Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2023

“Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Sullivan on the significant leftward orientation of younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers which does not track to historical models of political belief:

“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

It’s dawning on many on the political center and right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations. They’re immaturing with age. Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age. A recent, viral piece in the FT added a new spark to the conversation, arguing that if Millennials matured like previous generations, then by the age of 35, they

    should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history … millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare; growing up in a far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military; experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.

These are all 21st century phenomena — and simply not experienced by the generations immediately before them. Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped.

Sometimes we forget that these deep factors are what are most seriously in play. And the biggest mistake many of us on the center or right tend to make is assuming that all of the young’s stickier leftiness — especially the most irritating varieties of it — are entirely a function of woke brainwashing, and not related to genuinely unique challenges. A lot is — the indoctrination is real and relentless — but a lot isn’t. And it’s vital to distinguish the two.

The left’s advantage is that they have directly addressed this generation’s challenges, and the right simply hasn’t. The woke, however misguided, are addressing the inevitable cultural and social challenges of a majority-minority generation; and the socialists have long been addressing the soaring inequality that neoliberalism has created. Meanwhile, the right has too often ducked these substantive issues or rested on cheap culture-war populism as a diversionary response. I don’t believe that the young are inherently as left as they currently are. It’s just that the right hasn’t offered them an appealing enough alternative that is actually relevant to them.

That doesn’t mean cringe pandering. It means smarter policies. Some obvious options: encourage much more house-building with YIMBY-style deregulation; expand access to childcare for young, struggling families; tout entrepreneurial and scientific innovation to tackle climate change; expand maternity and paternity leave; redistribute wealth from the super-rich to working Americans to stabilize society and prevent capitalism from undoing itself; and, above all, celebrate a diverse society — and the unique individuals and interactions that make it so dynamic and life-giving.

January 10, 2023

Persuading women not to have families because it “helps the GDP”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Niall Gooch stands up for family life despite the regular hand-wringing articles pointing out just how “expensive” children are and how much money women forego in the working world to take time off and have a family, as if no other economic decisions in life have opportunity costs attached:

Every so often, a publication called something like Bosses Quarterly or Money Patrol will report a new study investigating the financial costs of having children. “Average child now costs £200,000”, they breathlessly inform us, or perhaps “Women Who Become Mothers Lose £400,000 In Earnings Over Their Lifetime”.

I have no idea how they generate these figures. Presumably they have at least some basis in proper empirical research. It doesn’t seem inherently implausible that middle-class parents in Britain spend well into six figures on their children one way and another, when you factor in childcare, holidays, clothes, food, transportation, birthday parties and university attendance. Raising children is undoubtedly costly, from a financial perspective, even if you are frugal. If my wife and I did not have children, our lifestyle would be considerably more affluent than it is at present. The “motherhood penalty” in lifetime wages does seem to be a real phenomenon – although it is one that many women are willing to accept.

But the accuracy or otherwise of the calculations is beside the point. There is something profoundly wrong-headed about the whole endeavour of trying to evaluate the good of family life in economic terms, or to treat the raising of children as simply one option among many in the great lifestyle marketplace. And yet many people persist with doing so. Sam Freedman, the policy analyst and writer, claimed on Twitter earlier this week, in defence of expanding subsidies for nurseries, that “it’s a lot cheaper for one person to look after several children than each parent to look after their own and not work”. This person noted “the long term impact on (nearly always) women’s career prospects which has a big effect on GDP”. He also argued against replacing subsidies to nurseries with direct payments to parents, noting that “giving money direct to parents would encourage people to leave the workforce when we need the opposite to happen”.

Even on its own terms, this is dubious. Low birth rates are a significant drag on economic growth, and making it harder for women to spend more time at home with their children is hardly conducive to increasing the birth rate. Besides which, there are big socio-economic problems connected to the modern norm of two parents working more or less full-time — house-price inflation for example, or the decline of communal organisations and lack of time for family caring responsibilities.

January 8, 2023

The (historical) lure of London

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the puzzle that was the phenomenol growth of London, even at a time that England had a competitive advantage in agricultural exports to the continent:

Ogilby & Morgan’s Map of London, 1677.
Scanned copy of reproduction in Maps of Old London (1908).

… the extraordinary inflow of migrants to London in the period when it grew eightfold — from an unremarkable city of a mere 50,000 souls in 1550, to one of the largest cities in Europe in 1650, boasting 400,000. I’ve written about that growth a few times before, especially here. It may not sound like much today, but it has to be one of the most important facts in British economic history. It is, in my view, the first sign of an “Industrial Revolution”, and certainly the first indication that there was something economically weird about England. It requires proper explanation.

