?’ Lucilius cried: ‘Who cares
whether the noble Consul forgive my libel or not?’
But name an Imperial favourite, and you’ll blaze, a human torch,
bound upright, half-choked, half-grilled, your calcined carcase
leaving a broad black trail as it’s dragged across the sand.
What price the man who’s poisoned three uncles with belladonna?
Is he to ride feather-bedded, and look down his nose at us?
Yes; and when he approaches, put a finger on your lips –
just to say That’s the man will brand you an informer.
It’s safe enough to retell how Aeneas fought fierce Turnus;
no one’s a penny the worse for Achilles’ death, or the frantic
search for Hylas, that time he plunged in after his pitcher.
But when fiery Lucilius rages with Satire’s naked sword
his hearers go red; their conscience freezes with their crimes,
their innards sweat in awareness of unacknowledged guilt:
hence wrath and tears. So ponder these things in your mind
before the trumpet sounds. Any later’s too late
for a soldier. I’ll try my hand on the famous dead, whose ashes
repose beside the Latin and the Flaminian Ways.
Al GoreEach has a Juvenal line seemingly written just for them.
Hillary Clinton
Bill Clinton
Barrack Obama
Jeffrey Epstein
Harvey Weinstein
Jussie Smollett
Reality TV shows
Paris Hilton
Roman Polansky
Many Hollywood poseurs
Kenneth Lay
Bernie Madoff
Matt Lauer
Woke Sillicon Valley
Devos attendees
Telephone and email scammers
Welfare cheats
Activist Foundations
Burning Man Festival
Woke social media mobs
John Kerry
Reality will not be denied and is always prepared to surprise us.
I have frequently noted the poisonous inheritance of Antonio Gramsci. When you know of his work, you see the modern world as the off-spring of his thinking. There is a case to be made that the promulgation of Gramsci's philosophy was the most effective weapon deployed by the Soviets against the Age of Enlightenment West. There is a plausible argument that this brood-parasitic version of zombie Marxist philosophy is finally delivering long after the death of the Soviet Union which deployed it.
It is a plausible argument but I suspect not fully accurate. I suspect it overweights planning and underplays random chance. But that it has been unchecked so far is undeniable.
A good brief primer on Gramsci's thought is found in Mayor Pete: Red Diaper Baby by Paul Kengor.
I also have known that candidate Pete Buttigieg is much more of a radical candidate than is being presented in the media. Most the press are positioning him as a centrist along with Joe Biden and in opposition to socialist Sanders and socialist-in-all-but-name Warren. It has been a puzzle to me because when you read his positions and policies, there does not seem too much reason for why you would consider him a centrist. It is a little like the right's respect for Tulsi. Another candidate who, based on her actual political positions, is pretty radical.
In both cases I suspect people are being thrown off the trail by appearances. Both Buttigieg and Tulsi have served in the military, both are younger, both are good looking, and both are sufficient novelties not to carry the weight of baggage. I suspect responses right now are based on first appearances rather than examination of policies.
I have also heard people referring to Pete Buttigieg as a red-diaper baby, a phrase I know from the UK where the phenomenon is much more common. Adult politicians who were raised by avowed communists. It has the implication of being a dyed-in-the-wool leftist.
I had assumed that the phrase, used in the American context and against Buttigieg, was hyperbole.
Turns out, based on Kengor's reporting, he is in fact a red-diaper baby. And not just any red-diaper baby.
It is astonishing enough that the narrowed DNC field of six candidates is fully one third shaped by extensive exposure to Marxist thought (Sanders and Buttigieg) and one half deeply compatible (Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren).
But that one of the six candidates should be the living embodiment of what Marxist philosopher Gramsci was aspiring to, a candidate with a deep knowledge of Marxism, the son of a Marxist, and the son of a Marxist who stormed the Academic ramparts and helped reshape the higher education sector is astounding to me. The long march through the institutions towards which Gramsci aspired seems to have reached its apotheosis in Pete Buttigieg.
This is a script so improbable that I cannot imagine it coming to pass. But here we are. Reality will not be denied and is always prepared to surprise us.
It is a plausible argument but I suspect not fully accurate. I suspect it overweights planning and underplays random chance. But that it has been unchecked so far is undeniable.
A good brief primer on Gramsci's thought is found in Mayor Pete: Red Diaper Baby by Paul Kengor.
