Obama Logic

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/barack-obama-on-bell-curve.php This is one of the very few things Obama has actually put his name to. It makes for totally unoriginal propaganda along the main line of political correctness. How surprising. Obama says (circa 1994): 1. IQ tests are illegitimate 2. cancelling affirmative action and welfare is racist 3. blacks need to take responsibility for their lives 4. blacks have never had equal opportunity in reality 5. equal opportunity would require heavy (or heavier) government spending/intervention in the lives of the poor I agree with #3. #1 is a harmful form of denial. #2 presumes that America owes reparations to blacks, which it does not. I might add that calling others racist without clear cause and justification is itself racist. #4 blacks have received more than they've given since 1965 in financial, professional, and educational terms--and it is a pregnant symbol of the self-defeating attitude of the black community that by the second generation, every non-black group of immigrants (having started with less) has surpassed American blacks in all measurable socioeconomic statistics. #5 government intervention has been so pervasive and is so incompetent and psychologically damaging that it has been, is, and will be counterproductive.

Priorities

It's interesting to note the options not presented in this game: Medicaid, food stamps, section 8 housing come to mind. And the real problem remains overall health costs, not the budget deficit--which is just a symptom of health costs. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=h7u6c816

Dunceries

For those who still consider Beck, Limbaugh and company anything more than cartoon figures: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/opinion/17friedman.html?src=me&ref=general

Those who submit to leaders who lie to them for fun--
Well, demagoguery is still a going business.

Secession, Part II

http://www.economist.com/node/17467202

The harping on the 1964 Civil Rights Act seems disingenuous to me. I doubt more than 10-20% left the party for that reason: look at the graph. What really turned white southerners against the Democrats over the long term was the explosion of the welfare state and the advent of federally mandated anti-white racism. And these monstrous outgrowths of political correctness were all the more damaging in the South, since blacks are so heavily represented there. It is only surprising that the Democratic decline has taken so long--but, most people hold to their political beliefs unto death, seized by the mania for consistency, that "hobgoblin of little minds." I think the die-off dividend has been collected at this point, which means the Democrats are roughly at their nadir there--and our immigration policies promise a bright future to the socialists and their darkling dependents.

Crossing the Line

This is not the sort of review one expects to find in a leftist magazine like The New Republic: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/what-hope Nevertheless, even if enlightenment is achieved by the socialist component of our polity--I think a change of policy likely to lag very far behind, for political, psychological, and cognitive reasons. This is a key insight: Wax [author of the book under review] is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.          The Johnsonian "Great Society" interventions in black America are as flagrant a public policy failure as the Nixonian "War on Drugs" that followed. In each case, the government stepped in, all money and arrogance, spent profligately to ensure black men no longer faced any financial responsibilities, ruined millions of American lives by process of moral hazard, and made the original problems much worse. The black family was ruthlessly destroyed as an institution, and black culture went with it. Further, as I've mentioned at other times, the black-white IQ gap is not irrelevant to the problem. It has persisted at the same level for the 100 years that IQ testing has been administered. But, to reiterate a basic consequence of this fact, if the top third of whites pull bachelors degrees, their average IQ would be about 114 and the minimum would be 106. Only 8% of blacks meet this minimum and 2.5% meet the average--a fourfold difference between college-capable whites and blacks. With ever more sophisticated demands faced by professionals, the fact that only 8% of blacks can hope to meet those demands constitutes a serious problem requiring such redress as we can muster. Wax does mention this, but only in a single paragraph that fails to grapple with its implications. I do credit her, however, with the courage to admit that the possibility of genetic differences in IQ between races yet remains, "the science on this question is inconclusive." (69) In the next quote, I disagree with the reviewer, who hasn't learned the limits of governmental competence. Throwing more handouts at black America will exacerbate the problem, which stems in the first instance from a lack of self-reliance reinforced over decades by the nanny state. Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I [the reviewer] would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. The welfare state imposes a system of incentives on blacks that encourages irresponsibility. Black men who walk on their families are at the center of the problem. But, why do they walk? They did not do this in 1960. What has fundamentally changed except the vast and comprehensive governmental provision of all necessities to black mothers and children? And the less involved the father is, the greater the government's largesse. The incentives are clearly perverse, and they have achieved the effect one might have expected. Incentives work. I do not mean to claim that this monstrous bureaucratic affliction impacts only blacks--attenuated versions may be seen among other groups as well. The welfare state has entirely remade lower and working class American society. It has not only robbed these orders of all dignity, but even of the sense that human dignity has value. So have the economic incentives crafted by our left-wing experts corrupted the character of much of America. The author, seeing the psychological results without fully understanding the causes which lie embedded in the system, then moves on to her summation: Wax usefully asks: “Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right. This is dead on. The whole of our handling of black America since Johnson has been a cynical game of elites (especially gentile and Jewish elites) engaged in social status competition. The most "generous" on the face of it, at the superficial level, won the competition, as demonstrated by the ever leftward tendency of our politics. Assuming that the poor are angels who will not humanly respond to incentives in the way that the contemptible "bourgeois" would counted as a sound basis for policy design. It turns out the poor are human, and the incentives came into play, and the poor were ruined--just as the middle classes would have suffered ruination had the incentives been generous enough to tempt them. This is what comes of officially sanctioned lies. To adapt Henry James, these are the black and merciless things that are behind the great socializations.

Magical Sharks

A couple of entertainments: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/science/02angier.html?ref=science http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

The second is impressive and delightfully deflates the arrogance of doctors. They're not as clever as they think and generally understand little of either math or science--which is unfortunate, since optimal medical care is based mainly on math and science. They oftentimes forget this because their gradual accumulation of anecdotal experience eventually comes to overwhelm in their minds their theoretical knowledge. In other words, within a few years of leaving medical school, they can no longer see the forest for the trees (or is it that they can't see the patients for the dollar signs? or that they can't see reality for their god-complex?). I think a few mathematicians and physicists are needful at the commanding heights of medical research and administration--to herd these MDs in the right direction.

Union Blackmail and Corruption

I especially like the last line of the article. Public sector unions are holding the country hostage. They ought to be outlawed. They represent an intolerable encroachment upon the integrity of a democratic system of government.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/10/unions_america

The Non-Debate

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/02/how-the-other-half-thinks/

Krugman is perhaps too kind in this post: the other half by and large does not think. Republicans have been consistently stupid or dishonest on the economic issues we face. Their policy solutions are an invitation to a prolonged slump a la Japan over the last 20 years. On macroeconomics, the democrats have a better approach right now--except insofar as they intend to expand entitlements. But, apparently, the story Krugman has clearly explained on multiple occasions is too counterintuitive for most to grasp.

There may also be some deeper motives at play--deliberately extending the recession to discredit Obama, for example. Or, squeezing government revenues so hard as to force a reconsideration of the whether we can afford an ever-expanding welfare state. Or, waiting for increasing unemployment to lead to an anti-immigration political consensus that will evolve at least far enough to end illegal immigration, preferably all non-strategic immigration. All worthy motives to my mind. But, are they worth the price? Also, can they be this way achieved? The second and third seem unlikely to happen, and they are more important in the long run than Obama's political fortunes. The welfare state strategy may even backfire. FDR invented the welfare state during the Depression.

Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Krugman

That is, Dr. Krugman on economics instead of  his Hydeian political madness. Here are two concise perspectives on how to escape the current economic recession (we are only technically out of recession, not in any meaningful sense). The first explains, with reference to one of the most appropriate historical analogies, why temporarily increased government spending should not result in a long-term rise in the government's debt burden. Essentially, this is because expansionary fiscal policy increases economic growth and increases inflation--both of which erode the real burden of any incurred debt. The key is to ensure that new entitlement programs are not a part of expanded government spending. The second explains the other likely way out--continued high levels of bankruptcy and default. This path will take longer and result in less economic growth in the long run. It is the path we opted for in the 30's and the one Japan has opted for since its financial collapse 20 years ago. In both cases economic growth was minimal at best. So far, it is the path we are on--supported mindlessly by the repubs and cravenly by the dems. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/paradoxes-of-deleveraging-and-releveraging/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/default-is-in-our-stars/

Afghanistan and American Responsibilities

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/31/opinion/31topping.html?_r=1

I consider this a rather dubious line of reasoning, culminating in the fantastical assumption in the last line. Depend upon it, none of our allies in any war we have ever fought volunteered to fight "in our interests." Were the French royals fighting in our interests in the Revolutionary War? Were Stalin's soldiers fighting in our interests? Absolutely not. They are motivated by their own distinct set of interests. The fact that there is sufficient overlap in their interests and ours to constitute them allies is a very different matter from having the same interests. This guy is arguing that whenever we go to war we have to accept the responsibility either to fight indefinitely until victory or to be prepared to relocate whole peoples and nations to the U.S. There are cases in which neither option is acceptable or reasonable, either from our perspective or from that of our allies. I might add that if this were adopted explicitly as U.S. policy it could lead to a major increase in isolationist tendencies. It effectively punishes us for trying to create decent regimes in other countries. This is like insisting that a man who saved several children from a fire, at risk to his own life, must now adopt those children since he failed to save their parents. It punishes good intentions and encourages a dangerous isolationism--which is far more pernicious, morally, than the occasional failure of well-intentioned international intervention. 

 

From a moral perspective there is no more reason to relocate Afghan allies to the U.S. than to relocate Congolans caught in the middle of that nation's civil war. Neither group was promised this privilege. Both groups face the prospect of being murdered by their countrymen and may, to that degree, be considered equally innocent and worthy of rescue. And there is no proof that our intervention in Afghanistan caused or will cause an excess of deaths above what would have occurred had we left that land to continue its endless civil wars and theocratic gambits. Perhaps we are more culpable for the millions of deaths in Congo since these might have been greatly reduced had we intervened. Another moralistic perspective might be this: it became clear within the first few years that the Afghan war was unwinnable (since the Taliban are based in Pakistan and Pakistan is neither our ally nor readily conquerable). This means the lives lost and monies squandered in the last 2-4 years were wasted in a futile exercise. And, remember, money at this scale, properly spent, could actually save lives instead of facilitating finishings.