In brief, the key question is whether the migrants to London — almost all of whom came from elsewhere in England — were pushed out of the countryside, thrown off their land thanks to things like enclosure, or pulled by London’s attractions.

I think the evidence is overwhelmingly that they were pulled and not pushed:

  1. The English rural population continued to grow in absolute terms, even if a larger proportion of the total population made their way to London. The population working in agriculture swelled from 2.1 million in 1550 to about 3.3 million in 1650. Hardly a sign of widespread displacement.
  2. As for the people outside of agriculture, many remained in or even fled to the countryside. In the 1560s, for example, York’s textile industry left for the countryside and smaller towns, pursuing lower costs of living and perhaps trying to escape the city’s guild restrictions. In 1550-1650, the population engaged in rural industry — largely spinning and weaving in their homes — swelled from about 0.7 to 1.5 million. Again, it doesn’t exactly suggest rural displacement. If anything, the opposite.
  3. There were in fact large economic pressures for England to stay rural. England for the entire period was a net exporter of grain, feeding the urban centres of the Netherlands and Italy. The usual pattern for already-agrarian economies, when faced with the demands of foreign cities, is to specialise further — to stay agrarian, if not agrarianise more. It’s what happened in much of the Baltic, which also fed the Dutch and Italian cities. Despite the same pressures for England to agrarianise, however, London still grew. To my mind, it suggests that London had developed an independent economic gravity of its own, helping to pull an ever larger proportion of the whole country’s population out of agriculture and into the industries needed to supply the city.
  4. As for the supposed push factor, enclosure, the timing just doesn’t fit. Enclosure had been happening in a piecemeal and often voluntary way since at least the fourteenth century. By 1550, before London’s growth had even begun, by one estimate almost half of the country’s total surface had already been enclosed, with a further quarter gradually enclosed over the course of the seventeenth century. A more recent estimate suggests that by 1600 already 73% of England’s land had been enclosed. As for the small remainder, this was mopped up by Parliament’s infamous enclosure acts from the 1760s onwards — much too late to explain London’s population explosion.
  5. Perhaps most importantly, people flocked specifically to London. In 1550 only about 3-4% of the population lived in cities. By 1650, it was 9%, a whopping 85% of whom lived in London alone. And this even understates the scale of the migration to the city, because so many Londoners were dropping dead. It was full of disease in even a good year, and in the bad it could lose tens of thousands — figures equivalent or even larger than the entire populations of the next largest cities. Waves upon waves of newcomers were needed just to keep the city’s population stable, let alone to grow it eightfold. In the seventeenth century the city absorbed an estimated half of the entire natural increase in England’s population from extra births. If England’s urbanisation had been thanks to rural displacement, you’d expect people to have flocked to the closest, and much safer, cities, rather than making the long trek to London alone.

It’s this last point that I’ve long wanted to flesh out some more. The further people were willing to trek to London, the more strongly it suggests that the city had a specific pull. I’d so far put together a few dribs and drabs of evidence for this. Whereas towns like Sheffield drew its apprentices from within a radius of about twenty miles, London attracted young people from hundreds of miles away, with especially many coming from the midlands and the north of England. Indeed, London’s radius seems to have shrunk over the course of the seventeenth century, suggested that they came from further afield during the initial stages of growth. Records of court witnesses also suggest that only a quarter of men in some of London’s eastern suburbs were born in the city or its surrounding counties.

QotD: Unintended consequences, fuel economy division

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s a claim that you encounter a lot — an insult really — that people are buying bigger and bigger trucks to compensate for … something. Here’s one particularly cringeworthy example, because the person making it doesn’t seem to realize the go-kart he’s praising doesn’t meet US emissions standards.

    whenever americans say that they *need* a massive pickup truck that gets 12mpg just show them the Subaru Sambar

    utility vs. ego pic.twitter.com/NqexDbQcok
    — sam (@sam_d_1995) May 11, 2022

In response, a lot of people will defend their big truck purchase by saying they need a larger vehicle for their family, their business, or just because they like it. And to an extent, market forces are partly responsible for the increase in truck sizes, particularly when it comes to features like crew cabs. But it turns out that even a lot of people who like the big trucks don’t know the full story of how their trucks got so big.