At the age of 35, in 1926, Antonio Gramsci was arrested in his native Italy by Mussolini and spent the last 11 years of his life in prison, where he would write, write, and write — compiling a master volume of 33 Prison Notebooks. Of these notebooks, compiled mainly between 1929 and 1935, two of them, Notebooks 16 and 26, deal explicitly with culture — that is, Gramsci’s Marxist thoughts applied to culture. Those two notebooks are titled, respectively, “Cultural Topics I” (completed in 1933–34) and “Cultural Topics II” (completed in 1935). Moreover, even as Notebooks 16 and 26 deal with “Cultural Topics” I and II, culture is a consistent theme throughout the Prison Notebooks.This much I knew already but Kengor expresses it well and succinctly. Entertainment, Academia, K-12, Mainstream Media, Administrative State bureaucrats - the Gramscian march through the institutional vectors of cultural transmission has been impressively comprehensive and thorough. Not everyone in those sectors is by any means a Marxist. But everyone is exposed to silkily repackaged Marxist philosophy which, if not examined closely, sounds moral.
Gramsci looked to culture, particularly through his theory of “cultural hegemony.” If the fundamental transformers of the radical Left truly wanted to win, then they needed to first seize the so-called “cultural means of production”; that is, culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities. Gramsci himself foresaw societal transformation coming about by what others have characterized as a Gramscian “long march through the institutions.” (There is debate over who first used the phrase, but most current sources credit West German Marxist writer and student activist of the 1960s named Rudi Dutschke.)
Not until leftists came to dominate these cultural institutions would they be able to convince enough people to support their Marxist revolution. “This part of [Gramsci’s] thesis was like manna from heaven for many left-wing Western intellectuals,” writes Samuel Gregg of the Acton Institute. “Instead of joining a factory collective or making bombs in basements, a leftist professor could help free society from capitalist exploitation by penning essays in his office or teaching students.”
The heirs of Gramsci, like the ideological progeny of Marx and Lenin and the Frankfurt School, insisted on the need to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. There was no traditional institution off limits to the cultural Left. In fact, so “critical” was the cultural-Marxist left of anything and everything that it would brand itself as “critical theory.”
Critical theory has become common in academic English departments in particular. It was this tendency to criticize everything, to tear down everything, that has made this particular brand of Marxism so dangerous. Accordingly, Gregg calls Gramsci perhaps “the most dangerous socialist in history.”
I also have known that candidate Pete Buttigieg is much more of a radical candidate than is being presented in the media. Most the press are positioning him as a centrist along with Joe Biden and in opposition to socialist Sanders and socialist-in-all-but-name Warren. It has been a puzzle to me because when you read his positions and policies, there does not seem too much reason for why you would consider him a centrist. It is a little like the right's respect for Tulsi. Another candidate who, based on her actual political positions, is pretty radical.
In both cases I suspect people are being thrown off the trail by appearances. Both Buttigieg and Tulsi have served in the military, both are younger, both are good looking, and both are sufficient novelties not to carry the weight of baggage. I suspect responses right now are based on first appearances rather than examination of policies.
I have also heard people referring to Pete Buttigieg as a red-diaper baby, a phrase I know from the UK where the phenomenon is much more common. Adult politicians who were raised by avowed communists. It has the implication of being a dyed-in-the-wool leftist.
I had assumed that the phrase, used in the American context and against Buttigieg, was hyperbole.
Turns out, based on Kengor's reporting, he is in fact a red-diaper baby. And not just any red-diaper baby.
As for that red-diaper background, Charlie is referring to the work of Pete Buttigieg’s father, Joseph Buttigieg, who was the world’s foremost expert (certainly the English-speaking world) on the famous Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Joseph, who died in January 2019, was no less than the founder of the International Gramsci Society, a fact hardly a secret and acknowledged warmly on the website of the International Gramsci Society. It’s so unmissable that the first thing that displays when you open the website is Joseph’s photo with a memorial tribute. In fact, as someone who regularly checks that website, I can tell you that Joseph’s photo has been the lead on the screen for a full year and counting. He was very important to them.Whoa. I feel like I have suddenly fallen into a reds-under-the-bed McCarthy Twilight Zone episode. His dad was a Gramsci expert?
Again, Gramsci’s massive paper trail, his primary body of work, was the Prison Notebooks. That brings us to Joseph Buttigieg, and even to Pete.The rest of the article is more detail about the possible effects on Buttigieg of his red-diaper babyhood. Fair questions but perhaps a touch fevered. Past is not prolog. The father is not the son. But the price of liberty is eternal vigilance and all that.
The definitive English translation of Gramsci’s work is Joseph Buttigieg’s translation of his vast Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere), published by Columbia University Press. Joseph Buttigieg produced three thick volumes, each around 700 pages in length. In each of the volumes, Joseph begins with acknowledgments in his preface. And each time, he concludes by giving special thanks to his wife, Jennifer Anne Montgomery, and to his son Pete. Importantly, this seems a little more than the typical sentimental thanks a writer would give to a family member.
