“Progressives” mistake as “science” their habit of lumping countless idiosyncratic individuals and things, each always in an ever-changing set of deeply nuanced circumstances, into catch-all categories (such as “consumers,” “labor,” “government,” “the environment,” “the health-care sector,” “the money supply,” “the unemployment rate,” “the capital stock,” and “imports”) and then theorizing about how these big blobs of people and things interact with each other, and how these interactions can be “improved” by an apolitical, loving, intelligent, ever-diligent scientific guiding hand. That professors and their graduate students can assemble data on each of these big blobs of people and things, can write intricate equations describing mathematically how the professors and their graduate students imagine these blobs interacting with each other, and use the gathered data and sophisticated software to “test” the equation-ladened “models” seems oh-so-objective and truly scientific.
Yet most such exercises are b.s. Far too many of these exercises, when done by economists, are done in utter disregard of the meaningful, if impossible to observe from afar, differences that separate from each other each of the individuals and things that comprise each constructed blob. Far too many of these exercise are done by people whose impressive, deep, and vast knowledge of econometric techniques does not begin to compensate for their innocence of price theory, of history, and of formal and informal institutions.
Correctly taught and understood, economics reveals that reality is vastly more complex than the economically untutored mind realizes. Yet this message of complexity is unwelcome by those who want to rule and command. The reason is that to understand the reality of reality’s complexities is to understand that ruling and commanding – the actions of the “man of system” – can only worsen most individuals’ lives. Ruling and commanding of the sort that “men – and women – of system” itch to do can only disrupt for the worse, and not improve for the better, the spontaneous forces of society.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-20.
August 2, 2018
QotD: Economic complexity
August 1, 2018
QotD: The state of Ataraxia
Epicurus says that nature compels all living beings to search for pleasures and to avoid pain. When they reach their goal, they are in a state of contentment and rest that we can call happiness or tranquility of mind. Ataraxia is the term used by Epicurus to describe a perfect state of contentment, free of all uneasiness.
Martin Masse, “The Epicurean roots of some classical liberal and Misesian concepts“, speaking at the Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn Alabama, 2005-03-18.
July 31, 2018
QotD: Hostility to international trade
Much suspicion of, and hostility to, international trade is akin to atavistic superstitions that raised in some peoples suspicions of, and hostility to, mating with individuals outside of those people’s ethnic or racial or religious groups. “Only We are worthy of your seed or your womb – They are not!” “Corruption of the purity of Our race is the inevitable result of your conjugal mixing with Them!”
Or only slightly differently: protectionism is much like in-breeding. Like in-breeding, protectionism weakens the economy that practices it. Like in-breeding, protectionism causes the group that practices it to become ever-more stupid, uncreative, fragile, and vulnerable – a population of pathetic misfits destined to be weaker and poorer than are their more-cosmopolitan and open neighbors.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-14.
July 30, 2018
QotD: Buying books but not reading them
Nick Carraway slinks away from Jay Gatsby’s party. In the library he comes across a drunken, bespectacled fat cat who starts going off about the books lining the walls. “They’re real,” he slurs, pointing to them. “What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too — didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?” Uncut pages! If you know how books used to be manufactured, this means one thing and one thing only: Gatsby wasn’t much of a reader. After all, until they’re cut, book pages can’t be turned.
Collecting books and not reading them is, shall we say, textbook behavior. At least for some of you, and you know who you are. Suffering from the condition of racking up book purchases of $100, $200 or $1,000 without ever bending a spine? There’s a Japanese word for you.
Prognosis: terminal. Stats reveal that e-reading doesn’t hold a candle to the joy of reading a physical book. Although e-book sales jumped 1,260 percent between 2008 and 2010, 2.71 billion physical books were sold in the U.S. alone in 2015, according to Statista. That’s compared with the 1.32 billion movie tickets sold in the U.S. and Canada. As if every American were reading an average of more than eight books annually.
Certainly, it’s unlikely you’re going to hear the word tsundoku on the subway. But in a language where there are words for canceling an appointment at the last minute and the culture-specific condition of adult male shut-in syndrome, how can you be surprised? Other, similar words like tsūdoku (read through) and jukudoku (reading deeply) are in praise of sitting down with a book (doku means “to read”). But we think tsundoku is particularly special: Oku means to do something and leave it for a while, says Sahoko Ichikawa, a senior lecturer at Cornell University, and tsunde means to stack things.
Libby Coleman, “There’s a Word for Buying Books and Not Reading Them”, OZY, 2016-10-03.
July 29, 2018
QotD: The third Great Awakening
We are now — in the Me Decade — seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of “psi phenomena” and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?
The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies’ religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O’Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as “bleak” on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as “fascist.” The hippie movement was often attacked as “fascist” in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and “the Moonies” (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.
Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.
The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize — but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating! — to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.
Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan — “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” — seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name — they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.
Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine, 1976-08-23.
July 28, 2018
QotD: “And are we doing okay?”
“And are we doing okay?”
Waiters have all started talking like preschool teachers in the past several years. It is perplexing. It makes me want to do something shocking and violent, but instead I usually just reply with something like:
“Well, we are, last we checked, not, in fact, plural. And we are therefore slightly confused by our insistence upon addressing us as though we had a mouse — or mice? — in our pocket.”
(I only do this if I am alone, inasmuch as it tends to make dinner conversation awkward when your date shrinks into her seat in mortification.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “You and Who Else?”, National Review, 2016-10-02.
