Quotulatiousness

January 30, 2021

Obey your technocratic elites, peasant!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, History, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Scott Alexander considers some historical (and current) examples of you peasants being steamrolled by the powers of the government at the behest of the technological elites of the day:

I am not defending technocracy.

Nobody ever defends technocracy. It’s like “elitism” or “statism”. There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers.

[…] it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:

1. Mandatory vaccinations: Technocrats used complicated mathematical models to determine that mass vaccination would create a “herd immunity” to disease. Certain that their models were “objectively” correct and so could not possibly be flawed, these elites decided to force vaccines on a hostile population. Despite popular protest (did you know that in 1800s England, anti-smallpox-vaccine rallies attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators?), these technocrats continued to want to “arrogantly remake the world in their image,” and pushed ahead with their plan, ignoring normal citizens’ warnings that their policies might have unintended consequences, like causing autism.

2. School desegregation: Nine unelected experts with Harvard and Yale degrees, using a bunch of Latin terms like a certiori and de facto that ordinary people could not understand let alone criticize, decided to completely upend the traditional education system of thousands of small communities to make it better conform to some rules written in a two-hundred-year-old document. The communities themselves opposed it strongly enough to offer violent resistance, but the technocrats steamrolled over all objections and sent in the National Guard to enforce their orders.

US Highway System needs in 1965 from “Needs of the Highway Systems 1955-1984”, a letter from the Secretary of Commerce to the House Committee on Public Works, approved May 6, 1954.
US Government Printing Office via Wikimedia Commons.

3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn’t.

4. Climate change: In the second half of the 20th century, scientists determined that carbon dioxide emissions were raising global temperatures, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climatologists created complicated formal models to determine how quickly global temperatures might rise, and economists designed clever from-first-principle mechanisms that could reduce emissions, like cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes. But these people were members of the elite toying with equations that could not possibly include all the relevant factors, and who were vulnerable to their elite biases. So the United States decided to leave the decision up to democratic mechanisms, which allowed people to contribute “outside-the-system” insights like “Actually global warming is fake and it’s all a Chinese plot”.

5. Coronavirus lockdowns: The government appointed a set of supposedly infallible scientist-priests to determine when people were or weren’t allowed to engage in normal economic activity. The scientist-priests, who knew nothing about the complex set of factors that make one person decide to go to a rock festival and another to a bar, decided that vast swathes of economic activity they didn’t understand must stop. The ordinary people affected tried to engage in the usual mechanisms of democracy, like complaining, holding protests, and plotting to kidnap their governors – but the scientist-priests, certain that their analyses were “objective” and “fact-based”, thought ordinary people couldn’t possibly be smart enough to challenge them, and so refused to budge.

Nobody uses the word “technocrat” except when they’re criticizing something. So “technocracy” accretes this entire language around it – unintended consequences, the perils of supposed “objectivity”, the biases inherent in elite paradigms. And then when you describe something using this language, it’s like “Oh, of course that’s going to fail – everything like that has always failed before!”

But if you accept that “technocracy” describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?

I want to make it really clear that I’m not saying that technocracy is good and democracy is bad. I’m saying that this is actually a hard problem. It’s not a morality play, where you tell ghost stories about scary High Modernists, point vaguely in the direction of Brasilia, say some platitudes about how no system can ever be truly unbiased, and then your work is done. There are actually a bunch of complicated reasons why formal expertise might be more useful in some situations, and local knowledge might be more useful in others.

“The only thing ‘dangerous’ about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter”

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

Matt Taibbi says “Suck it, Wall Street!”

Meme stolen from Ace of Spades H.Q.

The press conveyed panic and moral disgust. “I didn’t realize it was this cultlike,” said short-seller Andrew Left of Citron Research, without irony denouncing the campaign against firms like his as “just a get rich quick scheme.” Massachusetts Secretary of State Bill Galvin said the Redditor campaign had “no basis in reality,” while Dr. Michael Burry, the hedge funder whose bets against subprime mortgages were lionized in The Big Short, called the amateur squeeze “unnatural, insane, and dangerous.”

