Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2012

Anecdotes are not data: Demise of Guys based on anecdotal evidence

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Jacob Sullum on the recent ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.

Zimbardo’s thesis is that “boys are struggling” in school and in love because they play video games too much and watch too much porn. But he and his co-author, a recent University of Colorado graduate named Nikita Duncan, never establish that boys are struggling any more nowadays than they were when porn was harder to find and video games were limited to variations on Pong. The data they cite mostly show that girls are doing better than boys, not that boys are doing worse than they did before xvideos.com and Grand Theft Auto. Such an association would by no means be conclusive, but it’s the least you’d expect from a respected social scientist like Zimbardo, who oversaw the famous Stanford “prison experiment” that we all read about in Psych 101.

[. . .]

One source of evidence that Zimbardo and Duncan rely on heavily, an eight-question survey of people who watched Zimbardo’s TED talk online, is so dubious that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in psychology (such as Duncan), let alone a Ph.D. (such as Zimbardo), should be embarrassed to cite it without a litany of caveats. The most important one: It seems probable that people who are attracted to Zimbardo’s talk, watch it all the way through, and then take the time to fill out his online survey are especially likely to agree with his thesis and especially likely to report problems related to electronic diversions. This is not just a nonrepresentative sample; it’s a sample bound to confirm what Zimbardo thinks he already knows. “We wanted our personal views to be challenged or validated by others interested in the topic,” the authors claim. Mostly validated, to judge by their survey design.

[. . .]

Other sources of evidence cited by Zimbardo and Duncan are so weak that they have the paradoxical effect of undermining their argument rather than reinforcing it. How do Zimbardo and Duncan know about “the sense of total entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships”? Because “a highly educated female colleague alerted us” to this “new phenomenon.” How do they know that “one consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography…is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects”? Because of a theory propounded by Daily Mail columnist Penny Marshall. How do they know that “men are as good as their women require them to be”? Because that’s what “one 27-year-old guy we interviewed” said.

Even when more rigorous research is available, Zimbardo and Duncan do not necessarily bother to look it up. How do they know that teenagers “who spend their nights playing video games or texting their friends instead of sleeping are putting themselves at greater risk for gaining unhealthy amounts of weight and becoming obese”? Because an NPR correspondent said so. Likewise, the authors get their information about the drawbacks of the No Child Left Behind Act from a gloss of a RAND Corporation study in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial. This is the level of documentation you’d expect from a mediocre high school student, not a college graduate, let alone a tenured social scientist at a leading university.

August 7, 2012

QotD: The musical decline of Bruce Springsteen

Filed under: Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

The musical decline of Bruce Springsteen has been obvious for decades. The sanctimony, the grandiosity, the utterly formulaic monumentality; the witlessness; the tiresome recycling of those anthemic figures, each time more preposterously distended; the disappearance of intimacy and the rejection of softness. And the sexlessness: Remnick adores Springsteen for his “flagrant exertion,” which he finds deeply sensual, comparing him to James Brown, but Brown’s shocking intensity, his gaudy stamina, his sea of sweat, was about, well, fucking, whereas Springsteen “wants his audience to leave the arena, as he commands them, ‘with your hands hurting, your feet hurting, your back hurting, your voice sore, and your sexual organs stimulated!’”, which is how you talk dirty at Whole Foods. Remnick lauds him also for his “exuberance,” which is indeed preternatural. I was twice at The Bottom Line in August 1975 and I have never been in a happier room. But there is nothing daft or insouciant, nothing crazy free, about Springsteen’s exuberance anymore. The joy is programmatic; it is mere uplift, another expression of social responsibility, a further statement of an idealism that borders on illusion. The rising? Not quite yet. We take care of our own? No, we do not. Nothing has damaged Springsteen’s once-magnificent music more than his decision to become a spokesman for America. He is Howard Zinn with a guitar. The wounded workers in his songs do not have the authenticity of acquaintance; they are pious hackneyed tropes, stereotypical class martyrs from Guthrie and Steinbeck. Springsteen’s sympathy is genuine, but his people are not. His 9/11 and recession songs are bloated editorials: “where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” His anger that “the banker man grows fat” is too holy: “if I had a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight” is not a “liberal insistence.” I prefer Dodd-Frank. The drawl in his voice is a production value, the grit a mannerism. A few minutes with one of Johnny Cash’s last records and it is impossible to take Springsteen’s vernacular seriously.

