Wednesday, March 31, 2021

“I’m sorry, Father, but in that case I think we’ll go to Caxton Hall.”

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 156.

Having both toed the line as required, we turned to the marriage service itself. I suggested that we might begin with “The Spacious Firmament on High,” and then . . . but Father Albion cut us short. “I’m afraid we can’t allow any music,” he said. Nor, as it later emerged, would they allow any flowers; and it soon became clear that, although the Roman Catholic Church had reluctantly accepted the possibility of a mixed marriage, it was determined to make the actual service as unpleasant as it possibly could. It was at this moment that Anne put her foot down. “I’m sorry, Father,” she said, “but in that case I think we’ll go to Caxton Hall.” The effect of this threat—Caxton Hall being the main London Registry Office where civil marriages were performed—was better than either of us could have expected. Instantly resistance crumbled away. When the great day came—it was Tuesday, August 5, 1952—we seriously overworked the organist, and the little Catholic church at the gates of Sutton Place in Surrey (my new parents-in-law lived a few hundred yards down the road) was awash with flowers.

It is only fair to point out that this occurred well before the Second Vatican Council, when Pope John XXIII put an end to all such ridiculousness. Several of the changes he made—such as the use of the vernacular language in the Mass, and the requirement that the priest should in future face the congregation rather than the altar—have, I personally believe, proved disastrous. They have demystified the Faith and taken away much of its former magic, with catastrophic results to congregations all over the world. But at least those contemplating a mixed marriage will find themselves navigating a path a good deal less stony than ours. 

 

History

 I visited there in 1981 at the tail end of my summer in Germany where I was polishing my German language skills to pass my German fluency test.  A side trip to Greece was restorative and Lindos spectacular.


A growing awareness

Three times this morning, I come across articles making a similar point.  Each article is reasonably interesting but doesn't quite rise to the point of quotability.  But all three together?

Recently I have asserted that the critical theory/social justice mob mentality is approaching its peak, if not already passed it.  The inherent violence, illiberality, rejection of civil rights, racism, and logical, empirical, and philosophical incoherence seems finally beginning to pull the whole thing down.  It likely will take a long while to excise this poison from our institutions such as K-12, Academia, governmental bureaucracies, and mainstream media, but I hope I am right in observing a slow sea change back towards classical liberalism.

The three articles all allude very indirectly to this from a media perspective.  First was If You Want to Make It As a Writer, For God's Sakes, Be Weird by Freddie deBoer.   A long rambling piece but some key insights.

Writing is not a hard profession. Writing is actually an impossibly easy profession. I could sleep until noon every day if my cat didn’t wake me up at 5:30 AM. The act of writing itself is not hard. In fact it’s easy! People pretend that it’s hard but it’s not. What they find hard is keeping their eyes on their work instead of on Instagram. If you are willing to concentrate writing is a stone-cold breeze, and concentrating is something that you, as a literate primate in possession of free will, can choose to do. I think writers have created the impression that writing is hard because they’re afraid someone will find out the truth and pull down our whole house of cards. Don’t let anyone fool you: being a writer is cake. Trust me, if it was hard I’d be like “I don’t want to be a writer, it’s too hard.”

However, getting paid enough money to live as a writer is hard. Very hard, if you do not have the sort of dynastic advantages many of the professionals out there quietly do (1). And that makes it hard to know how to navigate the intrinsic sense that you must write with integrity even as you do it for a dollar.

(1) So, so many. Writing is precisely the kind of romantic vocation one imagines for themselves while staring out the window of a boarding school with tuition higher than Princeton’s, and so a lot of privileged aspiring writers arrive in New York with the wardrobe of mid-period Joan Didion and the writing skills of… not mid-period Joan Didion. Because they are insulated from financial need they will gladly get paid $12.50 an hour to write 14,000 words a day of viral content, viral in the sense that it will make everyone who reads it feel physically ill. I truly shudder to think of how the wages of experienced and talented writers are driven down by trust funds kids and their willingness to accept poverty wages just to be able to say that they work as a writer in the big city. 

I have ascribed the banality and inaccuracies in much mainstream media reporting to all being similarly educated, all middle class, all living in a small handful of a few major cities, all of which are characterized by Democratic administrations, extraordinarily high income inequality, high crime, exceptionally high levels of immigrant populations, an incredibly insular meritocratic social status system based on certificates of prestige education and white collar professionalism, etc.  These journalists say the same things to each other because they see the world the same way as each other and all subscribe to social justice, critical race theory charlatanism.  

DeBoer points an important additional aspect which I have known but never emphasized.  They are disproportionately middle class but not just the broad middle class.  They are, as deBoers says, the heirs to "dynastic advantages" - some are trust fund beneficiaries, but many are simply the offspring of higher income indulgent parents who are willing and able to subsidize their children through the first decade of financial hazing as described by deBoers.  

There are many industries and sectors which are dramatically winner take all markets.  Theater, movies, arts, journalism, writing, dance, and other such cultural activities are among the most brutal winner take all competitive arenas.  1% take 90% of the winnings and success, beyond basic talent and competitive determination, is largely dictated by who can pay their excessive dues (i.e. low, low income) the longest before breaking through.

Then there was the piece Has American Liberalism Abandoned Free Speech? Interview With Thomas Frank by Matt Taibbi.  

Writer Thomas Frank published a piece in The Guardian last week called, “Liberals want to blame rightwing 'misinformation' for our problems. Get real.” Its basic argument was that rather than look inward for reasons the Democratic Party message isn’t succeeding, and why political extremism is on the rise, Democrats have instead opted for a strategy of “shushing the world.”

Frank addressed the “clampdown mania” of the Internet era, expressing puzzlement over a change in how Democrats look at the speech issue now, versus how traditional liberals almost unanimously viewed the issue in the not-so-distant-past.

“Criticism, analysis, mockery, and protest: these were our weapons,” he wrote. “Censorship and blacklisting were, with important exceptions, the weapons of the puritanical right.”

To say the piece didn’t go over as he expected is an understatement. Although some liked it, he was stunned by the reaction from people he once considered political allies. “People were like, ‘Fuck you, Frank!’” he says, half-laughing.