The rest of the story is something the folks at Freakanomics might enjoy because it is a classic tale of unintended consequences. In brief, Obama-era fuel regulations incentivized automakers to build bigger trucks.

One particular goal of the Obama Administration was to increase fuel efficiency through the typical political process: telling someone else to do it. To that end, the DOT and the EPA handed down a series of standards that nearly doubled the miles-per-gallon requirements for cars and light trucks.

The administration praised their own new standards as “groundbreaking”. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood predicted that the program would “result in vehicles that use less gas, travel farther, and provide more efficiency for consumers than ever before”.

The intent was to put pressure on automakers and force them to work out the engineering to meet the tough new standards. Their blindspot was failing to recognize that by placing the regulations solely on cars and small trucks, they had created a much simpler solution.

The new platform-based standards set fuel economy targets based on wheelbase and tread width, that is, how far apart the wheels are. If your vehicle is longer and wider, the fuel-economy targets shrinks. In the words of Dan Edmunds of Edmunds.com, “There was kind of an incentive to maybe stretch the wheelbase a couple of inches and set the tires maybe an inch [farther] apart, because you get a bigger platform and slightly smaller target.”

The regulations meant to get better mileage out of vehicles also made it easier for larger vehicles to meet fuel-efficiency standards. In what should have been an unsurprising move, when faced with the choice between reengineering their vehicles or simply going bigger, automakers chose to go bigger.

AndToddSaid, “The Real Reason Why Are Trucks Getting Bigger”, Todd’s Mischief blog, 2022-05-13.

January 6, 2023

QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I’ll be the first to admit that I not only don’t understand the business side of it, but the whole concept leaves me cold. Yes, of course, like any young man from the latter half of the 20th century I’ve seen a few pornos, gone to a few strip clubs, and so forth. Both were bachelor party rites of passage in my day; lord knows what they do now, and maybe that’s part of the OnlyFans sales model — since guys can’t go out to seedy strip clubs or get together as a bachelor party and watch a porno (too much Toxic Male Gaze, #MeToo) they have to do it virtually. And I don’t get that, either. Looking at sex strikes me as pointless — either put me in, coach, or I’m going to find some other, more productive use of my time — and looking but not touching at a strip club seems even dumber.

Given that I am not in the target audience for OnlyFans, then, perhaps all my speculations are hilariously wrong. And obviously there’s a robust market for porn, so it stands to reason that a la carte porn would have, if anything, an even bigger market …

… but do we trust those numbers? Everything in Clown World is fake and gay, and everything to do with the Internet has always been … how shall we put this? Factually dubious. This was true even when the Internet was a Libertarian paradise (for the young guys out there: Back in the build-your-own-modem days, I’m told, the Internet was hardcore Libertarian. By the time I got there, it was still very, very Right. Which stands to reason — you needed patience, discipline, and a little savvy to be online back then, and those are not Leftist qualities). OnlyFans claims a subscriber base of X, with revenues of Y. Do we have any reason to believe those are even within shouting distance of reality?

Money laundering seems like a live option.

My other guess was kompromat. I understand that Chinese Intelligence has all but openly admitted that TikTok is part of a targeted program to spread deviance, and if it has some intel benefit that’s a bonus. I figure OnlyFans had some sort of similar function. We all know that the classic “honey pot” is alive and well — Eric Swalwell and of course Hunter Biden say hi — but why bother running a real agent at somebody when he’s perfectly willing to put all his deviant desires in writing, backed by his credit card number?

I checked out OnlyFans — on Wikipedia; for research — and hey, whaddaya know, they got in on The Current Thing in Ukraine. Given what we know about Vladimir Putin, I’m sure he’s real broken up about that. It probably works pretty well as “open source” domestic intelligence, too — just as your enemies are busy uploading their own blackmail photos, so your domestic deviants are busy outing themselves on the other side of the transaction. Indeed, the only thing that surprises me is that the usual (((retards))) aren’t blaming it on the Mossad …

… actually I’m sure they are, and I do NOT want to know about it, but the point is, the whole thing seems really sketchy. So what are your thoughts? Money laundering scheme? PsyOp? Really obvious intelligence ploy? Or is it exactly what it seems like, desperately horny betas doing their thing?

(Based on what I saw on Facebook etc., I’m almost willing to believe the latter. All a recognizably human female has to do is post a cleavage shot on Facebook and she’ll get a hundred thirsty simps complimenting her. It’s the money thing that gets me, though. Being a simp in the Facebook comments is free).