Leon Wieseltier, “Washington Diarist: A Saint in the City”, The New Republic, 2012-08-01

July 29, 2012

A brief critical analysis of Olympic merchandise

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Stephen Bayley – Founder of the Design Museum – gives the Olympics merchandise a critical mauling.

In ‘Rule Britannia: The Vice Guide to The Olympics’ VICE takes an in-depth look at the British public’s reaction to The Games coming to London this summer and the negative impact it’s having on certain people’s lives.

The six week festival promises to bring a a celebration of unity and sporting achievement, not to mention a huge cash injection to our beleaguered capital. VICE questions the real effects of The Games on a city as complex and tempestuous as London and discovers that they go much deeper, and murkier than the Olympics’ media spin-machine would have us believe.

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

July 27, 2012

If Boris wasn’t mayor of London

Filed under: Britain, Media, Sports — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

Lawsmith imagines what Boris Johnson would write about the London Olympics “major international sporting event” in a “certain major city in the UK” if he were not mayor:

I can imagine his perfect article in this alternative history in my dreams. Written in the Spectator and littered with self-deprecation, references to dead or fictitious Greeks, Liverpool and wiff-waff, Boris would have danced across the pages as he gleefully excoriated the Labour administration for the absurd idea of inviting a bunch of prima donna athletes and bureaucrats, most of them foreign, to compete in an outdoor stadium during the coldest, wettest summer in British history.

He might have pointed out that all this would take place in Newham, a place not altogether unlike Portsmouth and, in any case, one most Londoners consider more alien than Paris, with among the highest incidence of robbery and assault in the entire city. He might have joyfully foretold the pain and suffering of millions of income taxpayers on account of the shut-down of major roads and TfL advising know-nothing tourists to hop the tube at rush hour to make the 10 AM events, and seriously questioned the wisdom of erecting a steel wall around Hyde Park for an entire summer before fouling it up beyond recognition.

In our alternative history he would have savaged, rather than prodded, the implementation of widespread censorship undertaken by a hit squad of intellectual property ninjas; he would have lamented the fact that our police were arresting “marginal” (i.e., possibly innocent) suspects – living, breathing, thinking people – on terrorism charges which they might not be able to prove. If he had really driven it home, he would have pointed out that, under normal circumstances, those arrests would never have been made. He would also have asked why nobody seems to care.

By this point, his oeuvre would have been the most hilarious political essay ever written. He would flay alive in full public view the pathetic, uncritical, fawning news-media industry which crafts its Olympic stories with all the creative flavour of an oak plank, their proxy world to escape from our own inadequacies where professional athletes become “heroes” (seriously, find a different word), washed-up “heroes” become “legends,” and civil liberties violations and government largesse are completely ignored.

July 12, 2012

QotD: The real reasons for criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:52

When you get down to it, the problem most people seem to have with Fifty Shades of Grey is that it’s for girls. Even worse — it’s “mommy porn”, porn for mommies, for older women to read and get excited about, and that dangerous nonsense really needs to be stopped right now. Everyone knows that the only women who are allowed to actually have sexuality are slender, high-breasted twenty-one year old virgins — rather like, it has to be said, the heroine of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Laurie Penny, “In defence of Fifty Shades of Grey”, New Statesman, 2012-07-08

July 6, 2012

QotD: Criticism is not bullying

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Portraying criticism — even wrong-headed or unfair criticism — as “bullying” and “totalitarian” — is a whine that is not worthy of our respect. It encourages ignorance about the fundamental nature of free speech and the marketplace of ideas. There is no generalized right to be free of offense. But there’s also no right to be free of the words “that’s offensive.” Please. Even if you don’t respect the people you disagree with, have some self-respect.

Ken White, “All This Talk of Harassment Is Harassing Me!”, Popehat, 2012-07-05

July 1, 2012

H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary turns 70

Filed under: Books, History, Humour, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

Terry Teachout celebrates the 70th anniversary of the original publication of H.L. Mencken’s New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles From Ancient and Modern Sources:

The “New Dictionary” was a byproduct of its prolific editor’s fanatically industrious journalistic career. For years Mencken maintained a card file of quotations “that, for one reason or another, interested me and seemed worth remembering, but that, also for one reason or another, were not in the existing quotation-books.” In 1932 he decided to turn it into a book. When the “New Dictionary” finally saw print a decade later, Time praised it as “one of the rare books that deserve the well-worn phrase ‘Here at last.'”

Painstakingly organized and cross-referenced by subject, with each entry arranged in chronological order by date of original publication, the “New Dictionary” is formidably wide-ranging. Indeed, the only major writer missing from its index is Mencken himself. (“I thought it would be unseemly to quote myself,” he told a curious reporter. “I leave that to the intelligence of posterity.”) Its 1,347 pages abound with such innocent-sounding rubrics as “Civilization,” “Flag, American,” “Hell,” “Hypocrisy,” “Old and New” and “Science and Religion.” At first glance you might mistake it for a cornucopia of the world’s wisdom—but don’t let appearances fool you. The fathomlessly cynical Mencken wisely warned his readers in the preface that the “New Dictionary” was aimed at “readers whose general tastes and ideas approximate my own…. The Congressman hunting for platitudes to embellish his eulogy upon a fallen colleague will find relatively little to his purpose.”

He wasn’t kidding. Look up “Evolution,” for example, and you’ll find this 1925 statement by the Bible-thumping evangelist Billy Sunday: “If a minister believes and teaches evolution, he is a stinking skunk, a hypocrite, and a liar.” Look up “Critic” and you’ll be confronted with a rich catalog of ripe insults, among them this passage from Samuel Coleridge’s “Modern Critics”: “All enmity, all envy, they disclaim, / Disinterested thieves of our good name: / Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.” Or check out “Irish,” under which can be found no less than a page of invidious comments, including a sideswipe from, of all people, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “The ambition of the Irish is to say a thing as everybody says it, only louder.”

Teachout is the author of a brilliant biography of Mencken: The Sceptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, which I happen to be re-reading at the moment. For more on Mencken himself, the wikipedia entry is here.

June 27, 2012

It was abusive, but it wasn’t bullying

Filed under: Media, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

On the sp!ked website, Nancy McDermott analyzes the “bus monitor bullying” video and the reaction to the situation:

By now, millions of people across the world have viewed ‘Making the Bus Monitor Cry’. For those of you who haven’t, it is a video of a slew of vile, verbal abuse against 68-year-old Karen Klein, a bus monitor from Greece, New York, from four 13-year-old boys. It is hard to know what is more shocking: the methodical cruelty with which the children ply their insults; or the grandmother’s inability to respond effectively to the humiliating onslaught.

Childish cruelty is allegedly old news, but, recorded and broadcast across the world, it is still jarring. Not only is the video footage completely at odds with the way we usually like to regard children — as innocents in need of protection — but their willingness and, more disturbingly, their success at targeting an adult is unsettling.

Yet, in reality, the video tells us less about the nature of children and more about the erosion of adult authority in American society. When adults are too timid to enforce basic standards of behaviour in public, and when other adults (in this case, the bus driver) are willing to stand by and tolerate bad behaviour aimed at a fellow adult, it’s no wonder children run wild. The depths of this problem are nowhere more apparent than in the confused reaction to the bus-monitor incident.

[. . .]