The episode prompted calls to regulate Reddit and, finally, halt action on the disputed stocks. As I write this, word has come out that platforms like Robinhood and TD Ameritrade are curbing trading in GameStop and several other companies, including Nokia and AMC Entertainment holdings.

Meaning: just like 2008, trading was shut down to save the hides of erstwhile high priests of “creative destruction.” Also just like 2008, there are calls for the government to investigate the people deemed responsible for unapproved market losses.

The acting head of the SEC said the agency was “monitoring” the situation, while the former head of its office of Internet enforcement, John Stark, said, “I can’t imagine there isn’t an open investigation and probably a formal order to find out who’s on these message boards.” Georgetown finance professor James Angel lamented, “it’s going to be hard for the SEC to find blatant manipulation,” but they “owe it to look.” The Washington Post elaborated:

    To establish manipulation that runs afoul of securities laws, Angel said regulators would need to prove traders engaged in “an intentional act to push a price away from its fundamental value to seek a profit.” In market parlance, this is typically known as a pump-and-dump scheme …

Even Nancy Pelosi, when asked about “manipulation” and “what’s going on on Wall Street right now,” said “we’ll all be reviewing it,” as if it were the business of congress to worry about a bunch of day traders cashing in for once.

The only thing “dangerous” about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a “pump and dump scheme” to push prices away from their “fundamental value” is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?

H/T to Larry Correia for the link.

January 28, 2021

GameStop in a very different kind of game

Filed under: Business, Gaming, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh looks at the fascinating gyrations of GameStop’s share price in the grip of an unexpected group of players in the market:

“GameStop” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0

GameStop has long been seen by institutional investors as following down the road of Blockbuster Video: it’s a bricks-and-mortar retailer whose main product is downloadable from your sofa. For that reason, it is heavily shorted by professional funds who normally eschew short-selling, which does have the risky feature of potentially infinite negative downside.

Enter Reddit, the website for special-interest user forums of all kinds. A Reddit “Wall Street bets” board uncovered evidence in regulatory filings that some hedge funds had legitimately dangerous large short positions representing bets against GameStop’s flaccid share price. A few hobby investors began to buy GameStop out of a sense of adventure and perhaps nostalgic loyalty. More importantly, they began to preach the gospel to others.

This is explicit “market manipulation,” but done in the open; it is surely as legal as any other conversation. GameStop’s price (NYSE symbol: GME) surged upward as word spread amongst day traders and other amateur investors. And as the random-looking rise in price got noticed, the whole scheme, itself rather reminiscent of a video game, went viral.

As of Jan. 12, GME was below $20, which is about where most analysts thought it belonged on merit, or lack thereof. The price as I type this particular sentence is $328.81. The backs of some funds with heavy short positions have been broken.

High finance seems somewhat terrified, as amateur investing websites — ones pioneered by the financial industry itself — begin to throw roadblocks in front of late-arriving GME buyers. For itself, Wall Street will invest billions replacing copper wire with fiber optics to gain microsecond arbitrage advantages in the market; for you and I, the good old portfolio can get conveniently 404ed for an afternoon.

This suggests that Wall Street may not have reckoned with the full possibilities of a world of proletarian shareholders. The stock market has proverbially been a playground of “animal spirits” since long before John Maynard Keynes used that phrase in 1936. What happens to an ecosystem when new animals show up? One can surely count on at least a minimum of chaos; maybe the surprise is that it took so long to take this game-like, combative form.

December 30, 2020

This is why the word “unexpectedly” gets such a workout in media these days

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

David Warren on “unexpectedly” negative results from policies born of virtue-signalling “good intentions” by self-styled progressives:

The expression, “unintended consequences,” is a charitable dodge. It is what old-fashioned, polite, civic-minded people say about the fallout from progressive social policies. It implies that their authors have overlooked something, or made some innocent mistake. For unfortunately, the policies do the exact opposite of what was promised. Surely the “reformers” didn’t mean to force decent, reasonable people to do things that any decent, reasonable person would consider to be satanic. Yet somehow, that was the result.