July 27, 2018
QotD: All pizza is local
When it comes to pizza, you like what you like; and the weird regionalized nature of pizza suggests that we are most likely to like what we know. Real travellers are aware that it is almost impossible to anticipate what you might get ordering pizza outside its twin cultural homes of Italy and North America. Try it in the U.K.: any sort of two-dimensional horror might materialize. Is that yogurt? Endive? Are those eggs? To the depraved British, it makes sense, like Marmite.
Colby Cosh, “The Edmonton pizza hypothesis”, National Post, 2016-10-03.
July 26, 2018
QotD: Protecting the truth
No one ever heard of the truth being enforced by law. Whenever the secular arm is called in to sustain an idea, whether new or old, it is always a bad idea, and not infrequently it is downright idiotic.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report, 1956.
July 25, 2018
QotD: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
This reality of outright lying during campaigns is so familiar that we excuse it. It’s just what politicians do.
But suppose that a business owner did the equivalent in the market. Such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated by customers or by law-enforcement officials. For example, suppose that the owner of Acme Furniture, in a scheme to get more sales, outright lies with a radio ad that promises that everyone who buys any piece of furniture from Acme will get half of the purchase price refunded in 12 months. “Wow! Darn good deal!” consumers think. They flock to Acme and buy furniture.
One year later, Acme customers submit their applications for the refunds of half of the purchase prices they each paid. But these customers, rather than getting what Acme promised, instead get a note from Acme explaining that the promise of a refund was made in jest; it was designed only to get more consumers to buy furniture from Acme. “But don’t worry!” the letter from Acme continues, “you’re still better off having bought furniture from Acme than from any of Acme’s competitors. Trust me on this! Yours Sincerely,….”
From time to time unscrupulous (and, typically, also really stupid or myopic) business people pull fraudulent stunts such as this one. Yet – rightly – no one excuses these stunts as being par for the course in business. One reason, of course, is that such stunts are not par for the course in private business; far from it. But such stunts are indeed par for the course in politics. And yet, despite this reality, we are constantly told that businesses operating in competitive markets cannot be trusted to behave honestly unless they are regulated by politicians and bureaucrats operating in political ‘markets.’
Politicians lie and such lying is excused because it’s normal. But it’s not normal; it’s not normal in the private sector; it’s normal only in the very abnormal world of politics.
Don Boudreaux, “Politicians Lie Openly and Such Behavior Is Excused Because It’s ‘Normal’”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-05.
July 24, 2018
QotD: Passwords
It makes no sense to force users to generate passwords for websites they only log in to once or twice a year. Users realize this: they store those passwords in their browsers, or they never even bother trying to remember them, using the “I forgot my password” link as a way to bypass the system completely — effectively falling back on the security of their e-mail account.
Bruce Schneier, “Security Design: Stop Trying to Fix the User”, Schneier on Security, 2016-10-03.
July 23, 2018
QotD: The revolution of the proletariat wouldn’t play out the way Marx imagined
I remember a friend telling me that multi-culti was knocked out of his young skull when he got a job as a construction worker for the summer. Marxism too. He said if revolution came from the proletariat, the resulting society would view wife beating as a sort of little hobby, on the side, nothing bad, just a little indulgence on Saturday night. (Mind you this was not in the US. The US working class is by and large better than this.) And all those prejudices against other races/sexual orientations/etc? Yeah, the working class had no problems with those. Only a privileged twit like Marx could think that the working class all over the world wanted to unite. They tend to be rather more nationalistic than their “betters” after all. More all sorts of “ists” too (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]). It’s what works at their level, and virtue signaling buys them nothing.
Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.
July 22, 2018
QotD: A touching naivety
… the typical “Progressive” continues to imagine the state to exist in the same way that a four-year old child imagines Santa Claus to exist: as a super-human force for good that possesses a supernatural capacity for pursuing and achieving that good. There is, in practice, no epistemological difference between the belief of many children that dusk on December 24th causes reindeer to fly and the belief of many adults that minimum-wage legislation causes the incomes of all low-skilled workers to rise. Higher-skilled workers, and the labor unions that represent them – as well as some firms that use fewer low-skilled workers than are used by their competitors – are only too happy to promote this juvenile fantasy.
Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-04.
July 21, 2018
QotD: Epicurus and Plato
Epicurus had reacted against the Platonic concepts of Reason with a capital R, the Good, the Beautiful, Duty, and other absolute concepts existing in themselves in some supernatural world. For Epicurus, what is moral is what brings pleasures to individuals in a context where there is no social strife. The Epicurean wise man will keep the covenant and not harm others not because he wishes to comply with some moral injunction being imposed from above, but simply because that’s the best way to pursue his happiness and keep his tranquility of mind.
Martin Masse, “The Epicurean roots of some classical liberal and Misesian concepts“, speaking at the Austrian Scholars Conference, Auburn Alabama, 2005-03-18.
July 20, 2018
QotD: The modern mission of the university
God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense; to adapt their brains as a useful putty — a kind of “semtex” or plastic explosive to press into the folds and corners of the society the progressive must destroy to rule.
David Warren, “Halls of memory”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-10-01.
July 19, 2018
QotD: Ladies first
You men must learn your place in the progressive pecking order.
“On television interviews, on platforms and political meetings, at any presentations — if there’s no woman speaker, then the event does not take place,” says Professor Haiven. By which she means, such gatherings should not be permitted. She’s quite emphatic on this point. Professor Haiven is also keen on punishing people who say things of which she doesn’t approve, and which she casually conflates with acts of violence. And this great thinker can denounce the evils of an alleged male “monopoly” in an environment where women outnumber men by quite some margin, and while sitting on a panel with no male participants, and with no-one willing to argue a substantively different view.
David Thompson, “Reheated (48)”, DavidThompson, 2016-09-27.