It is easy to forget in an age when so many adults find it hard to keep children under control that adults are inherently more powerful than children. Adults bear both rights and responsibilities for making and acting on their own decisions. Children, in contrast, have no real autonomy. To the extent that they have any limited independence, it is entirely conditional on the adults in their lives. And rightly so: children lack both the experience and the maturity to be held legally or morally accountable for their actions. Although we all hope children will learn to behave responsibly, we should be under no illusions as to their capacity to assume responsibility in the same way that adults do.

[. . .]

The seventh graders who taunted Klein did not do it because they lacked empathy or awareness of bullying, or because they were overcome by a claustrophobic mob mentality, or because they are worse than children anywhere else. They behaved the way they did because none of the people or institutions responsible for guiding them in their journey to adulthood set or enforced clear standards of behaviour. It is a pattern that repeats across America, not just in this little corner of New York state. The sad truth is that unless we wake up and recognise this phenomenon for what it is, and start letting children know where they stand, behaviour like that on the bus will continue.

(more…)

June 23, 2012

Autobiography as fiction, lightly dusted with personal history

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

Mark Steyn on America’s first Invented-American president:

Courtesy of David Maraniss’ new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather, supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism, met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish nonliterary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

[. . .]

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straitjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

June 10, 2012

QotD: Journalism, in theory and practice

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:03

In the same way that many children naively assume adults are infallible, I grew up with the fantasy that anything in print must be true. This created some logical conundrums in the supermarket checkout aisle, where I’d see the Weekly World News and wonder, “But if aliens haven’t abducted Elvis, how can they print it?”

I mean, if journalists don’t hold themselves to standards of accuracy, why would they take the trouble to print an Errata column for the few minutiae they happened to miss? “In last week’s issue,” such a column would say, “we mistakenly identified the smiling man in the photograph as Nathan Daniels of Ballwin, Missouri. In fact, while he is indeed Nathan Daniels of Ballwin, Missouri, what we called a smile is more of a tempered grin. We sincerely regret the error.”

If that’s the kind of error a newspaper regrets — and sincerely, no less — surely the major facts behind any story are watertight.

But the Errata are a trick, and not even a new trick. I use the same trick to ingratiate myself to my wife when I realize I’ve neglected to do something important for our 1-year-old daughter. “I remembered her shoes and socks,” I’ll say, “but I couldn’t find the pink sippy cup, so I brought the green sippy cup.” By apologizing for this lesser transgression, I’m hoping my wife won’t notice that I’ve forgotten to arrange for our daughter to wear pants.

Adam Ruben, “The Unwritten Rules of Journalism”, Science, 2012-05-25

May 27, 2012

Fifty shades of suburbanizing stuff to make it boring

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

In the National Post, Darrin Rose laments the “mainstreaming” of BDSM, or badly written erotica, or something:

The erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has sold 10 million copies in only six weeks of sales, and in doing so has shed a lot of light on what suburban moms are looking for in the bookstore, if not in the bedroom. It has been banned in some U.S. libraries, generating controversy in equal measure for pornographic content and terrible writing. If you like books that read like a triple-X version of your Grade 8 diary, then you’re in luck. But trouble looms on the horizon.

The book has become part of the zeitgeist, leading to all kinds of new sexual ideas in the suburbs. I should confess that as a city dweller, I like to encourage the notion that urbanites lead sexy, dangerous lives already. But the suburban soccer moms who make up the majority of the book’s readership are discovering a sexy, dangerous world of bondage, discipline and sado-masochism, also known — by lazy people and perverts — as BDSM. While BDSM is currently a risqué, fun activity, the suburbs will do what they always do when they find a new sexy idea — turn it into an exercise you do at the gym, thereby simultaneously destroying its sexiness and enjoyability. They did the same thing to the Lambada and stripper poles.

[. . .]

The same thing happened to stripper poles, which you can find in the aerobics room of many gyms these days. It takes a really asexual person to see a stripper pole and think “that’d be great for low impact muscle development.” So stripper poles were installed in the sweat factories, and real life took a hit. If you go to a strip club and think the best part is the gymnastics, you’re really missing the point. They did the same thing to lap dances and stripteases, two related disciplines now doled out in 60 minute lessons at strip malls across the nation.

And now Fifty Shades of Grey has BDSM lined up next for the exercise treatment. That way middle-aged women can take flogging classes, where personal instructors literally beat you into shape. We’re probably a couple years away from spending 30 minutes on the elliptical machine while a personal trainer whispers in your ear “do you like that?” and “you’re such a dirty little jogger.” A workout seems much more intimidating if you need a safety word to make it stop, but I would rather be spared the sight of a gym full of moms being spanked while they do hamstring curls.

May 26, 2012

Neil Davenport reviews Tony Judt’s final book

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

As I just started reading Judt’s best known work recently (Postwar), I was unaware that Judt had died not long after that book was published. In the sp!ked review of books, Neil Davenport reviews Thinking the Twentieth Century: Intellectuals and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder:

In 2008, Judt discovered that he was suffering from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disease. Over a two-year period, Snyder records and transcribes a series of conversations that cover both Judt’s life and intellectual pursuits by way of the tumultuous events of the last century. Judt died in August 2010, 62 years old, just a few weeks after dictating a final afterword to this book.

The format works surprisingly well. Judt relishes his role as a public intellectual and makes accessible huge swathes of history and ideas throughout the book’s 400 pages. There are never any lapses into impenetrable jargon or academic riddles. The book is tremendously lucid and informed, thoughtful and engaging. Credit must be given to Snyder who, rather than stamping on the coat tails of Judt’s intellect, proffers sharp questions and observations only intermittently. When he does, it serves as a striking reminder that this is a conversation, not an academic monologue. Mostly we are left to marvel at Judt’s command of his material, his knowledge, intellect and insights, as they’re casually reeled off into a digital recorder. The working-class ex-grammar school boy makes attractive and vital something that has been relentlessly and scandalously attacked in recent decades: a liberal, humanities-based education.

[. . .]

Judt gave much of his early career to the history of the French left, but could not buy into their assumption that the Russian Revolution was merely the continuation of 1789. And to his credit, he saw through the cultural studies, Marcuse-era left of 1968, too. As he rightly puts it, ‘my residual socialist-Marxist formation made me instinctively suspicious of the popular notion that students might now be a — the — revolutionary class’. He was also spot on about how the cultural left fragmented history as a discipline into competing ‘narratives’.

These are all sharp, well-observed points. So it’s a pity that, like so many left-leaning academics before him, he retained that most durable of illusions: belief in the credibility of the British Labour Party’s social democracy. For someone so well versed in Marxism and interwar radicalism, it’s surprising that he remained steadfastly quiet about the real purpose of social democracy. And if he was feeling generous about its achievements, he doesn’t nail down social democracy’s strengths during its postwar heyday, either. Although he used the social-democracy banner to describe contemporary politics both in Britain and Europe, there’s no awareness of how ‘parliamentary socialism’ has come to mean something very different in the twenty-first century.

May 25, 2012

“SWATting”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

This is a rather disturbing development:

At 12:35 a.m. on July 1, 2011, sheriff’s deputies pounded on my front door and rang my doorbell. They shouted for me to open the door and come out with my hands up.

When I opened the door, deputies pointed guns at me and ordered me to put my hands in the air. I had a cell phone in my hand. Fortunately, they did not mistake it for a gun.

They ordered me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They handcuffed me. They shouted questions at me: IS THERE ANYONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE? and WHERE ARE THEY? and ARE THEY ALIVE?

I told them: Yes, my wife and my children are in the house. They’re upstairs in their bedrooms, sleeping. Of course they’re alive.

Deputies led me down the street to a patrol car parked about 2-3 houses away. At least one neighbor was watching out of her window as I was placed, handcuffed, in the back of the patrol car. I saw numerous patrol cars on my quiet street. There was a police helicopter flying overhead, shining a spotlight down on us as I walked towards the patrol car. Several neighbors later told us the helicopter woke them up. I saw a fire engine and an ambulance. A neighbor later told me they had a HazMat vehicle out on the street as well.

Meanwhile, police rushed into my home. They woke up my wife, led her downstairs and to the front porch, frisked her, and asked her where the children were. Then police ordered her to stand on the front porch with her hands against the wall while they entered my children’s bedrooms to make sure they were alive.

The call that sent deputies to my home was a hoax. Someone had pretended to be me. They called the police to say I had shot my wife. The sheriff’s deputies who arrived at my front door believed they were about to confront an armed man who had just shot his wife. I don’t blame the police for any of their actions. But I blame the person who made the call.

Because I could have been killed.

A “prank” phonecall that could easily have gotten the victim killed. Difficult to describe that as a mere “prank”. Bordering on terrorism, if not over the line.

It actually happened. The phenomenon is called “SWATting,” because it can bring a SWAT team to your front door. SWATting is a particularly dangerous hoax in which a caller, generally a computer hacker, calls a police department to report a shooting at the home of his enemy. The caller will place this call to the police department’s business line, using Skype or a similar service, and hiding behind Internet proxies to make the call impossible to trace. Anxious police, believing they are responding to the home of an armed and dangerous man, show up at the front door pointing guns and screaming orders.

That is exactly what happened to me. It is a very dangerous hoax that could get the target killed.

May 8, 2012

Now available for download: License to Work

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

The Institute for Justice has released a new study, License to Work: A National Study of Burdens from Occupational Licensing, which shows the negative effects imposed on (especially) poor and minority workers across the United States:

The report documents the license requirements for 102 low- and moderate-income occupations — such as barber, massage therapist and preschool teacher — across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It finds that occupational licensing is not only widespread, but also overly burdensome and frequently irrational.

On average, these licenses force aspiring workers to spend nine months in education or training, pass one exam and pay more than $200 in fees. One third of the licenses take more than a year to earn. At least one exam is required for 79 of the occupations.

Barriers like these make it harder for people to find jobs and build new businesses that create jobs, particularly minorities, those of lesser means and those with less education.

Hayek and Keynes

Filed under: Books, Economics, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Brian Lee Crowley recounts some of the interactions between F.A. Hayek and John Maynard Keynes in the National Post:

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the death of Friedrich August Hayek, the Viennese-born Nobel Prize-winning economist and philosopher, who led the intellectual equivalent of the D-Day charge against central planning in the postwar era. His lessons are worth remembering in 2012, especially now that left-wing politicians in France, Greece and elsewhere seem intent on forgetting them.

Hayek’s great adversary was John Maynard Keynes, whose faith in the ability of government economic planners to “correct” the operation of markets inspired generations of disciples in government and academe. In the long run, Hayek got the better of the argument with Keynes. Indeed, his ideas contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and continue to influence economic thought to this day.

Hayek and Keynes were punctilious professional colleagues and scholarly rivals. Yet for all the correctness that characterized their relations — Hayek was, for example, Keynes’s guest when the London School of Economics fled the Nazi bombings to the relative safety of Cambridge — the Austrian could not shake a profound distrust of Keynes.A brilliant economist, captivating teacher, witty conversationalist and bon vivant, Keynes seemed to almost everyone who knew him a Renaissance man and one of his country’s most powerful minds. Hayek found Keynes glib and superficial, but it was Keynes’ intellectual dilettantism that most appalled him. When Keynes wrote A Treatise on Money in 1930, Hayek spent a year carefully analyzing it, and then wrote a devastating review. At their next meeting, Hayek was outraged when Keynes airily said that he now agreed with Hayek, having long since changed his mind. Hayek always regretted that this incident led him to neglect replying to Keynes’ next book. By the time Hayek was alive to the danger, it was too late.

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