Convening to ring the alarm about global warming, our putative betters and would-be rulers gathered in Davos, Switzerland, filling the local general-aviation hangars with some 1,700 private jets. Taking an international commercial flight is one of the most carbon-intensive things the typical person does in his life, but if you’re comparing carbon footprints between your average traveler squeezed into coach on American and Davos Man quaffing Pol Roger in his cashmere-carpeted intercontinental air limousine, you’re talking Smurfette vs. Sasquatch. The Bombardier’s Global 6000 may be a technical marvel, but it still runs on antique plankton juice. The emissions from heating all those sprawling hotel suites in the Alps in winter surely makes baby polar bears weep bitter and copious baby-polar-bear tears.
The stories add up: Jeff Greene brings multiple nannies on his private jet to Davos, and the rest of the guys gathered to talk past each other about the plight of the working man scarf down couture hot-dogs that cost forty bucks. Bill Clinton makes the case for wealth-redistribution while sporting a $60,000 platinum Rolex.
The hypocrisy of our literally (literally, Mr. Vice President!) high-flying crusaders against fossil fuels — who overlap considerably with our high-living crusaders against economic inequality — is endlessly annoying if frequently entertaining. And there is something unseemly about enduring puritanical little homilies on how we need to learn to live with less from guys wearing shoes that cost more than the typical American family earns in a quarter. When that obnoxious Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross informs that sad-sack real-estate salesman that his watch costs more than that guy’s car, he was trying to provoke him into getting richer, to the tune of a Cadillac Eldorado or, if not that, at least the second-prize set of steak knives. But our modern progressive versions of that guy are even more obnoxious: They demand that we lower our expectations while they live lives of opulence that would have embarrassed the Count of Monte Cristo.
Out-obnoxious-ing a guy with Alec Baldwin’s smirking mug takes a lot of brass.
Kevin Williamson, “Davos’s Destructive Elites: ‘None of us is as dumb as all of us'”, National Review, 2015-01-25.
February 9, 2015
QotD: The hyper-rich are not like you and I
January 28, 2015
The great and the good gather at Davos
And Monty calls ’em exactly what they are:
Luckily, all is not lost. Our moral and ethical betters have gathered in Davos to light their cigars with hundred-dollar bills while mocking the tubercular bootblack who’s been pressed into service to keep their shoes looking spiffy while they chat and laugh and eat lobster canapes. Oh, wait, I read that wrong, sorry. They’re in Davos to discuss the pressing problem of Global Warming(tm). Because they’re so concerned about Global Warming(tm) that they felt compelled to fly their private jets to an upscale enclave in the Swiss Alps to talk about it. While making fun of the tubercular bootblack who’s spit-shining their wingtips.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a big believer in ostentatious displays of wealth. If I had the money, I’d build a hundred-foot-high statue of myself made out of pure platinum and then hire homeless people to worship at it for no fewer than eight hours per day. (I’d pay them a fair wage, though. What’s the going rate for abject obeisance to a living God? I’ll have to look it up.) But this Davos thing is just…rank. It’s a collection of rich fart-sniffers who want to congratulate each other on how socially conscious they are, and how much they care about the Little People. (Except the tubercular bootblack, whom they often kick with their rich-guy shoes.)
November 2, 2014
It’s safe to just ignore the World Economic Forum’s report on pay gaps
In Forbes, Tim Worstall looks at how the World Economic Forum came up with their scary conclusions that the pay gap between men and women won’t disappear until 2095:
And that’s it: no, really, that is what they’re basing, in its entirety, their estimations of the gender pay gap upon. They asked a few people whether they thought that men and women got roughly the same pay for roughly the same sort of job or not and that’s it. This isn’t cutting edge data science to put it very kindly indeed.
For when we go off and look at the messy details of the gender pay gap we find that we’ve not really got one, not in the industrialised countries. Once we correct for the obvious things like hours at work, years in the workforce, educational background and so on we find that the mythical gender pay gap (that “women earn 77 cents to every $ men do”) simply disappears. There might be a small residual, a few percent, left in there but not enough that we can really notice. And quite apart from anything else it’s actually illegal to pay men and women different amounts for doing the same job (if on the basis that the different pay is purely as a result of their being men or women that is).
So, no, we shouldn’t be taking this report or finding seriously. And there’s more than just the fact that they’re using a survey to measure that gap. For of course the printing of this report will lead to, as the other incorrect claims about the gender pay gap do, a certain circularity of reasoning.
Ask someone: “Are men and women paid equally?” And they’ll start thinking about whoever it was that said that 77 cents line, recall that last year the WEF said that gender pay inequality was very bad indeed. So, now we come to asking them the same question for the next WEF survey and their answer will be influenced by the cacophony of voices that have been telling them how bad the gender pay disparity is. Including, obviously, last year’s WEF report that said so. It’s entirely circular and self-reinforcing.
Really, we shouldn’t be taking this stuff seriously.
April 14, 2010
QotD: The environmental conspiracy theorists
In the conventional wisdom, conspiracy theorists are stubble-faced old coots missing every third tooth, who live in backwoods shacks and claim the Pope (who is really Hitler’s love child) is in league with the Freemasons and the World Economic Forum to enslave us all through the cashless society.
Environmentalists, on the other hand, live in low-energy townhouses in upscale neighbourhoods, drink fair-trade coffee from 100% post-consumer recyclable cups, drive hybrid cars and eat only organic food grown within 100 kilometres of their homes. They are trendy, tony, highly educated and socially conscious with small carbon footprints. So, surely, they can’t be conspiracy theorists.
But they are.
In his new book, for instance, Mr. McKibben spins a tale about a vast web of shadowy payoffs to for-hire scientists, and intense pressure placed on politicians and editors by powerful lobbyists. He, like many environmentalists, sees himself and his colleagues as the little guys battling an enormous, unseen disinformation machine funded by Big Oil and Big Coal that is keeping the people from hearing the truth about the coming climate catastrophe.
They fancy themselves the underdogs when in fact they are the overdogs.
Lorne Gunter, “Green paranoia on parade”, National Post, 2010-04-14