Severian, “The E-Thot Economy”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-05.

January 5, 2023

QotD: The Broken Window Fallacy

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The broken window fallacy is a classic hurricane-season misstep. “Hurricanes may do damage”, the reasoning goes, “but look on the bright side. Think of how many jobs will be created because of the destruction. Think about all the demand that will be stimulated. Things may look bleak, but this is actually good for the economy.”

Bastiat debunked this reasoning in his 1848 essay “That Which Is Seen and that Which Is Not Seen“, and countless economists since have echoed his remarks. In the essay, he tells the parable of a shopkeeper whose careless son breaks a window, and he asks the reader whether this is good for the economy. At first glance, it’s tempting to say yes. But as Bastiat shows in the story, this conclusion ignores the unseen effects of the broken window.

“If … you come to the conclusion,” he writes, “as is too often the case, that it is a good thing to break windows, that it causes money to circulate, and that the encouragement of industry in general will be the result of it, you will oblige me to call out, ‘Stop there! your theory is confined to that which is seen; it takes no account of that which is not seen.'”

What is not seen, briefly, is the lost opportunities, the things that could have been done with our resources had they not been needed to replace the broken window. Taking those into account, it becomes clear that the broken window is harmful to the economy. After all, there is now one less window in our stockpile of goods.

The same reasoning applies on a larger scale. There may be plenty of jobs and demand when a hurricane destroys a town, but saying this is “good” for the economy is simply wrong. If this logic were true, the more destruction we experience the better off we’d be! But economic reasoning — and plain common sense — tells us this can’t be right.

Patrick Carroll, “3 Economic Fallacies to Watch Out for during Hurrican Season”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2022-09-30.

January 4, 2023

Sarah Hoyt on some of the dystopian futures we’ve avoided (so far)

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt outlines a few of the grim future scenarios that appeared to be the future to people who earned a living writing about possible futures:

1 – World government.
To be fair, it seemed an absolutely sane and inescapable prediction for people who had seen the centralized nation states of the twentieth century consolidate. With faster communication, would come total union, right?

I note Heinlein stopped believing this after his world tour. In fact in Friday he has a fractured USA.

That second vision is more likely. There are too many cultures in the world and too many competing interests to have a world government. Even on the administrative side, a world government might be absolutely impossible, unless it’s a nominal government and the sub-governments do everything really.

In which case, you know what? It’s no different than what we have, except we call any war a civil war.

The only people this idea still makes sense to are people who think they can change reality by changing the words.

Of course, just because there isn’t a formal world government doesn’t stop national governments and legacy media organizations from pretending that there is some supranational body whose directives they must always follow … at least when they want to do something the voters don’t want them to do. Lockdowns, anyone? Vaccine mandates? Social media censorship at the micro level? Oh, we have to do them because the WHO/UN/WEF/etc. insist.

2 – Overpopulation.
Yeah, I know what the population “counts” are, but we don’t have overpopulation. We don’t have any of the signs of overpopulation, and it’s becoming plainly obvious, country by country, locality by locality that there’s no overpopulation.

Malthus was an unpleasant fatalist. he was also wrong. Humanity doesn’t keep reproducing like mindless rabbits.

To be fair, this makes perfect sense because we’re a scavenger species. For scavenger species the population curve is the bell curve, not an exponential climb.

It’s funny how third world governments can “accurately” report booming populations — at least partly because foreign aid from the west is often directly tied to those reports — yet many of them don’t even know how many civil servants they employ. And western governments and aid agencies just pretend to believe them.

3 – Total depletion of resources leading to the “rusty future” in a lot of eighties science fiction.
A lot of resources are in fact depleted, but we have found others This is something that the “Greens” seem unable to grasp. Humanity is a continuous depleting of resources, and discovering new resources and new ways to use them. For instance, given our population, I don’t think we have enough flint to knap for knives for all of us. It’s an obvious crisis.

In the same way, do you think it’s even possible for all of us to have a horse? Our cities would be hip-deep in horse poo.

But we are the ape that adapts. Things change. And the future will be as shiny as we want it. Unless fashion calls for dull, of course.

If you’ve been educated in a zero-sum economic picture, then it’s difficult or impossible for you to recognize that when resources begin to run short and prices rise, individuals and companies look for more efficient ways to use the now more expensive resource or to consider substitutions. This is why economies who try to suppress normal market signals, like rising prices due to diminished supplies, end up far worse off … humans in aggregate are adaptable and will try to find alternatives when they can.