In the preface to Volume II, for instance, Joseph finishes, “The greatest debt of all I owe to J. Anne Montgomery and Peter Paul Buttigieg (who also helped with the compilation of the index of this volume) for the countless ways in which they have enabled me to realize this work.”
It is astonishing enough that the narrowed DNC field of six candidates is fully one third shaped by extensive exposure to Marxist thought (Sanders and Buttigieg) and one half deeply compatible (Sanders, Buttigieg, and Warren).
But that one of the six candidates should be the living embodiment of what Marxist philosopher Gramsci was aspiring to, a candidate with a deep knowledge of Marxism, the son of a Marxist, and the son of a Marxist who stormed the Academic ramparts and helped reshape the higher education sector is astounding to me. The long march through the institutions towards which Gramsci aspired seems to have reached its apotheosis in Pete Buttigieg.
This is a script so improbable that I cannot imagine it coming to pass. But here we are. Reality will not be denied and is always prepared to surprise us.
Faust's Vision, 1878 by Luis Ricardo Falero
Faust's Vision, 1878 by Luis Ricardo Falero
Click to enlarge.
Proud Mary by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Double click to enlarge.
Proud Mary
by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Left a good job in the city
Workin' for the man ev'ry night and day
And I never lost one minute of sleepin'
Worryin' 'bout the way things might have been
Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis
Pumped a lot of pane down in New Orleans
But I never saw the good side of the city
'Til I hitched a ride on a river boat queen
Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
If you come down to the river
Bet you gonna find some people who live
You don't have to worry 'cause you have no money
People on the river are happy to give
Big wheel keep on turnin'
Proud Mary keep on burnin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Rollin', rollin', rollin' on the river
Monday, February 24, 2020
I “promise in return to keep you informed of the price of codfish & potatoes.”
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 83.
To the American navy fell the unsavory task of stopping violations of the laws, halting and turning back American ships, and seeing through the myriad ruses that American ship’s captains inventively created to get around the restrictions. This did not make Bainbridge a popular man in Portland. It would not have been the most lively place to live in the best of times, but his job added a social awkwardness and isolation to his stay there. He wrote to a friend begging for news and said he could “promise in return to keep you informed of the price of codfish & potatoes.”Disdain for the boonies has early roots as well.
Just who is propagandizing for whom?
This is pretty remarkable. It almost feels like intentional disinformation. From Richard Grenell Begins Overhauling Intelligence Office, Prompting Fears of Partisanship by Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fandos.
It has been very well established at this point that there are some serious issues at the top of our national intelligence and security agencies. CIA and NSA have both acknowledged perjured testimony to Congress. CIA has acknowledged spying on Congress. Those two seem to have played contributing roles in the FBI led Cross-fire Hurricane fiasco in which Democratic oppo research pulled from Russia-associated sources was used as the illegal basis for spying on American citizens and on the Trump 2016 campaign.
We know that there is a problem which needs addressing and it is astonishing that it has taken this long to get around to it. However, powerful bureaucratic enemies can't simply be dismissed. Sometimes it does require staging.
Despite the failure of the Mueller investigation to find grounds that there was collusion between Trump and Russia, despite the impeachment effort to find such evidence, and despite the increasing public record that "collusion" was only ever a domestic political weapon and not a real event, the New York Time keeps returning like a dog to its vomit.
Last week they had yet another go, trying to interpret intelligence agencies as having uncovered new evidence of Russian influence in the 2020 election, reporting this was provided in a briefing to the White House. This time the NYT claims the influence is on behalf of Sanders and Trump, two NYT favorite bête noire. No sooner did the NYT report this than there were a flood of denials on the part of participants and briefers that this was not the message. It is like the NYT is on auto-pilot and, insensate, cannot learn from the past. They need there to be Russian collusion so that is what they report regardless of what actually happened or what was actually said.
And now this in the morning paper. Trump has appointed a new acting National Intelligence Agency director. How does NYT frame this?
However, while politically charged and subject to widespread criticism, its content has been pretty thoroughly established as accurate. A fact which the New York Times omits.
This feels like the New York Times is desperate - there was a large pool of Democratic allies in the intelligence agencies who ended up undertaking bad actions during the 2016 campaign. They are slowly being fired and/or replaced, leaving the NYT with fewer and fewer allies in high places. It appears that that is the "partisanship" the NYT fears.
But to deliberately suppress facts known to be true?