By contrast, these reformers despise the tactics of the bourgeois. Rather than argue, they prefer to drown out their opponents with slogans. Rather than coherently reply, they characterize any asking questions as “fascist,” “misogynist,” “racist,” “hate criminals,” &c. Those who have exposed scandals are personally smeared, slandered, doxxed. This isn’t new. It is the way the Left has always “debated,” going back long before Lenin. Once they have the police working for them, opponents get the knock in the middle of the night.

There are, incidentally, two kinds of “reform,” corresponding to the two political persuasions. One happens without planning, and is an organic response to things no longer working properly. Try, in good faith, to make the old system work, and it will subtly change. The “problems” fix themselves, when they are allowed to. The other kind is “reform” according to a theory. A huge, mostly imaginary “problem” is created, so a “solution” may be imposed. Every tool must be applied, to get everyone onside for the task: fake news, fake science, fake history, and miscellaneous fakery. For as every godless person knows, “the end justifies the means.”

Luckier than most, raised in “liberal” environments, I was able to discern this from an early age. By chance I acquired many friends who were refugees from Communist (especially Soviet-occupied) countries. But it was not just that. Having been trained counter-culturally, by non-conformist “classically liberal” teachers, and also having learnt to read for myself, I was already fairly alert. The clincher for me was a native disposition, not only to think independently, but to resist being a putz. It was not in my nature to assume that the enemies of real liberalism (which requires honesty) had good intentions. Reason, and experiment, demonstrated that they had not.

For instance, I early realized that leftwing factions formed a Party of Privilege. Every policy they advanced favoured individuals with relatively more wealth and power, against individuals with less. Unions were a good example. They represented the better-paid. The labour laws they advocated were designed to exclude the young and the poor from labour-market competition. They secured the allegiance of thuggish union members through crassly self-interested schemes. They opposed legitimate rewards for labour; for skill and hard work. Instead they enforced universal mediocrity, and punished intelligent enterprise. Legitimate labour interests, once represented by cooperative and self-managing guilds, were replaced by the interests of (untalented) union organizers.

September 15, 2020

When you mix up cause and effect

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

In the Continental Telegraph, Esteban remembers a Reagan bon mot that is still observably true today:

US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev at the Hofdi House in Reykjavik, Iceland during the Reyjavik Summit in 1986.
Official US government photograph via Wikimedia Commons.

Ronald Reagan once observed that “the trouble with our liberal friends isn’t that they are ignorant, it’s that so much they know isn’t so”. I am repeatedly surprised by Leftists’ ability not to just get something wrong, but to get it spectacularly, 180 degrees wrong.

First, a couple of examples from the archives – some years ago there was an article in the NY Times (or WaPo perhaps) quite distressed that even though crime rates in the U.S. were at historically low levels the percentage of the population in prison was quite high. “Why are we putting so many people in prison when the crime rate is low?” they wondered, seriously. Hmm, how about this – when we put more bad people in prison the crime rate goes down? Keep in mind that the crime rate is what’s happening now, the prison population is who we caught and locked up over the past several years.

Then we had an article in a West Coast newspaper wondering why the homeless population in San Francisco had grown dramatically in recent years despite all the wonderful things the city had done to help them – weekly stipends, free shopping carts, etc. Note that none of this assistance to the homeless enabled them to become independent or required them to better themselves, they were all handouts. How is it that offering lots of goodies to homeless people attracts more of them here?

My point in bringing up these old stories is that it seems impossible that someone could fail to see they had cause and effect reversed. How could someone intelligent enough to write a column get these stories so backwards. The only answer I can see is that their worldview, at least in these areas, flows in only one direction and the underlying premise can never be questioned – putting people in prison is bad, there can be no possible upside, giving homeless people stuff is good, there can be no downside. So, when things get worse it’s a mystery, we can’t reconsider our starting point.

August 19, 2020

He calls it “unintended consequences”. I disagree … these consequences are very much intended

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

Brad Polumbo is being far too generous to Californian politicians by saying the impending collapse of the state’s entire gig economy was not the intended result of passing “worker protection” laws that penalized success:

UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

This Friday, Uber and Lyft are set to entirely shut down ride-sharing operations in California. The businesses’ exit from the Golden State will leave hundreds of thousands of drivers unemployed and millions of Californians chasing an expensive cab. Sadly, this was preventable.