4 – The world isn’t a communist state, or filled with communist states.

There are some yes, but the ones there are are in obvious trouble, and only the propagandized and the ignorant believe it is a way to live, or a way that brings about paradise. In fact, most of today’s communists are merely wanting to reign in hell.

They know they’d unleash hell, they just think they’d be king.

As bad as it is that people are still fighting for this, it’s miles ahead of the status quo till the eighties, where people actually believed planned centralized states were better.

We still have a fight ahead of us, and we might still fail, but there will never be a whole-word communism. and those of use devoted to freedom will eventually win. It just will take probably more than my life. At least on a world-scale.

Among the governments most likely to resort to market denial (and autarky) are socialist and communist states. Central planning is one of the fastest methods to starving your population aside from total war. Central planners are always confident that they “know better” than filthy capitalists, and with proper “scientific” planning they can avoid all the “waste” that market societies produce. For a detailed look, consider the plight of poor, imaginary Wyatt, a factory manager under GOSPLAN in the old Soviet Union. If anything, Sev underestimates the economic disaster that Soviet central planning perpetrated.

5 – We don’t have some sort of central authority that contols all of something: genetics; who is arrested; etc.
A lot of places have crazy authorities, but not the whole world. we’re not enslaved by the Tech Lords (and what a pitiful lot those turned out to be) and the agencies trying to subjugate us are not all powerful, more along the lines of a bunch of venal chuckleheads. Annoying, with no morals and insane, but not all powerful. It could be worse.

It certainly could be worse, and useful idiots in western governments and legacy media are doing what they can to bring everything possible under tighter control, but as I’ve pointed out repeatedly the more a government tries to do, the worse it does everything.

January 2, 2023

QotD: Academic incentives and the Bobo lifestyle

Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The road to tenure takes only left turns, you’ll recall, because only “original” “research” gets published, and since Shakespeare ain’t writing no more sonnets, the only way to be “original” is through radical politics. As above, so below — since nobody’s going to upvote or retweet a sentiment like “Things are pretty much ok the way they are,” social media becomes little more than competitive #wokeness.

[…]

Here again, academia provides the answer. But first, let’s talk about David Brooks, the “conservative” infamously aroused by Obama’s perfectly creased pants. There are few sillier people than David Brooks, but “take wisdom where you find it” is my motto (well, that and “mihi dare vinum“), and he really knocked it out of the park with Bobos in Paradise. No, seriously. […] A Bobo, in other words, is a Gen Xer who could compete with the Boomers on their turf … but since he also took the Boomers at their word when they went on (and on and on and on and on) about Sticking It to the Man (an all too common generational failing), the Bobo sees the Boomer’s luxury car / vacation home / trophy wife conspicuous consumption as unbearably gauche. So instead, the Bobo spends $500 on a can opener because it’s good for the environment or is handcrafted by paraplegic Brazilian Eskimos or something, anything, so long as it a) obviously costs a shitload, and b) has some kind of Save-the-World rationale attached to it.

Academia reinforces this. Lots of Gen Xers went into the ivory tower for precisely that reason. Y’all know that the average professor hauls in nearly $200 large, right? The median income for an American worker in 2019 was approximately $46,800. I was in History, not math, but even I can see that the eggheads take home over four times what the average Joe makes. Which sets up another lifestyle contest. When you’re a) richer than sin, b) surrounded by a caste on slave wages, and c) ideologically committed to seeing yourself as The People’s Champion, the only way out is to live Bobo-style. Sure, sure, I have a $500 can opener … but Maricela the cook is really empowered by using it, because it was made by transgendered aborigines Of Color.

And since those Bobos are middle aged now, they’ve indoctrinated two generations of students with this garbage. And those two generations also came up with social media, so now you’ve got the heady combination of lifestyle and persona striving. That’s why the DC crew do what they do. Competitive #wokeness is the only way to go … and since they’ve got their $400-manicured mitts on the levers of power, we all get to be the bit players and stagehands in the big Broadway show that is their special unique wonderfulness.

Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.

January 1, 2023

QotD: The amazing economic impact of mobile phones in the developing world

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the interesting findings about mobile phones is that they grow the economy. In a country without a general landline network – ie, all the poor ones – 10% of the population gaining a mobile increases GDP by 0.5%. No, not the growth rate goes up from 2% to 2.01%. But an additional 0.5% of GDP each year. Which is, by the standards of these things, pretty big.