The alternative rendering based on the full record (and not just on how things were characterized back when), is "Grenell hires former Nunes aide who helped uncover intelligence agency failings and FISA court abuse two years before Muller and Impeachment."
It has been very well established at this point that there are some serious issues at the top of our national intelligence and security agencies. CIA and NSA have both acknowledged perjured testimony to Congress. CIA has acknowledged spying on Congress. Those two seem to have played contributing roles in the FBI led Cross-fire Hurricane fiasco in which Democratic oppo research pulled from Russia-associated sources was used as the illegal basis for spying on American citizens and on the Trump 2016 campaign.
We know that there is a problem which needs addressing and it is astonishing that it has taken this long to get around to it. However, powerful bureaucratic enemies can't simply be dismissed. Sometimes it does require staging.
Despite the failure of the Mueller investigation to find grounds that there was collusion between Trump and Russia, despite the impeachment effort to find such evidence, and despite the increasing public record that "collusion" was only ever a domestic political weapon and not a real event, the New York Time keeps returning like a dog to its vomit.
Last week they had yet another go, trying to interpret intelligence agencies as having uncovered new evidence of Russian influence in the 2020 election, reporting this was provided in a briefing to the White House. This time the NYT claims the influence is on behalf of Sanders and Trump, two NYT favorite bête noire. No sooner did the NYT report this than there were a flood of denials on the part of participants and briefers that this was not the message. It is like the NYT is on auto-pilot and, insensate, cannot learn from the past. They need there to be Russian collusion so that is what they report regardless of what actually happened or what was actually said.
And now this in the morning paper. Trump has appointed a new acting National Intelligence Agency director. How does NYT frame this?
The ouster of Mr. Hallman and exit of Mr. Maguire, who also oversaw the National Counterterrorism Center, allowed Mr. Grenell to install his own leadership team.Fascinating, the deliberate construction. The Patel/Nunes memo was "politically charged" and there were widespread criticisms from the left.
One of his first hires was Kashyap Patel, a senior National Security Council staff member and former key aide to Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California and the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Patel will have a mandate to “clean house,” CBS News reported, citing a person close to the matter.
Mr. Patel was best known as the lead author of a politically charged memo two years ago that accused F.B.I. and Justice Department leaders of abusing their surveillance powers to spy on a former Trump campaign adviser. The memo was widely criticized as misleading, though an inspector general later found other problems with aspects of the surveillance.
However, while politically charged and subject to widespread criticism, its content has been pretty thoroughly established as accurate. A fact which the New York Times omits.
This article says that @RichardGrenell just hired “an expert on Trump conspiracy theories.”
— James Hasson (@JamesHasson20) February 22, 2020
The evidence? The aide wrote “a politically charged memo” that “was widely criticized as misleading.”
That was the Nunes memo, which turned out to be accurate.https://t.co/7l3Kyp4lER
This feels like the New York Times is desperate - there was a large pool of Democratic allies in the intelligence agencies who ended up undertaking bad actions during the 2016 campaign. They are slowly being fired and/or replaced, leaving the NYT with fewer and fewer allies in high places. It appears that that is the "partisanship" the NYT fears.
But to deliberately suppress facts known to be true?
The alternative rendering based on the full record (and not just on how things were characterized back when), is "Grenell hires former Nunes aide who helped uncover intelligence agency failings and FISA court abuse two years before Muller and Impeachment."
Data talks
Study: No association between egg consumption and blood lipids, cardiovascular disease, or mortality in 177,000 people in 50 countries. https://t.co/mmlg3IlKou pic.twitter.com/cuvxxN0mkz
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) January 28, 2020
I see wonderful things
Amazing: a trail of termites (up) and a trail of ants (down), both protected by a row of their soldiers in a stand-off, without fighting.
— Lionel Page (@page_eco) January 27, 2020
from @mehdi_moussaidpic.twitter.com/4ULo2idgH4
The Thought by Humbert Wolfe
The Thought
by Humbert Wolfe
I will not write a poem for you,
because a poem, even the loveliest,
can only do what words can do -
stir the air, and dwindle, and be at rest.
Nor will I hold you with my hands, because
the bones of my hands on yours would press,
and you'd say after, 'Mortal was,
and crumbling, that lover's tenderness.'
But I will hold you in a thought without moving
spirit or desire or will
for I know no other way of loving,
that endures when the heart is still.
Sunday, February 23, 2020
We're getting better at trade wars than in the beginning.
From the excellent Perilous Fight by Stephen Budiansky, an account of the naval aspects of the War of 1812. Page 83.