Here’s how we got to this point.

In September of 2019, the California state legislature passed AB 5, a now-infamous bill harshly restricting independent contracting and freelancing across many industries. By requiring ride-sharing apps such as Uber and Lyft to reclassify their drivers as full employees, the law mandated that the companies provide healthcare and benefits to all the drivers in their system and pay additional taxes.

Legislators didn’t realize the drastic implications their legislation would have; they were simply hoping to improve working conditions in the gig economy. The unintended consequences may end up destroying it instead.

Here’s why.

AB 5 went into effect in January, and now, a judge has ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with the regulation and make the drastic transformation by August 20. Since compliance is simply unaffordable, the companies are going to have to shut down operations in California.

Their entire business model was based upon independent contracting, so providing full employee benefits is prohibitively expensive. Neither Uber nor Lyft actually make a profit, and converting their workforce to full-time employees would cost approximately $3,625 per driver in California. As reported by Quartz, “that’s enough to boost Uber’s annual operating loss by more than $500 million and Lyft’s by $290 million.”

Essentially, California legislators put these companies in an impossible position. It makes perfect sense that they’d leave the state in response. It’s clear that despite the good intentions behind the ride-sharing regulation, this outcome will leave all Californians worse off.

May 8, 2020

The Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown – “perhaps the worst policy mistake ever committed by Western governments during peacetime”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Toby Young on the fall of “Professor Lockdown”, the former top advisor to the British government on the response to the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

The reason for looking into the political affiliations of the scientists and experts who’ve been advising governments across the world during this crisis is that it may throw some light on why those governments have made such poor policy decisions. Will the vast majority of those advisers turn out to be left-of-centre, like Professor Ferguson? I’m 99% sure of it, and I think that will help us to understand what’s happened.

I don’t mean they’ve deliberately given right-of-centre governments poor advice in the hope of wrecking their economies for nefarious party political reasons or because they’re members of Extinction Rebellion and want to destroy capitalism. Nor do I believe in any of the conspiracy theories linking these public health panjandrums to Bill Gates and Big Pharma and some diabolical plan to vaccinate 7.8 billion people. I have little doubt they’ve acted in good faith throughout – and that’s part of the problem. The road they’ve led us down has been paved with all the usual good intentions.

The mistakes these liberal policy-makers have made are depressingly familiar to anyone who’s studied the breed: overestimating the ability of the state to solve complicated problems as well as the capacity of state-run agencies to deliver on those solutions; failing to anticipate the unintended consequences of large-scale state interventions; thinking about public policy in terms of moral absolutes rather than trade-offs; chronic fiscal incontinence, with zero inhibitions about adding to the national debt; not trusting in the common sense of ordinary people and believing the only way to get them to avoid risky behaviour is to put strict rules in place and threaten them with fines or imprisonment if they disobey them (and ignoring those rules themselves, obviously); arrogantly assuming that anyone who challenges their policy preferences is either ignorant or evil; never venturing outside their metropolitan echo chambers; citizens of anywhere rather than somewhere… you know the rest. We’ve seen it a hundred times before.

More often than not, the “solutions” these left-leaning experts come up with make the problems they’re grappling with even worse, and so it will prove to be in this case. The evidence mounts on a daily basis that locking down whole populations in the hope of “flattening the curve” was a catastrophic error, perhaps the worst policy mistake ever committed by Western governments during peacetime. Just yesterday we learnt that the lockdowns have forced countries across the world to shut down TB treatment programmes which, over the next five years, could lead to 6.3 million additional cases of TB and 1.4 million deaths. There are so many stories like this it’s impossible to keep track. We will soon be able to say with something approaching certainty that the cure has been worse than the disease.