We also know why too. Being able to contact people means that markets complete, contracts and transactions are possible. It’s no longer necessary to near randomly meet someone physically in order to be able to organise a transaction. Thus more transactions happen – the value added in voluntary transactions being that GDP which is increasing.

Tim Worstall, “Mobile Phones Cut The Murder Rate – For the Same Reason They Grow The Economy”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-05-30.

December 9, 2022

QotD: Computer models of “the future”

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The problem with all “models of the world”, as the video puts it, is that they ignore two vitally important factors. First, models can only go so deep in terms of the scale of analysis to attempt. You can always add layers — and it is never clear when a layer that is completely unseen at one scale becomes vitally important at another. Predicting higher-order effects from lower scales is often impossible, and it is rarely clear when one can be discarded for another.

Second, the video ignores the fact that human behavior changes in response to circumstance, sometimes in radically unpredictable ways. I might predict that we will hit peak oil (or be extremely wealthy) if I extrapolate various trends. However, as oil becomes scarce, people discover new ways to obtain it or do without it. As people become wealthier, they become less interested in the pursuit of wealth and therefore become poorer. Both of those scenarios, however, assume that humanity will adopt a moral and optimistic stance. If humans become decadent and pessimistic, they might just start wars and end up feeding off the scraps.

So, interestingly, what the future looks like might be as much a function of the music we listen to, the books we read, and the movies we watch when we are young as of the resources that are available.

Note that the solution they propose to our problems is internationalization. The problem with internationalizing everything is that people have no one to appeal to. We are governed by a number of international laws, but when was the last time you voted in an international election? How do you effect change when international policies are not working out correctly? Who do you appeal to?

The importance of nationalism is that there are well-known and generally-accepted procedures for addressing grievances with the ruling class. These international clubs are generally impervious to the appeals (and common sense) of ordinary people and tend to promote virtue-signaling among the wealthy class over actual virtue or solutions to problems.

Jonathan Bartlett, quoted in “1973 Computer Program: The World Will End In 2040”, Mind Matters News, 2019-05-31.

November 30, 2022

QotD: The rise of liberalism

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Germany, History, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Liberalism, in its own turn, came out of the accidents of European reformations, revolts, and revolutions, in an existing polity of hundreds of more or less independent political units, such as the Dutch cities in their Golden Age, or the Kleinstaaterei of German polities even after 1648. The success of the accidents made people bold — not necessarily and logically, but contingently and factually. For example, the Dutch Revolt 1568–1648 imparted the idea of civic autonomy against the hegemon of the time, Spain, and by analogy against other hegemons international and local. For another example, the initial successes of the English Civil War of the 1640s made ordinary people think they could make the world anew. For still another example, the Radical Reformation of Anabaptists, Mennonites, Congregationalists, and later the Quakers and Methodists let people take charge of their own religious lives, and by analogy their economic lives. The tiny group of English Quakers made for Lloyd’s insurance, Barclay’s bank, Cadbury’s chocolate. It was in the religious case not the doctrines of Calvinism as such (not the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism) but a flattened church governance that mattered for inspiriting people.

In sum, as one of the Levellers in the English Civil War of the 1640s, Richard Rumbold, said from the scaffold in 1685, “there was no man born marked of God above another, for none comes into the world with a saddle on his back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him.” It was a shocking thought in a hierarchical society. In 1685 the crowd gathered to see Rumbold hanged surely laughed at such a sentiment. By 1885 it was a solemn cliché.

Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.

November 28, 2022

It’s not a “conspiracy theory” if you’re just repeating the words they say themselves

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Dr. Rainer Zitelmann on the clear declarations of climate activists that abolishing capitalism is part of their overall goal:

For the last three years, Greta Thunberg has said that her life’s purpose was to save the world from climate change. Now she told an audience in London that climate activists must overthrow “the whole capitalist system”, which she says is responsible for “imperialism, oppression, genocide … racist, oppressive extractionism”. The “activists” of the doomsday cult “Last Generation” say quite openly that their goal is the abolition of capitalism.

Examine the standard work of anti-capitalist climate change activists, and you will quickly see what I mean. Naomi Klein, the popular critic of capitalism and globalization, admits she initially had no particular interest in the issues surrounding and related to climate change. Then, in 2014, she wrote a hefty 500-page tome called This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

Why did she suddenly become so interested in climate change? Well, prior to writing this 2014 book, Klein’s main interest was the fight against free trade and globalization.