The last full year of Thomas Jefferson’s second term, 1808, found William Bainbridge in Portland, Maine, assigned to oversee the building of gunboats and enforce a series of wildly unpopular measures that the president and the Republicans thought would force Britain to recognize American rights. Jefferson remained convinced that America possessed a powerful weapon in economic coercion; limiting or banning America’s oceangoing trade would deliver British concessions without recourse to war.
John Randolph offered up his usual scorn. Supporters of trade restrictions, he said, wanted “to cure the corns by cutting off the toes.” Subsequent events only seemed to confirm his cynicism. American exports and re-exports, which had reached $108 million in 1807, plummeted to $22 million in 1808 after Jefferson’s embargo of all American oceangoing trade with Europe or European colonies went into effect. A few towns were especially hard hit; a fifth of the residents of Salem were said to be reduced to beggary and the pastor of the town’s East Church, Dr. William Bentley, noted in his diary that more than a thousand of the town’s citizens were being fed each day at a soup kitchen supported by public subscription.
Data talks
Study: No association between egg consumption and blood lipids, cardiovascular disease, or mortality in 177,000 people in 50 countries. https://t.co/mmlg3IlKou pic.twitter.com/cuvxxN0mkz
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) January 28, 2020
I see wonderful things
It looks like a dead fish, until you realize those are grizzly bears. The scale of a whale, washed ahore in Larson Bay near Kodiak, Alaska on June 13, 2015 [full story: https://t.co/OVVX9HIgTP] pic.twitter.com/xEskdzdR8J
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) January 24, 2020
Ironies galore
Sunday morning and I am seeing a lot of ironies out of Nevada. Not much discussed in the roiling near hysteria, but there none-the-less. The results in 5 Takeaways From the Nevada Caucuses (The Big One: Sanders Takes Control) by Shane Goldmacher. Everybody seems in spin mode and they are reluctant to state the bare facts. As of 10:07am Sunday February 23rd, with 60% of the precincts reporting, Sanders has 46% of the vote, Biden 20%, Buttigieg 15%, Warren 10%.
I can see, especially in the context of Iowa and New Hampshire, why the DNC might be alarmed.
Irony Number 1 - At this point both establishment parties are basically running with outsiders independent of their respective parties. Trump is no traditional Republican and Sanders is explicitly a Socialist rather than a Democrat.
Neither establishment party is able to muster a credible candidate from within the establishment ranks.
Death of the establishment parties? I think not. This is a slow grinding recalibration of establishment parties across the developed world. All of them grew too lax, too arrogant, too incompetent, and too blind to the needs and interests of the majority of voters. They coasted on the winds of the post WWII boom and forgot how to govern through consent.
Here in the US, the Republican Party was put on notice way back in the 1990s with the Gingrich rebellion and has been edging closer to the needs and interests of voters ever since. Grudgingly. The Tea Party moved them close to voters but was ultimately suppressed. The Trump phenomenon has pushed them closer to voters. But they are still ineluctably an establishment party who desperately want to backslide.
The DNC as an establishment party came off their Obama high ideologically and candidate bankrupt. They lost their bench of candidates. They played typical backroom games with superdelegates and byzantine voting procedures to try and ensure that the DNC choice in Washington would be the choice of the rubes in the sticks. I was in California in 2016 and the outrage on the party rank-and-file and especially among Sanders supporters over the super-delegates and the blatant thumb-on-the-scale hypocrisy was palpable.
What we are seeing right now is not really a meaningful contest between candidates in the Democratic contest. What we are seeing are jubilant rebels on the ideological fringe and a panicking establishment party.
Irony Number 2 - The Democrats who have, since 2016, been avid supporters of the direct popular vote and the abolition of the Electoral College, are sudden enthusiasts for a non-democratic brokered convention.
I make no call on who the Democratic candidate from the primary process will be. However, absent heart-attacks or multiple indictments among the field or destructive opposition-research, it seems that the most probable scenario is that the Democrats will arrive in Wisconsin on July 12th with a leading candidate (Sanders) who has a plurality of the votes, perhaps a strong plurality, but who will not receive the nomination. That the machinations of the fractured party will lead to the anointment of a more "electable" candidate.
Should this come about, Democrats will be in the position of rejecting the sanctity of the popular vote. The very position about which they have been harping (even though the US is not and has never been a direct democracy), ever since 2016. In fact the position will be worse. With the electoral college you can win the election without having the largest number of votes. However, the win will occur through established law and procedures. As opposed to the brokered convention outcome the DNC faces where popular choice has little or no direct bearing on the selected winner (who might not even be someone who has been running.) Democrats will be in the position of rejecting the very basis of democracy - that individual votes count.
Irony Number 3 - Relative base-strength will probably be a bigger determinant of election outcome than absolute votes. I work off of a conceptual model where about a third of the population are reasonably committed Democrats, about a third are reasonably committed Republicans and about a third are either pretty consistent moderates or centrists who can comfortably swing either way. At any point in time, the numbers will vary from 33%, but that seems broadly the reverted mean.
I look at the intra-party bitterness between the moderates, the central establishment and the socialist fringe of the Democrats and see a recipe for electoral disaster. Plenty of observers have noted that part of what is causing uncertainty is that among the field of candidates, no one has a knock out punch and everyone has a marginal path for sustainability. Each staggers from one event to another without ever really opening any gaps.
Sanders always has a base of some 25% which makes him the default front runner in any crowded field. Everyone else floats between single digit and very low double digit positions. As long as that continues, the probability of a brokered convention mounts. But if Sanders takes the brass ring, the reality is that he only commands an enthusiastic 25% of the Democratic Party. 25% of 33% is only 8% of the national vote.
In contrast, Trump has vanquished the never-Trumpers and coopted the establishment Republican Party. He will go into the election with perhaps 95% of 33% enthusiastically backing him, i.e. about 31% of all voters. With a strong economy and many international and reputational tail-winds, all the polls seem to indicate that centrists, independents and moderates are likely to vote with their pocketbooks with at least half of the 33% going reasonably happy with Trump (50% times 33% equals 17%.) Among the balance in the middle, there appear to be very few Sanders supporters.
The net is that out of their respective conventions, it seems likely ceteris paribus that the respective nominees will enter the final stretch with one candidate having about 48% of voters solidly in his pocket and one candidate having only somewhere around 8-12%.
Irony Number 4 - The DNC reforms to make their primary season more open and fair to everyone (reducing the number of establishment super-delegates) has exposed them to how deep a divide there is between the average American voter and the Democratic Party, particularly the socialist wing of the party.
I see a lot of discussion about South Carolina, the relative campaign merits, and Super Tuesday. All useful, if noisy, considerations. I think the above four ironies are where the real dynamics exist.
I can see, especially in the context of Iowa and New Hampshire, why the DNC might be alarmed.
Irony Number 1 - At this point both establishment parties are basically running with outsiders independent of their respective parties. Trump is no traditional Republican and Sanders is explicitly a Socialist rather than a Democrat.
Neither establishment party is able to muster a credible candidate from within the establishment ranks.
Death of the establishment parties? I think not. This is a slow grinding recalibration of establishment parties across the developed world. All of them grew too lax, too arrogant, too incompetent, and too blind to the needs and interests of the majority of voters. They coasted on the winds of the post WWII boom and forgot how to govern through consent.
Here in the US, the Republican Party was put on notice way back in the 1990s with the Gingrich rebellion and has been edging closer to the needs and interests of voters ever since. Grudgingly. The Tea Party moved them close to voters but was ultimately suppressed. The Trump phenomenon has pushed them closer to voters. But they are still ineluctably an establishment party who desperately want to backslide.
The DNC as an establishment party came off their Obama high ideologically and candidate bankrupt. They lost their bench of candidates. They played typical backroom games with superdelegates and byzantine voting procedures to try and ensure that the DNC choice in Washington would be the choice of the rubes in the sticks. I was in California in 2016 and the outrage on the party rank-and-file and especially among Sanders supporters over the super-delegates and the blatant thumb-on-the-scale hypocrisy was palpable.
What we are seeing right now is not really a meaningful contest between candidates in the Democratic contest. What we are seeing are jubilant rebels on the ideological fringe and a panicking establishment party.
Irony Number 2 - The Democrats who have, since 2016, been avid supporters of the direct popular vote and the abolition of the Electoral College, are sudden enthusiasts for a non-democratic brokered convention.
I make no call on who the Democratic candidate from the primary process will be. However, absent heart-attacks or multiple indictments among the field or destructive opposition-research, it seems that the most probable scenario is that the Democrats will arrive in Wisconsin on July 12th with a leading candidate (Sanders) who has a plurality of the votes, perhaps a strong plurality, but who will not receive the nomination. That the machinations of the fractured party will lead to the anointment of a more "electable" candidate.
Should this come about, Democrats will be in the position of rejecting the sanctity of the popular vote. The very position about which they have been harping (even though the US is not and has never been a direct democracy), ever since 2016. In fact the position will be worse. With the electoral college you can win the election without having the largest number of votes. However, the win will occur through established law and procedures. As opposed to the brokered convention outcome the DNC faces where popular choice has little or no direct bearing on the selected winner (who might not even be someone who has been running.) Democrats will be in the position of rejecting the very basis of democracy - that individual votes count.
Irony Number 3 - Relative base-strength will probably be a bigger determinant of election outcome than absolute votes. I work off of a conceptual model where about a third of the population are reasonably committed Democrats, about a third are reasonably committed Republicans and about a third are either pretty consistent moderates or centrists who can comfortably swing either way. At any point in time, the numbers will vary from 33%, but that seems broadly the reverted mean.
I look at the intra-party bitterness between the moderates, the central establishment and the socialist fringe of the Democrats and see a recipe for electoral disaster. Plenty of observers have noted that part of what is causing uncertainty is that among the field of candidates, no one has a knock out punch and everyone has a marginal path for sustainability. Each staggers from one event to another without ever really opening any gaps.
Sanders always has a base of some 25% which makes him the default front runner in any crowded field. Everyone else floats between single digit and very low double digit positions. As long as that continues, the probability of a brokered convention mounts. But if Sanders takes the brass ring, the reality is that he only commands an enthusiastic 25% of the Democratic Party. 25% of 33% is only 8% of the national vote.
In contrast, Trump has vanquished the never-Trumpers and coopted the establishment Republican Party. He will go into the election with perhaps 95% of 33% enthusiastically backing him, i.e. about 31% of all voters. With a strong economy and many international and reputational tail-winds, all the polls seem to indicate that centrists, independents and moderates are likely to vote with their pocketbooks with at least half of the 33% going reasonably happy with Trump (50% times 33% equals 17%.) Among the balance in the middle, there appear to be very few Sanders supporters.
The net is that out of their respective conventions, it seems likely ceteris paribus that the respective nominees will enter the final stretch with one candidate having about 48% of voters solidly in his pocket and one candidate having only somewhere around 8-12%.
Irony Number 4 - The DNC reforms to make their primary season more open and fair to everyone (reducing the number of establishment super-delegates) has exposed them to how deep a divide there is between the average American voter and the Democratic Party, particularly the socialist wing of the party.
I see a lot of discussion about South Carolina, the relative campaign merits, and Super Tuesday. All useful, if noisy, considerations. I think the above four ironies are where the real dynamics exist.
A flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey
From On Poetry, A Rhapsody by Jonathan Swift
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind.
We found a very precise zero effect
From H/T Paul Caron
From
The arrogance and disrespect is unconsciously on display in this article. It is palpable - "The morons don't know enough to accept free money!"
The low cog central planning statists seem unable to comprehend that people are not group averages and that people live under a multiplicity of circumstances, beliefs, goals, aspirations, assumptions, etc. Just providing more information is rarely effective at changing behaviors and decisions. One of the most effective mechanisms for changing behaviors is for people with a shared set of circumstances to see other similarly situated people enjoying obvious benefit and no downside from the intervention.
But when that happens in real life, there is no need for intervention. People self-adjust out of their own self-interest (no matter how that self-interest varies might from that of the central planners). You don't have to nudge them, they go.
Most nudging efforts have the sotto voce assumption on the part of well-intended but cognitively mundane central planners that they are better placed to understand the needs and wants of others than free people themselves. They are essentially trying to hide coercion by masking it as nudging.
"Its not that people want to be stupid. The capitalist system makes them stupid."
There are two scenarios based on this nudge case.
From
The Limits Of Nudging: Why Can't California Get People To Take Free Money? by Greg Roaslasky.I am deeply skeptical of and repulsed by nudging. The idea has merit and probably, under carefully defined circumstances, effectiveness but by-and-large it involves central planners with an authoritarian streak trying to surreptitiously shape the decisions of others, usually at some cost and little effectiveness and even destructive failure.
The Earned Income Tax Credit supplements incomes through the tax code, awarding thousands of dollars each year primarily to low-wage workers with kids. But there's a problem: a huge population of eligible workers fails to file their taxes and get the money each year.
Several years ago, the state of California established their own state EITC (CalEITC) on top of the federal one. Depending on how many kids they have and how much they earn, a Californian who files for both the state and federal credit can get upwards of $6,000. For the poorest households with kids, those tax credits could almost double their household income. There's a lot of money on the table to help the most at-risk families in the state, and California policymakers have grown concerned about the large number of eligible workers failing to file taxes and claim their credits.
In 2018, the state of California and the California Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary think tank of scholars from various University of California schools, started trying to solve this problem, and they commissioned one of the most fascinating experiments in "nudging" we've seen in a while.
Nudges are simple, low-cost interventions aimed at gently guiding people to make better decisions. For example, making retirement plans the default option when you join a job, which has been shown to significantly increase the likelihood you save more for retirement. The California Policy Lab and its partners decided it would try and nudge workers to claim the EITC by sending them letters and text messages. The solution seemed like a no brainer: inform people how they can get free money, and they'll get that free money! If only it were that simple.
The researchers conducted field experiments for two years on over a million Californians. They randomly divided them into treatment groups, which received various types of messages, and a control group, which received no message. ...
"We found a very precise zero effect," says Elizabeth Linos, a behavioral scientist at UC Berkeley who was also behind the study. Many of those who received the messages, she says, did visit the website advertised in the messages to help them sign up for the EITC. But in the end, they didn't fill out the forms to receive their credit. They turned down free money. "We weren't able to increase the rate at which people file for taxes and we weren't able to increase the number of households that claim the EITC," Linos says.
This experiment might seem like a gigantic failure for behavioral economics and the theory of nudging. But both researchers believe their findings support the broader idea that people aren't the perfectly calculating, error-free creatures of traditional economic models. They're turning down free money — even after they're informed they can get free money.
The arrogance and disrespect is unconsciously on display in this article. It is palpable - "The morons don't know enough to accept free money!"
The low cog central planning statists seem unable to comprehend that people are not group averages and that people live under a multiplicity of circumstances, beliefs, goals, aspirations, assumptions, etc. Just providing more information is rarely effective at changing behaviors and decisions. One of the most effective mechanisms for changing behaviors is for people with a shared set of circumstances to see other similarly situated people enjoying obvious benefit and no downside from the intervention.
But when that happens in real life, there is no need for intervention. People self-adjust out of their own self-interest (no matter how that self-interest varies might from that of the central planners). You don't have to nudge them, they go.
Most nudging efforts have the sotto voce assumption on the part of well-intended but cognitively mundane central planners that they are better placed to understand the needs and wants of others than free people themselves. They are essentially trying to hide coercion by masking it as nudging.
The researchers don't have a solid answer for why the nudges failed. They believe, however, a big part of the problem has to do with tax forms. "Those of us who file taxes know that it's not so easy to file taxes," Rothstein says. "And so we've gotten people to understand that it's there and to want it. But we haven't really given them the tools that it would take to make it easy for them to claim it."In English - "We central planners think people are too stupid to understand what is good for them. We wish we lived in a more totalitarian country where the government tells people what to do and how much money to give."
Linos and Rothstein believe our tax system is too complicated, and that we should make claiming the EITC, and filing for taxes more generally, much simpler. Linos says the good news is that other countries provide examples of systems that don't require mind-numbing paperwork to file for taxes or receive government benefits. "In a lot of countries, the government uses information they already have on you to pre-populate your tax forms," she says. In other words, they tell you what you owe. Or are owed. Then you can just look it over and click send.
"Its not that people want to be stupid. The capitalist system makes them stupid."
A dark view of the findings might write off this population as doomed to poverty because of bad decision-making and self-destructive behavior. But psychologist Eldar Shafir and economist Sendhil Mullainathan suggest a more charitable lens, which they call the "psychology of scarcity ." Their research suggests the poor bear a unique cognitive burden that hurts their decision-making. They work long hours. They have higher stress. They're consumed with thinking about paying their rent, getting their kids medical care, and putting food on the table. Shafir and Mullainathan find these stresses lower their "mental bandwidth," and it might help explain why so many low-income Californians are turning down free money.My alternative view is that the zero effectiveness of the nudge likely says something else than that citizens are stupid not to do what the State wants them to do. Alternative hypotheses include:
Yes, the forms and the tax system are needlessly complex, lack transparency, and have unintended net affects which aren't anticipated.The list goes on and on.
Whole classes of people want to keep their lives more shielded from the government. Taking the nudge opens them to risks from government action.
Some people are insulted by government trying to run their lives.
There are consequences to taking the nudge which the central planners are not understanding.
There is a risk-benefit trade-off which the central planners are not understanding.
There is a higher margin of benefit spending the time on some other activity than on form filling and complying.
We're the government and we're hear to help is not a credible sales positioning.
"Look, free money" is experientially a rarely true statement and frequently a high cost/risk sales line. Hearing that pitch, people turn away.
There are two scenarios based on this nudge case.
A - Mid-level Polisci majors working as bureaucrats in a state agency have such a clear and real understanding of the world of potential beneficiaries that the only explanation for people not taking the "free" money is that they are stupid.I'll go with B.
Or
B - Citizens are pretty canny and have different risk sensitivities, constraints, value-systems and objectives than the nomenklatura comprehend.
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