Thomas Frank is a reasonably hard left-leaning classical liberal.  But still enough of a classical liberal to believe in free speech and freedom of association and natural rights.  He is correct to point out that the fringes (but the noisiest elements) of the Democratic Party have become avowed racist, puritanical suppressors and completely intolerant of anyone who disagrees with them.  

Even fellow leftists.  The real divide, the real polarization is not partisan, it is cultural.  Do you believe in the Classical Liberal world view of tolerance and natural rights and emergent order and respect for all citizens and contributors to the determination of the direction of the nation, rule of law, equality before the law, or do you believe in rule by experts, central planning, intolerance and suppression and no natural rights?

Most conservatives are classical liberals.  What we are seeing happen in the Democratic Party is the gradual expulsion of classical liberals in favor of ideological Wokesters impassioned by Social Justice and Critical Race Theory.  The Wokesters are going after solidly left leaning classical liberals - Thomas Frank, Matt Taibii, Freddie deBoer, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, etc. and driving them away.  It is a race towards totalitarianism.

Finally, there was this reference in an Ann Althouse blog post.  From "The uproar over Michael Tomasky’s hiring at TNR underscores the extent to which any institution that isn’t explicitly right wing now faces enormous pressure to go 'woke.'"  That quote is from Thomas Chatterton Williams.  The rest of Althouse's post quotes a irritable response from a John Ganz who begs to differ.  He thinks TNR is broadly diverse in its political reporting.  His evidence?

Sure, the magazine had a certain political slant, but it was not in any way monolithic. Even its politics were eclectically left-of-center: TNR gave a cover to Bernie and A.O.C., but it also gave the cover to Warren and Biden.

Yep, that's the gamut of political reporting - From AOC to Biden.  All the bases are covered.  I think that argument by Ganz makes Williams's point.   

UPDATE:  And the day is not done.  Late this afternoon, a piece by el gato malo, hallucinating hegemony. Another cancelled libertarian.  Cancelled from Twitter for providing accurate evidence demonstrating the absence of a scientific basis for many or most of the CDC policies.  In other words, for doing the factual reporting that the mainstream media would not.  And no, I don't know anything about his aversion to capitalization.

when your social graph looks like an ouroboros swallowing its own tail and all you hear is echo chamber, it's easy to presume that yourself not just right but righteous. it’s easy to presume that you must be the majority.

when you become sufficiently adept at shouting down dissent, people stop bothering to voice any where you can hear it. but they do not change their minds. they become ever more sure of what a jerk you are.

[snip]

they stare in disbelief as those speaking against their narratives thrive despite the relentless attacks they launch against them. they gawp, incredulous, as their once august mastheads and and media franchises circle the bowl into disrepute and penury.

they blame sabotage. they blame stupid, gullible, deplorable readers. they blame the referees for not calling fouls despite the longest, most absurd run of hometown reffing in media history. they blame everyone but themselves. and that is why they're going to fail.

there is nothing left but empty credentialism and weaponized social dogma rooted in the dishonest application of post-modernism hollowed out to carry hypocritical payloads of un-interrogatable salients about how everything is race or gender or cultural oppression. it's just the childish game of "punch no punchbacks" wrapped up in impenetrable semiotics and jihadi rhetoric.

it’s an empty movement that serves nothing and feeds on nothing but division and divisiveness. astoundingly, the secular priesthood pushing it is so out of touch that they see this as “healing” and “coming together.” i do not use the term hallucination lightly, but this is definitely that. it’s smug, sanctimonious, and oppressive. it’s ubiquitous, unrelenting, and flat out amoral. it inverts everything it touches and calls up down and sideways stationary. it has about as much to do with reality as a hogwarts class on hippogriffs.

and people have had just about enough. the dam is breaking, it’s becoming OK to call this out as the dishonest hogwash it is, and the outlets where one can do so freed of the editorial slant of the dominating left and the winged monkeys of cancel culture cannot intrude are forming and coming to prominence. a child born today may well never even know what a “new york times” or an “msnbc” is. and that’s going to be to their benefit.

 

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Carolina Morning, 1955 by Edward Hopper

Carolina Morning, 1955 by Edward Hopper

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Gannet At Dursley by Jo March

Gannet At Dursley by Jo March

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Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Father Albion strongly advised her to go for spes conversionis, “hope of conversion,” which he described as “always popular.”

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 154.

As our wedding day approached in the summer of 1952, Anne and I were conscious of a problem. The Cliffords were Roman Catholics, one of the oldest recusant families in the country. Anne’s parents for their part never went to church except for weddings or funerals; but the head of the family, Sir Bede’s elder brother Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, seemed to have come straight out of one of the more improbable novels of Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. (When his daughter had married a Protestant, I was told, she was never again permitted to sleep under the family roof. On their occasional visits she and her husband would eat with her parents, but as their relationship was in her father’s eyes openly adulterous they always had to return at night to the local pub.) One day Sir Bede took me aside and told me how much he loved his brother and how distressed he would be if our marriage were to provoke a split in the family. He knew he was asking a lot, but would I therefore please accept whatever was required of me with regard to the wedding arrangements? 

Naturally I agreed. I loved his daughter and wanted to marry her; it seemed a small enough price to pay; though myself rather half-heartedly C of E, I certainly had no bias against Roman Catholicism. I reassured him that I was perfectly ready to do whatever was asked. Little did I know what that would entail. First of all I was presented with a statement, written entirely in Latin, beginning “Ego, Johannes Julius Cooper, apud. . . .” with, at the bottom of the page, a footnote in English reading “Insert full postal address.” In this I undertook to accept Catholic instruction, to marry in a Catholic church according to the full Roman rite and to bring up all our children as Catholics. All this I was more than happy to do—though as it turned out I never got the instruction—and I signed without hesitation. Then it was Anne’s turn. She was given a form, similarly in Latin, to fill in stating exactly why she wanted to marry me. There were, as I remember, seven possible reasons: true love was not one of them. She could marry me for my money; she could marry me to avoid a scandal; she could marry me because I obviously represented the last chance she would ever get (necessitas); but she could not marry me for love. The local priest, Father Gordon Albion—he had a press cutting from some racing newspaper pinned to his office wall, bearing the headline father Albion—second in the novice chases—strongly advised her to go for spes conversionis, “hope of conversion,” which he described as “always popular,” so that was what she did—though I am glad to record that throughout our married life she was to make not the slightest effort to bring me to the light.

 

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A Day of Celebration, 1902 by Fanny Brate, (1861 – 1940)

A Day of Celebration, 1902 by Fanny Brate, (1861 – 1940)

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Low Slope by David Thauberger.

Low Slope by David Thauberger

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Monday, March 29, 2021

“Only a little misunderstanding,” he said. “They thought you said the harp.”

 From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 153.

But the Foreign Office remained my first choice. Besides, several of my friends had applied at the same time, largely because—so long as one left the university with a creditable degree—there was no special examination to cram for.

This was replaced, however, by a rather terrifying interview. I was shown into a large room somewhere in Burlington Gardens and found myself confronted by a panel of a dozen distinguished elderly gentlemen. One only did I know: Ashley Clarke, who had been Minister in Paris under my father and was soon to be appointed Ambassador in Rome. They asked me a number of questions about why I wanted to join the Foreign Service, which I answered as best I could. Then one of them said, “Suppose you were posted to somewhere very remote, perhaps with no other diplomatic colleagues; how would you keep yourself occupied in your spare time?” I replied that I loved music and that I was sure that would keep me going. “Ah,” he said, “do you play any instruments?” “Yes,” I said, “the piano and the guitar.” Suddenly there was consternation; they all started muttering to each other. (Rock groups, I should explain, had not in those days been invented; guitars, if seen at all, were almost invariably of the Spanish variety.) I was conscious of having put a foot disastrously wrong, and was still wondering how when I saw Ashley lean forward and say in a reassuring manner: “He said the guitar.” There was a corporate sigh of relief and the interview went on. Some time later when I next saw Ashley I asked him what had happened. “Only a little  misunderstanding,” he said. “They thought you said the harp.”


Mail-Steamer to Trieste by Albert Rieger (1834-1905)

Mail-Steamer to Trieste by Albert Rieger (1834-1905)

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Persistent gaslighting - voting edition

From Everything Democrats Say About Georgia Election Law Is a Lie by Stephen Kruiser.  More of a partisan rant than a reasoned argument.  But not wrong.  

But it did bring to mind a persistent irony.  Democrats are wedded to the notion that there are disparities in voter registration by race and that this represents Republican voter suppression.  For near twenty years or more, this has been a materially suspect claim in most states.

It is true that there were major issues in registration differentials back before the sixties but through the seventies and eighties, voter registration campaigns were frequent and enthusiastic and differentials became smaller and smaller.

For the nation at large the White voter registration rate is 71.0% while that of Blacks is 63.7%, a 7.3% differential.  That is indeed a material gap, partially explained, but only partially, by the many states who restrict voting rights of felons.  Since African-Americans have higher rates of committing felonies (ex. 55% of all murders despite being only 13% of the population), this would have some impact on voting eligibility.

However, it is of note that there are some states where the registration rates of blacks exceed that of whites - Delaware, Georgia, and Mississippi for example.  

In addition, it should also be noted that fourteen states lack data for making race registration rate comparisons, typically those states with very low African-American populations.  Idaho would be an example where only 0.7% of the state population is African-American; or Hawaii where only 1.6% is African-American.

What is particularly striking, though, are the states where there are very high levels of disparate voting registration by race.  By size of differential in white versus African-American voting rates:

  • USA - 7.3% - voter registration rate in favor of Whites
  • Arizona - 19.1% voter registration rate in favor of Whites
  • California - 11.4%
  • Colorado - 25.6%
  • District of Columbia - 13.7%
  • Iowa - 15%
  • Kansas - 24.6%
  • Maryland - 11.3%
  • Massachusetts - 15.3%
  • Oklahoma - 17.5%
  • Oregon - 10.7%
  • Virginia - 10.7%
  • Wisconsin - 15.3%

Twelve states/D.C. with double digit differentials in favor of white voters.  Of the twelve, only Iowa, Kansas, and Oklahoma are solidly Republican.  So nine of the states with the lowest registration rates of African-American voters compared to Whites are overwhelmingly or lean Democrat.  

Of the three states with voter registration favoring African-Americans, Delaware, Georgia and Mississippi, 2/3rds are solidly Republican.  

The sustained mainstream media claim that Republicans are trying to disenfranchise African-American voters is pretty hard to sustain when looking at these facts.  The numbers would seem to indicate that it is Democrats who are suppressing the Black vote.  

However, being registered to vote is only part of the process.  Of greater importance is actually choosing to vote.  You might call this differential the voter enthusiasm differential.  If all registered voters were equally enthusiastic to vote, there would be no gap.

Instead, there is a 6.9% voting enthusiasm gap between Whites and African-Americans in favor of Whites.  57.5% of White registered voters actually do vote whereas only 50.6% of African-American registered voters vote.  

And where is the enthusiasm gap the largest?  It is not an unfamiliar list.  New states added in italics.

  • USA - 6.9% - gap in voting enthusiasm registration rate in favor of Whites
  • Arizona - 14.4%
  • California - 11.5%
  • Colorado - 31.6%
  • Connecticut - 9.4%
  • District of Columbia - 15.0%
  • Florida - 9.6%
  • Iowa - 9.5%
  • Kansas - 13.7%
  • Maryland - 10.0%
  • Massachusetts - 15.0%
  • Missouri - 9.5%
  • Nevada - 19.5%
  • Oklahoma - 17.5%
  • Oregon - 8.2%
  • Virginia - 10.7%
  • Washington - 19.8%
  • Wisconsin - 20.8%

The list has expanded from twelve to sixteen.  Of the sixteen, eleven are solidly Democratic states, 69%.

For both voter registration and for actual voting participation, the data suggests that Democratic states are by far more likely to suppress the African-American vote, both in terms of registration as well as in terms of actual voting.

That's not what you hear in the mainstream media though.  No room there for facts I guess.


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The Sleepless Night, 1988 by Hanno Karlhuber

The Sleepless Night, 1988 by Hanno Karlhuber

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Sunday, March 28, 2021

The only positive attribute was a splendid hooter

 From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 149.

Meanwhile I still had two years to go at Oxford. For my last, 1951–1952, I moved out of New College and into digs just round the corner in Holywell Street, run by a certain Mrs. Hall. My fellow lodgers were to remain friends for life: Johnny Lawrence (later Oaksey), Miles Jebb (later Gladwyn) and—alas no longer with us—Raymond Bonham Carter, father of the lovely Helena.
We were fond of Mrs. Hall, though we teased her mercilessly, but were a good deal less enamored of her French bulldog, one of the ugliest and smelliest beasts I have ever encountered. By now I was—after a fashion—mobile, having bought for £75 my first car, a 1922 Bean. Hardly anybody now remembers Beans; it was, I suspect, not only because of their ridiculous name that they went out of production at an early stage of motoring history. Mine, though it boasted a rudimentary self-starter, almost always had to be cranked by hand—not a pleasant job in pouring rain. But rain, together with cold, revealed other, more serious defects. The car had a retractable hood but no windows, a windscreen but no wipers. The screen was composed  of two separate panes of glass of which the upper could be raised outwards on a hinge, creating a narrow gap through which the driver could peer while the rain beat mercilessly on to his face. The only positive attribute was a splendid hooter, activated by a sharp squeeze on a rubber bulb, which gave us all intense satisfaction. With this perfectly dreadful machine my poor Anne would show superhuman patience, frequently arriving at parties windswept and blue with cold. 

 

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Always with the missing context.

Well this is a fascinating detail which I would expect to have a broader public awareness than it has.  I have probably read three books, maybe six, on the Texas War for Independence and the Alamo, and I was not aware of this context.

From What Nobody Tells You About the Alamo and the Texas Revolution of the 1830s by Erik at No Passaran.  There was a recent dust-up when the Texas State Historical Association’s chief historian, Walter Buenger, declared that the battle of the Alamo as an insignificant battle then and a monument to white supremacy now.

Racist idiocy of the first order.  

Erik points out the missing context.  Mexico was made up of a federation of twenty states, and in 1835, General Antonio López de Santa Anna staged a coup and overturned the Mexican Constitution of 1824 which among other things outlawed slavery.  

Eleven of the twenty states rebelled against the de Santa Anna coup (Wikipedia identifies fifteen states who rebelled against Santa Anna's coup).  Some sought to restore the 1824 Constitution and others sought independence from the new Junta. In fact, de Santa Anna's first battle was against the self-declared Republic of Zacatecas.  Ultimately three of Mexico's states declared independence, including Texas.  The Republic of the Yucatan lasted seven years.

Contra Woke Buenger, Texas was only one of some fifteen (of a total of twenty) Mexican states which rebelled against Santa Anna's coup, and one of the three which declared independence against Santa Anna.  Racism and white supremacy had nothing to do with these rebellions and independence movements - they were all efforts to support a Constitutional nation against the threats and violence of a dictator.


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But everything in moderation.  1-2 dissenters improve rigor of consensus decision.  100% dissenters, not so much.


Blonsterstykke by Christine Løvmand

Blonsterstykke by Christine Løvmand

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Saturday, March 27, 2021

This is what comes of a night at the Metropole, Look what it’s done for me.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 145.

Of all our guests, the most distinguished of all were Winston and Clementine Churchill. They regularly came to Venice for a fortnight in September, staying at the Excelsior on the Lido; and as Winston had a passion for the cinema the five of us frequently went together. He would immerse himself totally in the film, keeping up a running commentary to himself throughout. On one occasion I heard him muttering, “Oh jealousy, jealousy—the most barren of all vices.” On another, during a film about the life of wandering Irish tinkers, there were repeated murmurs of “poor people, oh poor people” and, once, “poor horse.” Sometimes the Churchills would come to dinner with us at the Gritti. There was one agonizing evening when Clemmie whispered to my mother as they arrived, “I’m sorry Diana, but Winston’s in a very black mood”—and indeed he was, scowling furiously across the table, answering all my mother’s ever more frantic attempts at conversation with an angry grunt. His depression spread over the party like a leaden pall; before long we were all reduced to an embarrassed silence. Then, quite suddenly, he turned to my mother and said, “I shall be much better when I have had another glass of your excellent champagne.” Five minutes later the fog had lifted and he was singing old music hall songs, one of which ended “This is what comes of a night at the Metropole, Look what it’s done for me.” I have been trying to find the words ever since.

 

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We do not identify any statistically significant effects of temperature on GDP growth

Economic forecasting, Covid-19 forecasting, AGW climate change forecasting, the past couple of decades should have taught us the challenges and dangers of narrow technical experts modeling multi-system, chaotic, complex, non-linear, loosely coupled systems.  The conceptual challenge is enormous and the data sets underpinning the efforts are often relatively sparse, low quality, or poorly defined and of inconsistent measurement quality.

For those watching the efforts it has been an exercise in frustration.  We are shoveling muck into a Rube Goldberg model of obscure design, and then treating the outcomes as if they were informative and and precise when in fact, they are virtually worthless. 

AGW forecasting models have been abysmal and repeatedly wrong to a material degree and yet we treat them as if they were both precise and accurate despite the absence of any evidence supporting that conclusion.  

One aspect of AGW forecasting is the estimation of the relationship between heat and GDP.  The argument is, in general, that the warmer the climate, the lower the GDP.  While generally treated as a given among the chattering class, among economists, historians and climate experts, relationship is far from proven.  

There is a recent paper which encapsulates some of the inside baseball aspects of this consequential debate about modeling.

In a paper by Steven Sexton in 2018, there is a recap of the debate.  From Sexton Response to Burke and Hsiang Critique of“The GDP-Temperature relationship: Implications for climate change damages”

In 2015, Nature published an important paper by Marshall Burke, Solomon Hsiang, and Edward Miguel that identified a global, non-linear relationship between temperature and economic production that implied a 23% reduction in global incomes from projected climate change in 2100. The paper (henceforth BHM) identified this relationship in rich and poor countries and in agricultural and non-agricultural production, upending the conjecture of many economists that poor countries and climate-exposed sectors like agriculture would be at risk, but rich countries and other industries may be spared large losses from climate change. In fact, the earlier work of Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones, and Benjamin Olken (DJO) that BHM advanced reached precisely that conclusion by identifying a statistically significant linear effect of temperature on GDP growth among only poor countries.

BHM has shaped a lot of media coverage.  However,

The implications of the BHM study cannot be overstated—and have not been lost on scientific and lay audiences. The higher are the expected losses from climate change, the more costs we should incur today to mitigate climate change. If rich countries are relatively spared harms, then traditional development activities to enrich poor countries can mitigate harms from climate change. But if they, too, are at risk, then climate policy should perhaps displace development policy in a world of constrained resources. Both BHM and DJO, further, propose temperature affects GDP growth, not merely the levels of GDP, as has been widely assumed among economists, including those who developed the models estimating the human harms caused by carbon emissions employed by policy makers in the U.S.That is, a temperature shock this year, BHM propose, does not merely affect production or incomes this year before returning to normal next year(if temperatures return to normal). Rather the shock this year also affects production and incomes in subsequent years by slowing economic growth and setting the world on a GDP path that is permanently lower because of the one-time temperature shock. Neither DJO nor BHM points to a developed and peer-reviewed theory for temperature affecting growth rather than levels of GDP. The first paper models a growth effect as a matter of statistical convenience.

Further:

A broader literature dominated by Hsiang relates temperature and other weather shocks to national and sub-national economic outcomes—including GDP levels in some instances, and GDP growth in others. This growing literature makes seemingly ad hoc decisions about how to model the relationship between temperature and economic aggregates, including how to control for determinants of economic outcomes that may correlate with weather but are unobserved by researchers. These “unobservables” can bias estimates of the temperature effects on the economy. Each of these models purports to identify a causal relationship between temperature and economic outcomes. But they specify different causal models in different instances in a fashion seemingly divorced from any theory.  Indeed, theory offers little guidance on the proper set of controls or functional forms to use in this endeavor. 

Thus, observing that there is little theory to guide the statistical modeler’s choices in this setting, we set out to determine whether model performance or predictive ability can discipline researcher discretion and lend greater credibility to the results of these analyses, or at least determine the degree of uncertainty attributable to this modeling ambiguity. We do so by employing the method of cross-validation to assess which among many plausible causal models best explains the data. The idea is simply to estimate models over a subset of the available data and then assess how well the estimated models predict outcomes for a different subset of data. This approach is common across disciplines, and is recently advanced in economics by Susan Athey, among others. It is specifically advocated in the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy(2017) by Elodie Blanc and Wolfram Schlenker specifically for assessing climate impacts:“Another strength of panel models is that they offer a straightforward way to assess prediction performance by comparing model predictions to output observations.”We couple cross-validation with an approach to assess which models are statistically significantly superior in their performance following the Model Confidence Set procedure of Hansen, Lunde, and Nason (Econometrica 2011).

Among the conclusions:

The sets of best-performing models are large, reflecting the limited capacity of the data to discern among these best-performing models. Because these models project dramatically different GDP outcomes in 2100, they yield immense model uncertainty that is ignored in BHM. Accounting for this model uncertainty and the sampling uncertainty that BHM explore, we do not identify any statistically significant effects of temperature on GDP growth. Not in poor countries. Not in rich countries. Not in agriculture. And not in industrial production. Not at the 5% significance level. Not at the 10%significance level. Indeed, not even at the 20% significance level.In estimating the marginal growth effect of temperature across all countries and all GDP, we do not find a statistically significant marginal effect of temperature on GDP growth at even the 50% significance level.

 Burke and Hsiang have a response in The GDP-temperature relationship - some thoughts on Newell, Prest, and Sexton 2018 from October, 2020.

Sexton et al have an update to their paper and response to critiques, also from October 2020.  

It would be presumptuous on part to assess the relative merits given that the esoterica of the criticisms of one another are beyond my direct experience.

As a practical matter, I am inclined towards Sexton, et al based on the old adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  All the institutional world is committed to the belief that there is an AGW effect (still disputed), that there are effective interventions (still disputed) and that only coercive central planning and control can make these interventions work (still disputed.)  

Additionally, there is the broader issue that our experience and capacity to model multi-system, chaotic, complex, non-linear, loosely coupled systems using data sets underpinning those efforts which are often relatively sparse, low quality, or poorly defined and of inconsistent measurement quality is highly constrained and record of success not established.  


Data Talks

 

The Blue Shirt by Jim Holland

The Blue Shirt by Jim Holland

Click to enlarge.


Friday, March 26, 2021

It was one of the most sensible resolutions I have ever made.

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 139.

Extracurricular life was enjoyable enough. The prefab didn’t last long: after a term or two I was moved into a funny little rickety cottage in the back quad, opposite the Library, where I had two rooms of my own which I loved and which were far better for entertaining friends and—a growing passion—making and listening to music. The year 1950 saw the introduction of the vinyl Long-Playing Record—which had a far greater impact than the later tape cassette or the CD, freeing one as it did from the drudgery of changing those heavy, fragile 78 rpm records every three or four minutes, endlessly sharpening or renewing the needles. The twelve inch classical LPs were expensive—thirty-nine shillings and sixpence each—which meant that one treasured them, playing them again and again. It was at Oxford more than anywhere else that I got to know the classical repertoire; but I never ventured very far outside it. Isaiah once confessed to me that he drew the line at a 1900 birth date; to composers born before then he was delighted to listen, those born afterwards bored him to death. I am prepared to make an exception for Benjamin Britten—who was born in 1913—but I otherwise feel much the same. For years I tried, spending countless hours at concerts of modern music and a small fortune on records, always hoping that the curtain would lift; but it never did, and on my fiftieth birthday I decided to give up. After all, there was far more music of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries that I could hope to enjoy in my lifetime; why waste any more time and money on that of the twentieth? It was one of the most sensible resolutions I have ever made.

 

The upside of colonialism

From Numeracy development in Africa: New evidence from a long-term perspective (1730–1970) by Gabriele Cappelli and Joerg Baten.  From the Abstract.

Historical evidence of numeracy on the African continent since the 18th century is presented for the first time based on a panel dataset of 43 African countries covering the periods before, during and after colonialism (1730–1970). Estimates of numeracy draw on the age-heaping methodology: we carefully discuss the potential biases and sources of measurement error concerning the use of this index for long-term analyses. These new estimates enable us to gain a better understanding of long-term African development. We find that the evolution of numeracy over time correlates with differences in colonial education systems, even when controlling for other variables.

There is more and more research like this, identifying countries with strong colonial history having accelerated socio-economic development as a consequence.   Not always, but preponderantly.  

We can increasingly see that for many colonized countries, a consequence was an acceleration in socio-economic progress and institutionalized progress.  

There are two unanswered questions.  Was the cost of colonization to the colonizer and colonized on balance worthwhile?  Hard to answer definitively but there are sometimes some suggestive hints.

The more difficult question is ethical.  Even if the net benefit is strongly beneficial to both the colonizer and the colonized, would that warrant the coercive occupation of undeveloped regions?

It feels compelling that the answer would be no!  On the other hand, recasting it a bit "Is mutually net  beneficial colonialism (even with a cost) permissible if it is the only known means of accelerating future national productivity?  The World Bank and IMF have a pretty extensive rate of failure.

I still feel that the answer should be no, but the implication is that we accept more deaths, greater illness and less stable development.  It is a challenging question.


History

 

They wanted more and they got less and it hurts.

Freddie deBoer is now on Substack, the platform for Classical Liberal journalists ostracized and banished from the Woke mainstream media.  He has an interesting and compelling essay, It's All Just Displacement by Freddie deBoer.  I recommend reading the whole thing as there is too much worthy of excerpting.  

Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

[snip]

You think the writers complaining in that piece I linked to at the top wanted to be here, at this place in their career, after all those years of hustling? You think decades into their media career, the writers who decamped to Substack said to themselves “you know, I’d really like to be in my 40s and having to hope that enough people will pitch in $5 a month so I can pay my mortgage”? No. But the industry didn’t give them what they felt they deserved either. So they displace and project. They can hate Jesse Singal, but Jesse Singal isn’t where this burning anger is coming from. Neither am I. They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security. I feel for them as I feel for all people living economically precarious lives, but getting rid of Substack or any of its writers will not do anything to fix their industry or their jobs. They wanted more and they got less and it hurts. This isn’t what they dreamed. That’s what this is really about.

Well worth the read.


An Insight

I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

The Train by Ben McLaughlin

The Train by Ben McLaughlin

Click to enlarge.


Thursday, March 25, 2021

But Rabelais is an exception to every rule

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 139.

Oxford should be fun, and so it was; but for me it was perhaps not quite as much fun as it might have been, because at the very outset I made a fatal mistake: I decided to read modern languages. My father had done his utmost to dissuade me. The only successful way to learn a language, he maintained, was by total immersion: to go off to the appropriate country, stay with a local family and saturate oneself in it all day, every day, from morning to night. As for literature, to study it academically was to turn what should be pleasure into drudgery. Briefly, I allowed myself to be persuaded and put my name down for PPE—politics, philosophy, and economics—but after a fortnight I could bear it no longer. I changed schools, for the rest of my Oxford life devoting all too many of my waking hours to French and Russian; and by the time I realized how right my father had been it was too late to change back again. (I am surprised, in retrospect, that I did not unhesitatingly plump for history, the writing of which has been my principal occupation since my mid-thirties. Perhaps the knowledge that I should be required to study the Pandects of Justinian in Latin may have had something to do with it.) Three years later when I left, my spoken French—always pretty fluent and further polished up in Paris and Strasbourg—was not appreciably better than it had been when I started; and though I could read Russian without too much difficulty, conversationally I could still barely get off the ground. What Oxford did do for me—though I have only myself to blame—was to ruin two of the greatest literatures of the world. After three years of force-feeding (I remember having to read three Dostoyevsky novels in a week) I had enough of them. I have hardly read a single French or Russian novel since. The one exception—if you can call him a novelist—was Rabelais, to whom Oxford introduced me and whose sheer fantasy and ebullience enchanted me and still does; but Rabelais is an exception to every rule.

 

History

 

An Insight

 

Swedish Update

A useful update.  From Sweden saw lower 2020 death spike than much of Europe data by Johan Ahlander.

I maintain that we still don't know what is going on.  Operation Warp Speed was a surprisingly successful strategic move.  Measurement of Covid-19 deaths is still wretchedly bad in the sense that we do not have data distinguishing those who died from Covid-19 from those who died of co-morbidities with Covid-19.   

A large number of other demographic and contextual data is also either not well-defined or poorly measured if at.  Natural lung diseases (pneumonia, flu, etc.) are known to vary by year, with a bad year often followed by a relatively low lung disease mortality year.  When comparing countries' performance in this first year, we need to know what the prior lung disease mortality rates were in prior years and this is virtually never discussed.  

The centralized control model with coercive lockdowns seems reasonably discredited at this point though the MSM and Mandarin Class are still avid apologists.  They almost have to be given the near universal failure of their predictions.

Sweden, which has shunned the strict lockdowns that have choked much of the global economy, emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries, an analysis of official data sources showed.

Infectious disease experts cautioned that the results could not be interpreted as evidence that lockdowns were unnecessary but acknowledged they may indicate Sweden’s overall stance on fighting the pandemic had merits worth studying.

In the past week, Germany and France have extended lockdowns amid rising coronavirus cases and high death tolls, moves that economists say will further delay economic recovery.

While many Europeans have accepted lockdowns as a last resort given the failure to get the pandemic under control with other methods, the moves have in recent months prompted street protests in London, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

Sweden, meanwhile, has mostly relied on voluntary measures focused on social distancing, good hygiene and targeted rules that have kept schools, restaurants and shops largely open - an approach that has sharply polarised Swedes but spared the economy from much of the hit suffered elsewhere in Europe.

Preliminary data from EU statistics agency Eurostat compiled by Reuters showed Sweden had 7.7% more deaths in 2020 than its average for the preceding four years. Countries that opted for several periods of strict lockdowns, such as Spain and Belgium, had so-called excess mortality of 18.1% and 16.2% respectively.

Twenty-one of the 30 countries with available statistics had higher excess mortality than Sweden. 

Once we begin getting consistent and usefully measured data over the next three to five years, we will have a better read on the judgment of which policies worked and which did not.  For the time being, the returns are that you are better off sharing the data which is known, making recommendations and asking citizens to make their decisions.  Centralization and coercion are not particularly successful. 


I see wonderful things

 

Offbeat Humor

 

Data Talks

 

There are more things in heaven, earth, and voting practices, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

These post-election investigations don't seem to be getting a lot of coverage.  From A River of Doubt Runs Through Mail Voting in Montana by John R. Lott Jr..  

A mountainous, 2,600-square-mile region with a population of approximately 119,600 does not seem like your prototypical setting for machine politics. Yet a recent audit of mail-in ballots cast there found irregularities characteristic of larger urban centers — on a level that could have easily swung local elections in 2020, and statewide elections in cycles past.

[snip]

The story at hand begins during the pandemic summer of 2020, when the then-governor, Democrat Steve Bullock, issued a directive permitting counties to conduct the general election fully by mail.  In the run-up to the election, a court also struck down Montana’s law aimed at preventing ballot harvesting.

Missoula, Montana’s second most populous county and one of its most heavily Democratic, opted in to the universal vote-by-mail regime.

In response, in October 2020, several county residents with experience targeting election integrity issues formed a group to ensure the legitimacy of the 2020 vote. The members contended that Missoula County had shown anomalies in elections past. 

[snip]

Seaman’s office complied with Tschida’s request for access to all of the county’s ballot envelopes, and on Jan. 4 a team of volunteers, overseen by Rhoades, conducted an audit with the assistance of the Missoula County Elections Office. The audit consisted of both a count and review of all ballot envelopes and comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the Nov. 3, 2020, general election.

Its conclusions were troubling: 4,592 out of the 72,491 mail-in ballots lacked envelopes— 6.33% of all votes. Without an officially printed envelope with registration information, a voter's signature, and a postmark indicating whether it was cast on time, election officials cannot verify that a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes.

What’s more, according to auditors, county employees claimed that during the post-election audit, some of the envelopes may have been double-counted, possibly indicating an even higher number of missing envelopes. 

Auditors also tested a smaller, random sub-sample of 15,455 mail-in envelopes for other defects. Of these, 55 lacked postmark dates, and 53 never had their signatures checked — for a total of 0.7% of all ballots in the sample. No envelope had more than one irregularity.

Extrapolating from the sub-sample, that would make more than 5,000 of Missoula County’s votes — roughly 7% — with unexplained irregularities.

Still another issue arose during the audit that aroused auditors’ suspicions: Dozens of ballot envelopes bore strikingly similar, distinctive handwriting styles in the signatures, suggesting that one or several persons may have filled out and submitted multiple ballots, an act of fraud.

One auditor asserted that of 28 envelopes reviewed from the same address, a nursing home, all 28 signatures looked “exactly the same” stylistically.

Another auditor reported that among the envelopes she reviewed, two very unique signatures appeared dozens of times, describing one such signature as starting out flat, moving to a peak, and tapering out, and another as consisting of numerous circles — a “bubble signature.” 

The whole thing is worth a read.  The issue is real, the effect size debated.  But to rebuild trust between the Mandarin Class and citizens, we need to better address what seems like a scheme to serve the entrenched interests over the representation of actual citizens. 


The truth is popping up in some strange places. I hope it is a portent.

Interesting at many levels.  From Mass Shooters Aren’t Disproportionately White by Daniel Engber in Slate magazine.  Slate is a fixture in the strongly left-leaning firmament of the mainstream media.  Their past willingness to report factually and counter to the Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theory myth-making has been restrained.  

While Engber gets the main statistical points right, there seems a lot of linguistic confusion about statistical terms as well as some effort to shore up the Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theory the world view even though the facts undermine it.

Engbert establishes the reality of the problem by citing instances from mainstream media voices:

Stephen Paddock shot more than 500 people from the windows of his Las Vegas hotel room Sunday night, killing 58 of them. In the days since, a familiar story has been passed around the internet about the blinkered way in which we talk about these sorts of massacres. We’re so quick to blame Islamic terrorists, this story goes, that we don’t address the stark, distressing truth about mass shootings. The killers aren’t angry immigrants, by and large. They’re white men.

“These shooters are almost exclusively coming from a single socio-economic class and racial group,” wrote actor Cole Sprouse in a widely shared Twitter thread. We must now address “what part of whiteness influences this kind of Petri dish for gun violence and killing.”

This wasn’t just a social media phenomenon. The Huffington Post published Sprouse’s tweets as a “Powerful Take on Whiteness and Mass Shootings.” An article in Elle called the link between white men and mass shootings “a general rule” and proposed that “our refusal to confront toxic white male violence is why this problem will metastasize.” The progressive news site ThinkProgress said that “when we talk about mass shootings, we are talking about white men.” Newsweek wondered if “white men commit mass shootings out of a sense of entitlement.” A CNN opinion piece bemoaned the fact that “America has silently accepted the rage of white men.”

The MSM argument, and reporting representation, is that empirical reality is consistent with Critical Race and Social Justice Theory - Whites are disproportionately responsible for mass killings.  

An argument which was disproved some thirty years ago and continues to be untrue with ever more accumulating evidence of the untruth of the argument.  Part of this false argument probably originates from simple innumeracy and statistical ignorance which is on constant display in media reporting on diverse topics.  Journalists and editors don't speak maths and frequently get it badly wrong.  

Take as a simple example.  Regardless of category (race, religion, left-handedness, marital status, etc.) we would expect, absent any a priori knowledge to the contrary, that a group will be represented in the outcome to the extent that they are represented in the universe.  If our focus is on mass killers and whites are 75% of the population, then we would expect them to be 75% of mass killers.  We can change the category and the rule remains the same.  If 10% of the population is left-handed, then we expect 10% of mass murders to be left-handed.  

To drive it home, if 50% of the population is Protestant, then 50% of mass murders will be Protestant.  

If the data bears out the assumption of equal proportionality between outcome and population, then it indicates there is no useful association between any of the categories and the outcomes.  

It is only when there is a material disproportion that you can see some suggestive causal effect.  If 40% of mass shooters are left-handed, then it raises the question: "What is distinctive about left-handedness which causes them to be over-represented among mass murderers?"

Journalists, however, frequently confuse majority and proportionality.  Specifically, if 75% of the population is white and 75% of mass murderers are white, then journalists seems to interpret this as "whites are a majority of mass murderers and that is a problem" whereas statisticians draw the conclusion that whites commit mass murders in strict proportion to their representation in the population and there is no problem.  

The prevailing myth among journalists that whites commit a disproportionate number of mass murders likely results from this statistical ignorance - majority does not carry the connotation of disproportionate.

Engbert understands this and refutes the common media narrative with the existing and easily available empirical data.

What those initial Mother Jones numbers showed, though, was that white people weren’t overrepresented among mass shooters. The media outlet had found that roughly 70 percent of the shooters in mass killings were white—certainly a majority. But according to Census Bureau estimates for 2012, whites accounted for 73.9 percent of all Americans. (Keep in mind that the definition of whiteness is both vague and forever changing. In the 2010 census, the “white” category includes those whose families originate in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Mother Jones, for its part, categorizes one Moroccan immigrant killer as “white”; leaves the race field blank for a Turkish immigrant; and describes several shooters of Pakistani, Palestinian, Afghan and Kuwaiti extraction as “other.”)

[snip]

Since 2012, Mother Jones has added 29 more mass-shooting events to its database (and tweaked its definition of the crime to fit with new federal guidelines that placed the threshold at three victims instead of four). In this bigger data set, the proportion of white mass shooters drops down to 56 percent, by my count. Judging by those newer numbers, and the most current census estimate that 76.9 percent of Americans are white, the whites-are-overrepresented-among-mass-shooters meme appears even less accurate. Perpetrators that Mother Jones classifies as Asian make up 7.4 percent of the data set, versus an estimated 5.7 percent of the population, while those MoJo identifies as black represent 17.0 percent of the mass shooters in the database versus an estimated 13.3 percent of the population. According to this data set, then, Asians and black Americans are overrepresented among mass shooters by about the same proportion (a bit more than one-fourth) that whites are underrepresented. This means the population rate of mass shootings by whites (at least according to the tiny sample measured in the MoJo database) is 0.021 per 100,000 people, while the corresponding rate of mass shootings by blacks is 1.7 times higher, at 0.037.

The MSM habit of perpetrating a demonstrable untruth is a longstanding habit.  It may or may not be due to ideological conviction (Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theory) and it may or may not be due to innumeracy and statistical ignorance.  Regardless of cause, they are spreading an obvious and empirical untruth.

Engbert gets caught in the weeds, propagating an odd notion.  It almost comes across as a jesuitical apology for critiquing the MSM narrative.

Overall murder rates among black Americans are 6.3 times higher than they are for whites, according to a report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Another report suggests white offenders made up just 45.3 percent of everyone who committed homicides between 1980 and 2008. In other words, white Americans may be somewhat underrepresented among mass shooters, but they’re even more underrepresented among all killers. In that limited sense, it would be fair to say that whites are responsible for more public massacres than you might expect. Does that mean their whiteness is a factor in these crimes?

White Americans are somewhat underrepresented among mass murders (whites being 77% of the population but only 74% of mass murderers) but are very underrepresented among murderers (whites being 77% of the population but only 45% of murderers).  Engbert tries to create the impression that this difference in underrepresentation has some negative significance.  That is a desperate hail-Mary to try and sustain the notion that whites are major problem in the issue of mass murders.

Why is any of this a problem?  Well the obvious racism and effort to cultivate division by Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theorists is certainly one part of the problem.  The main problem, though, is that if you do not correctly define the problem, the odds of you successfully "solving" or at least ameliorating the problem decline catastrophically.  

Which Engbert then demonstrates.

It’s possible—but given all the numbers above, I think it makes more sense to ask why those classified as non-white might be disproportionately represented among killers, from mass shooters down the line. The answer there would seem to have everything to do with privilege. Structural inequalities related to education, employment, housing, and health care, along with de facto segregation and a history of discrimination and bias, create conditions under which black Americans in particular are more likely to be both the perpetrators and the victims of this violence. More than half of those committing homicides in the BJS data set are black, and close to half of the victims of those homicides are black. These statistics show us that in a global sense, a lack of privilege contributes to killing and that white privilege kills, at least in part, through the reciprocal cost it imposes on to other groups.

For the Critical Race Theory/Social Justice Theorists, it always comes back to race and privilege and inequalities.  For rationalist empiricists out Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism, that is all nonsense.  It could be theoretically true but the data does not support that.  Nigerians do fantastically well in the US.  Haitian refugees do surprisingly well given the barriers they have faced (poverty, language difference, cultural difference, education disparities, etc.).  Somalis quite a bit worse.  As with native born African Americans.

It is not a race issue or inequality or privilege.  It is an issue of class and culture.  

If you want to address disparities, you have to address class and culture.  Notoriously difficult issues.  Diagnosing everything as race, inequality and privilege allows Marxists to advance theoretical solutions under a seemingly moral flag.  But they never work because they are applying failed solutions to incorrectly defined problems.  

So much nonsense.

Kudos to both Engbert and Slate for daring to introduce the truth into the lion's den of Woke self-delusion.  It will be intellectually refreshing if our MSM ever emerges into the uplands of clear thinking and logic based on empirical realities.  Most of them are still mired in the fog of self-delusion and fanatical adherence to bad ideologies.