She admits in her writing: “I was propelled into a deeper engagement with [the topic of climate change] partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of social and economic justice in which I already believed.” And she hopes for “a new kind of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade”. She strictly rejects highly efficient solutions, such as climate-friendly nuclear energy, because she is not at all interested in solutions within the framework of capitalism.

Klein writes that she recognizes that climate change presents a chance to “collectively use the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right now” and “that climate change could become a catalyzing force for positive change … it could be the best argument progressives have ever had … to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence; to block harmful new free trade deals … to open borders to migrants.” The climate crisis could “form the basis of a powerful mass movement”, and this movement should set itself the following objectives:

  • to “radically expand the commons” (i.e., state-owned property and resources)
  • to introduce a “carefully planned economy”
  • to “change pretty much everything about our economy”
  • to introduce “new taxes, new public works programs”
  • “reversals of privatizations”
  • “extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known — the oil and gas industry”
  • government guidelines on “how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to us, whether the goods we buy are built to last … how large our homes are”
  • “a fundamental reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product”
  • “less private investment in producing for excessive consumption”
  • “increased government spending”
  • “a great deal more redistribution”

Klein embraces a suggestion that the well-off 20 percent in a population take the largest cuts in order to create a fairer society. She argues that “our economic system and our planetary system are now at war”, and the only suitable response is “revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony”.

November 26, 2022

Britain’s experiment with mass immigration since 2014

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers the legacy media’s quick dismissal of conservative concerns about rising immigration from poorer European countries in 2014 with the reality only eight years later:

“Xenophobia” by malias is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be “flooded” by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).

Twitter that day was full of journalists and other public intellectuals laughing about how we were going to be “swamped”. Why would Romanians, after all, want to come here, to this miserable rainy island?

“We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January,” Vaz concluded.

Various publications, with the ill-founded confidence so often found in the journalist trade, soon declared that the Romanian influx was a conservative fantasy.

“Eastern European invasion comes to nothing”, the Independent declared on the day, just a tad prematurely you might say.

A Guardian commentator suggested the year before that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving might actually fall following accession, and that “all the ‘invasion’ predictions … have more in common with astrology than demography.”
[…]

As it turned out, in the year to September 2015, 206,000 Romanians and Bulgarians took out a National Insurance number, meaning they were registering to work here. By late 2017, there were 413,000 Romanian and Bulgarians living in Britain, suggesting 90,000 had arrived each year since January 2014, while just 6,200 Britons had made the opposite journey.

By mid-2018, there were more than 400,000 Romanians in Britain, making them one of the largest national minorities in England. The real figure is hard to tell, because the British state has lost the capacity or will to count the number of foreign residents, and it may be higher.

[…]

The scale of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s led to the rise of Ukip, the referendum and the political chaos that followed; what follows now we can’t yet say, but no one has seemed to have learned the lesson: that in the 21s century, because of easier travel, smartphones, smuggling networks and establishment communities in the West, the sheer scale of potential migration is astronomical. Yet people often have a very 20th or even 19th century understanding of how much people are able and willing to move, which makes them vastly underestimate the potential numbers arriving.

The Turkish Cypriots of north London are a case in point, the example Paul Collier used in Exodus to show the huge extent of potential migration between countries with different levels of wealth. 

Because of colonial links, North Cyprus had free movement with Britain and so provided a test case: as a result, there are now more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus. In fact, not only did the majority of Turkish Cypriots move, but back in their homeland they become outnumbered by arrivals from a third, even poorer country, mainland Turkey, who are permitted to settle there.

In a theoretical world of open borders, Britons would be outnumbered very quickly; infrastructure would start to buckle under the strain, and governments would find it difficult to increase the necessary number of houses, schools, hospitals and other services for this expanded population, because society would now lack the social capital and cohesion to make the personal sacrifices. People would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.

November 22, 2022

Our modern abundance of cloth is something to remember at Thanksgiving

Filed under: Economics, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Virginia Postrel wrote this originally for USA Today in 2020:

Our closets and drawers bulge with clothing in every imaginable color. Thanks to incremental improvements over the past few decades, our clothes resist stains and wrinkles in ways that would thrill the past’s laundry-weary housewives. T-shirts wick sweat, and raincoats shed water. Sweaters snap back into shape, and pants stretch with our bellies — a handy feature come Thanksgiving dinner.