May 4, 2020

Government “problem solving” is an oxymoron

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Food, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan explain why you should back away quickly when you hear a variant of “We’re from the government and we’re here to help”:

A central theme of our recent book, Cooperation & Coercion, is that all governments are hamstrung when they attempt to fix problems. Policymakers suffer from the knowledge problem: they don’t know enough to foresee every eventuality that will follow from what they do. Politicians see a problem, speak in sweeping statements, then declare what will happen, assuming their edicts will settle matters. But that is always just the beginning. More often than not, all manner of unintended consequences emerge, often making things worse than they were before their policies went into effect.

Consider the United States’ three high-profile wars against common nouns over the past half-century. Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty in the 1960s, Richard Nixon a War on Drugs in the 1970s, and George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in the early 2000s.

How are those wars working out? Because a back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that we have spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $23 trillion in our attempt to eradicate poverty, drugs, and terror. Not only have we not won any of these wars, it is unclear that any of them can be won. These three so-called wars have managed to saddle future generations of taxpayers with unprecedented debt. And, as is the case with all coercive endeavors, policymakers ask us to imagine how bad things would have been had we not spent the trillions we did spend. And then they ask for even more money. So now we have unwinnable wars along with institutionalized boondoggles to support them.

We see the same sort of thing happening now in the face of the COVID-19 threat that has induced the largest panic attack in world history. In the name of safety, policymakers have shut down myriad productive endeavors. And there will be a raft of unintended consequences to follow. We are already seeing them manifest, and they portend potential disaster as supply chains fail.

The first cracks in US supply chains appeared in the meat industry. Smithfield Foods, reacting to a number of workers contracting the virus, shut down its Sioux Fall plant. Kenneth M. Sullivan, President and CEO, explained in a press release that, “the closure of this facility, combined with a growing list of other protein plants that have shuttered across our industry, is pushing our country perilously close to the edge in terms of our meat supply.” But it’s not just the meat plant that’s implicated. It’s everyone from the cattle farmer to the person who cooks dinner, and there are a number of people who have a place in that process who might first escape attention. The people who make packing materials needed to ship food, the maintenance workers who service machines up and down the supply chain, the truck drivers who move product from one place to another, the grocers who sell the product, the daycare workers who care for the grocers’ children so the grocers can work, and many, many more are all at risk.

[…]

In declaring some jobs “necessary” and others not, in focusing on one supply chain versus another, policymakers show how little they know about the nation’s economy. In their view, they can simply declare things they want to happen, and then those things will happen. But that is not how economies work. An economy is the sum total of everyone’s activities, and when the government declares that something must happen, all kinds of other things happen too.

Consider how all the “non-essential workers” have been sent home for the past two months. Who gets to declare which workers are non-essential to the economy, and by what standard? Most assumed that politicians had the correct answers to these questions. But, as we are discovering, there is no such thing as “non-essential” workers. All workers are essential. How do we know? Because their jobs existed. Profit-driven businesses do not create non-essential jobs. Those people’s jobs were essential to their employers. Further, those people’s jobs were incredibly essential to the people themselves. They need their wages to pay the rent, buy their food, make their car payments, and for everything else that makes their lives livable.

But policymakers simply declared them non-essential, as if there would be no fallout from that decision.

May 1, 2020

The Scottish Sentencing Council recommends that no under-25s be sent to prison

Filed under: Britain, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Theodore Dalrymple isn’t impressed with this proposal:

A judges’s wig and advocate’s wig on temporary display in Parliament Hall, Edinburgh, 26 October 2013.
Photo by Kim Traynor via Wikimedia Commons.

Just as one begins to imagine that the liberal pseudo-conscience can go no further in foolishness, it comes up with new schemes to make the world a little worse. Its inventiveness, in fact, is infinite, and no victory over it by common sense is ever more than temporary. The price of sanity, at least in the modern world, is eternal vigilance.

This is not to say, of course, that no liberal reform in the past was ever justified or did no good, or that none will ever do any good in the future. It is simply that, as a matter of contingent sociological fact, many liberals seem to have lost their minds.

The Scottish Sentencing Council, an advisory body with no legislative powers but whose recommendations judges disregard at their peril, put forward a proposal earlier this year that those under the age of 25 should not be sent to prison because research shows that their brains have not yet fully matured. It is difficult to know where to begin in arguing with this fatuity.

Let us then start with the notion that no man under 25 is sufficiently mature to know that it is wrong to strangle old ladies in their beds and the further proposition that, until that age, they are unable to control their impulse to do so.

[…]

The idea that a man’s brain is so immature before age 25 that he does not know that all manner of crimes are wrong would suggest a revision of our electoral laws, for if a man can neither distinguish right from wrong nor control his impulses, should he have the vote? Should he, in fact, be considered of legal age? Should he be allowed even to choose his own career? I doubt that the Sentencing Council would preen itself on the corollaries of its proposal.

There is, of course, an element of truth in what the Sentencing Council says. Our characters are not fully formed by the age of 25 — mine certainly wasn’t. It is true also that there is a biological component to crime, inasmuch as the vast majority of criminals in all societies in which crime is a category of behaviour are young and male. The rate at which even recidivist criminals commit crimes declines with age and most often reaches zero. Time is the great therapist.

But punishment is not therapy. It is a very good thing, of course, if punishment (such as imprisonment) reforms the criminal, and I think that it is a moral obligation of the state, if it is to lock up people, to try to give them something purposeful and worthwhile to do. But that is not the primary purpose of punishment. If it could be shown that rewarding criminals with large fortunes would change their behaviour — as almost certainly it would in most cases — we should not advocate such a course, even if it were a better way of reforming them in the sense of reducing their recidivism rate.

April 13, 2020

James J. Hill, US railroading’s premier “market entrepreneur”

Filed under: Business, Government, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dane Stuhlsatz outlines the story of US federal government subsidies and other interventions into the 19th century railroad industry and the one tycoon who avoided the lure:

Postcard photo of the Great Northern Railway’s “Empire Builder” streamliner between Everett and Seattle, Washington, circa 1963.
Great Northern Railway postcard via Wikimedia Commons.

Burton W. Folsom, Jr. outlined this story in his book, The Myth of the Robber Barons, identifying two models of entrepreneurship; the “political entrepreneurism” of lines like the Union Pacific and Central Pacific versus the “market entrepreneurism” of James J. Hill and his Great Northern Railway.

Canadian-born James J. Hill (1838-1916) in 1914.
Photo from Famous Living Americans, edited by Mary Griffin Webb and Edna Lenore Webb via Wikimedia Commons.

As Folsom details, the former chased government largesse, ultimately in exchange for loss of control of their business, while the latter chased profits through prudent business decisions. Hill’s success juxtaposed with UP’s and CP’s failure is due in no small part to his steadfast refusal to accept any federal subsidies. In short, UP’s and CP’s government subsidized incentives were vastly different from Hill’s profit driven incentives, which lead to vastly different outcomes.

Federal subsidies incentivized speed, not efficiency. The subsidies were paid in the form of both land grants and direct payments. For each mile of track laid, the UP and CP would receive 20 acres of land and either $16,000 (for track on flat land), $32,000 (for track on hilly terrain), or $48,000 (on mountainous terrain). This incentive for speed resulted in winding, inefficient, routes built with inferior materials, ultimately culminating in a federal price tag of 44,000,000 acres and $61,000,000 (astronomical sums in the 1860s-70s). Despite all this federal assistance, shortly after the golden spike was driven on May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah, the UP and CP were nearly bankrupt and required further assistance to stay afloat.

The lines which were born and brought up on federal aid needed federal aid to continue. This led to the passage of the Thurman Law in 1874 which forced UP to pay 25% of its earnings a year to pay its federal debt.

UP’s profitability decisions were also subject to government approval. Branch lines — smaller lines off the main line into rural communities — which could have helped UP’s bottom line, were often not approved by federal bureaucrats. Additionally, the federal Bureau of Railroad Accounts required constant checking of UP’s books. All these measures stifled the ingenuity that UP so desperately needed to make its line profitable. UP quickly found out that the power to subsidize was the power to destroy.

Hill’s line on the other hand was methodically surveyed and built, on the shortest routes possible, with the least gradient possible, and using the best steel and other materials on the market at the time. Rather than political largess, Hill made his decisions based on profit and loss. But, for all the efficiency that Hill built into his line — he was able to transport across the country faster, cheaper, and with less maintenance costs than could the UP and CP — arguably the most important aspect for the viability of his business was the freedom to conduct business untethered by the strings that accompanied government subsidies.

While Hill was free to build when and where he wanted so long as he reached voluntary agreements with landowners, consumers, and employees, UP was tied up in red tape. As Hill’s line grew evermore profitable and reliable for customers, the UP and CP struggled along on federal aid, until they ultimately went bankrupt in 1893.

For his part, Hill’s line was the only transcontinental railroad to never go bankrupt.

Route map from the Great Northern Railway, circa 1920. Red lines are the GN route; dotted lines are other railroads. Created from the Map Maker at nationalatlas.gov and routes drawn in, using a 1920 map as a reference.
Map by Elkman via Wikimedia Commons.

March 16, 2020

QotD: Company incentives to prevent sexual harassment

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

One of the predictions I’m seeing everywhere, for instance, is how now Human Resources will need a lot more power over companies to prevent more #metoo incidents of sexual importuning of women.

The funny thing about this is that anyone with two eyes and a modicum of understanding of the world knows that this is not where the crazy is headed. As the attempt to drown out the legitimate cases of harassment — mostly by leftists, in leftist-dominated institutions — by claiming #metoo and that all men were essentially harassers becomes more frantic, it has become obvious that any man can be accused of harassment at any time by anyone.

So, here is a genuine prediction: I predict that instead of giving HR more power, this will give companies pause before hiring women, which will lead to a lot of decent and qualified women being left unemployed.

The second-order effect of that, for companies that can’t avoid hiring women, is two-fold: they’ll either hire women to “make-believe” positions, in which they interact only or primarily with other women, creating a drain on the bottom line, or they will allow a lot more work-at-home by both men and women. I predict we’ll see a great move towards that in the next year. Sure, it’s still possible to claim someone is harassing you via the phone, but one-party consent states at least will allow men to record everything in order to defend themselves.

Weirdly, I believe the long-term result of this will be the dismantling of the daycare and child-warehousing practice which has led to a lot of the left’s ascendency in education.

This is because no matter how much you wish to wishful think that companies will just give Human Resources more power, people who actually live and work in the world know this isn’t likely. Human Resources would mostly just make it impossible for anyone to get any work done.

Sarah Hoyt, “Nobody Expects These Predictions”, PJ Media, 2017-12-31.

March 15, 2020

Those damned unintended consequences

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on the differences between intention and the real world:

Unintended consequences are the bane of social engineers. They are why the “Scientific” and centralized method of governance never worked and will never work. (Sorry, guys, it just won’t.)

Part of it is because humans are contrary. Part of is because humans are chaotic. And part of it is because like weather systems, societies are so complex it’s almost impossible to figure out what a push in any given place will cause to happen in another place.

This is why price controls are the craziest of idiocies. They don’t work in the way they’re intended, but oh, they work in practically all the ways they’re not. So, take price controls on rent. All they really do is create a market in which housing is scarce, landlords don’t maintain their property AND the only people who can afford to live in cities that have rent control are the very wealthy.

BUT Sarah, you say, aren’t rent controls supposed to make them affordable. Yeah. All that and the good intentions will allow you to go skating in hell on the fourth of July weekend.

Let’s be real, okay? I saw rent control up close and personal in Portugal. Rents were controlled and landlords were penalized for “not keeping the property up”.

In Portugal at the time, and here too, most of the time from what I’ve seen, the administration of property might be some management company, but that’s not who OWNS the damn thing. The owners are usually people who bought the property so it would support them in old age/lean times.

To begin with, you’re removing these people’s ability to make money off their legitimately owned property. And no, they’re not the plutocrats bernie bros imagine. These are often people just making it by.

Second, people are going to get the money some other way, because the alternative is dying. And people don’t want to die or be destitute. So they’re going to find the money. I have no idea what it is in NYC, etc, but in Portugal? it was “key buying.” Sure, you can rent the house for the controlled price, but you have to make a huge payment upfront to “buy the key.” From what I remember this was on the order of a small house down payment. And if you couldn’t do that, you were stuck getting married and living with your parents. And if you say “greedy landlords” — well, see the other thing you could do was leave the lease in your will. So the landlord didn’t know if they’d ever get control of their property back, and they needed to live off this for x years (estimated length of life.) So, that was an unintended consequence. The kind that keeps surfacing in rent-controlled cities in the US.

The same applies to attempts to “help” the homeless. Part of this, as part of all attempts to “fix” poverty is that the people doing it, usually the result of generations of middle class parents and strives assume the homeless and the poor are people like them.

To an extent, they’re correct. The homeless and the poor are PEOPLE. But culture makes a difference, and culture is often based on class and place of upbringing. And the majority of humanity, judging by the world, might be made to strive but are not natural strivers. Without incentive, most of humanity sits back, relaxes and takes what it’s given.

March 8, 2020

QotD: The essential difference between intentions and results

Filed under: Books, Business, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the entire left seems determined to go around pretending that the intention is the action. That is, they believe whatever they intended to do is what will come about, and there will be no glitch, no second-order effects, nor will people adjust their behavior in ways unanticipated by the left.

The results can be uproariously funny, like the “push model” in publishing leading eventually to the success of indie ebooks. (The short explanation is this: the push model is where, in dealing with chain bookstores, the publishers, who are overwhelmingly leftist, realized they could push them to stock whatever books they wanted to succeed, and then the customers would have to buy them because they were the only thing available. The end result was a nosedive in book sales, the death of Borders, and eventually the success of indie-published ebooks.) However, even there, on the way there, there was the tragedy of people not being able to find good things to read for a long time. (I remember us calling bookstore trips “going to be disappointed by Barnes and Noble.”)

Other times, their carefully laid plans are foiled by new technology — see, for instance, their slow-crawl through news reporting and other institutions being nullified by the internet and blogs, and a bunch of us bums working in their pajamas. […]

But often the tragic/comic effects of their action lead directly to their undoing, in a beautiful, almost Shakespearean effect.

Sarah Hoyt, “Nobody Expects These Predictions”, PJ Media, 2017-12-31.

March 2, 2020

The unexpected electricity bill for Bitcoin

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

At the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall points out that Bitcoin transactions now consume a huge amount of electricity:

Some will take this as proof that the system of Bitcoin shouldn’t exist, even that we should attempt to close it down. For it is, according to these calculations, using vast amounts of energy:

    Just one Bitcoin transaction uses the same amount of electricity as a British household for nearly two months, new figures have shown.

    The amount of energy needed to run the cryptocurrency has soared to record annual highs of 77.78 terawatt hours the same as the entire electrical consumption of Chile.

    The carbon footprint of a single transaction is the same as 780,650 Visa transactions or spending 52,043 hours watching YouTube, according to calculations by Alex de Vries, a blockchain specialist, at PWC.

    “People react with disbelief, but the figures are true,” said Mr de Vries who founded the Digiconomist blog to highlight the impact.

All those calculations are over here.

February 25, 2020

QotD: Canadian content rules

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Stargate: Atlantis] is a Sci-Fi channel show produced in Canada, starring Canadians and featuring a cranky, sympathetic Canadian character in a lead role. But thanks to Canadian trade-barriers it has yet to air on Canadian television. Remind me again what original programming Canada’s CRTC sheltered Space: the Imagination Station has produced? How many times can we be expected to watch decade old repeats of Seaquest DSV in defense of “Canadian culture”? If they had the wisdom to rebroadcast Starlost or some such epic crap I could almost see the point but as it stands CanCon rules, and the businesses they shelter, are a joke.

I tried making this case to a left-leaning friend. She said, half-joking, “I know you are speaking Canadian but I can’t understand any of the words.” I am reminded every day of my former communication studies undergrads who would argue for Canadian content rules (I am told these represent “regulation” and not “censorship”) and, with no change of expression, cheerfully explain they never watch Canadian television because it is uniformly awful. Such is the naked truth of ideology.

Ghost of a Flea, “Poisoning the Well”, Ghost of a Flea, 2005-08-12.

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