Today’s textile cornucopia overflows with more than clothes. It includes the damask tablecloth beneath the Thanksgiving feast, the soft microfiber blanket in front of the fire, the potholders pulling dinner from the oven, the dish towels drying the heirloom china. Textiles upholster the dining room chairs and the football fans’ sofa cushions. They bandage the careless carver’s fingers. They furnish burlap wreaths and felt garlands, and, for those who prefer an autumnal escape to nature, backpacks, sleeping bags, and tents.

If, as Arthur C. Clarke famously observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, the reverse is also true. Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. We no more imagine a world without cloth than one without sunlight or rain. Textiles are just there.

Except, until fairly recently, they weren’t.

“Bring good store of clothes, and bedding with you,” an early Plymouth arrival advised a prospective colonist in 1621. Textiles weren’t easily procured in the wilds of Massachusetts. It is only in the past century, and especially in the past generation, that most Americans could forget where cloth comes from. Once so valuable they were stolen from clothes lines and passed down in wills, textile products now occupy only a tiny fraction of household budgets.

Cloth was precious because it took so much effort to make. Throughout history, and around the globe, women spent their days spinning. Yet yarn was always in short supply. In 1656, Massachusetts even passed a law requiring every family with “idle hands” — women and children who weren’t otherwise employed — to spin a minimum amount of yarn, with fines levied on those who didn’t make their quotas.

“The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers sometimes are idle for want of yarn,” wrote the 18th-century agronomist and travel author Arthur Young, reporting on a tour of northern England. It took about 20 spinners to keep a single weaver supplied with yarn.

A few decades after Young wrote, spinning machines broke the bottleneck and sparked the Industrial Revolution. Abundant yarn improved nearly every aspect of life. From clothing to sails, bed linens to flour sacks, essential items were suddenly much cheaper, more varied, and more easily obtained. It was the beginning of what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Great Enrichment,” the economic takeoff that over the next two centuries lifted global living standards by 3000%.

November 20, 2022

Printing books in China is economical, but also allows China to censor what you print

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, China, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte explains why some of Sutherland House’s books are now being printed in China … and illustrates some of the risks of having them printed there:

We decided last spring to offshore some of our book printing to China (see “The Crisis in Book Publishing”, SHuSH 138). It was not a difficult decision. The difference in price is enormous.

For instance. Next week we’re releasing a book called The Prison Lady: True Stories and Life Lessons from Both Sides of the Bars by Phyllis Taylor. Presales have been strong. We need to print more copies. We can’t go back to the original Chinese printer, which charged us $2.08/copy, because it takes months to get books from Guangzhou to Toronto. We need the books now. So we shopped around. The best North American price we could find is $4.39/copy.

Why is that a problem? The book is a paperback priced at $22.95. The retailer takes half that, leaving us $11.50. After our distributor and sales agent take their fees and we pay the author her royalty, we’re left with $6.32 out of which we pay for editing, cover art, design, overhead, and shipping. And printing. If the printing bill comes to $4.39 a copy, we make no money.

Those of the economics of a straightforward paperback. A friend of mine recently called about a quote from a Canadian printer for a full-color illustrated book that came in at $15.31/copy. It seemed steep, so I sent the exact same specs to a Chinese printer who quoted $5.27/copy.

[…]

Our initial plan was to print four of our spring books in China (we’re also using printers in Turkey and India). The files for the first two of the four were delivered last month. On Nov. 7, we received the following email from the printer:

    After more detailed review of some of the written content of these two books, there are some significant censorship concerns related to certain references to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.

    As you may be aware, China vehemently enforces a “one China” principle in which Hong Kong and Taiwan are part of the “one China”. Therefore, China censorship will not allow any reference to either Hong Kong or Taiwan as its own country.

    With this in mind, there is some “sensitive wording” on page 46 of The Big Exit that would not be possible to print in China due to it implying that Hong Kong and Taiwan are “countries”.

The Big Exit isn’t about politics. It’s a book about end-of-life choices or, more particularly, how we can dispose of the remains of a billion boomers over the next several decades without wrecking the planet (conventional burial and cremation are both environmentally reckless). The censorship issue arose in this paragraph, which the printer helpfully circled in bright red:

I grant that while Hong Kong still shows up in a lot of data as its own country, it is technically an administrative region of China. Taiwan’s independence is also disputed by China. Against China’s claims, we have the Frank Zappa rules of diplomacy which recognize as “a real country” any place with its own beer and its own airline. Taiwan and Hong Kong both qualify.

In any event, we are now printing The Big Exit in India.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress