Better living through Big Government?

From ourworldindata.org

U.S. federal debt as percentage of GDP; from wikipedia

Now, I'm not going to say that GDP equates to better living, but it does contribute to higher living standards which, other things being equal, makes for greater opportunities for better living (more leisure time to study/think about philosophy, for example, or improved pharmaceutical technology under 'better living through chemistry' assumptions, for another).  But let's say we look at this from the standpoint of purely economic outcomes (i.e., GDP per capita, perhaps adjusted for levels of inequality assuming that's particularly important to do...).  And look at the two graphs above in combination, covering roughly the same period of United States history.  Assume standard data/knowledge that any informed citizen should know about, concerning the size of government in the USA (spending, regulatory burden) both before and after the mid-20th century.  (The first graph, GDP per capita, is on a logarithmic scale so that we don't get the J-curve effect from exponential growth, i.e., would show a straight line over time for a constant rate of growth.)

Do the graphs show that big government has produced better economic outcomes, without undue or deadweight cost?

I mean, I might understand how the debt incurred by World War II may have been necessary, and relative to the economy was being paid down in the subsequent decades, but since that time the welfare state has ballooned.  Non-military spending since the beginning of the Great Society programs in the 1960s has increased from roughly 19 percent to roughly 28 percent of GDP.  What are the benefits that have come about from these additional costs?  From the GDP-per-capita graph, it appears hardly any benefit has happened compared to what came before.  Meanwhile, the national debt relative to GDP has increased considerably and is projected to go yet higher.  (I can only assume, based on my inquiries over the years into this matter, that this is due to the actuarial deficits in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds" that those in the know have heard and talked about - the figures running in the tens of trillions of dollars (present value terms) if not over $100 trillion - are beginning to materialize; turning Keynes on his head, as it were, the long run is now arriving.

What the data show, to me, is that Big Government has brought the USA a large cost, without an added economic benefit.  Am I missing something crucial here?  Is it that economic growth rates tend to slow as economies mature, and that Big Government and its associated deficits/debt have kept the growth rate roughly the same, and that perhaps the added costs of Big Government are worth this?    Is there a particularly compelling reason to believe this?  Is it that per capita GDP could manage to keep up its growth rate under the strains of Big Government (greater government spending and regulation as a share of GDP) only if the federal government went into structurally higher levels of debt (as a share of GDP)?  How do we tell?  And how does the dynamic of accelerated globalization in the past half-century affect this analysis?

Is the American layperson in a good epistemic position to decide whether trading off liberty for Big Government (and you'd have to bastardize the meaning of "liberty" to think it's anything other than this) is worth both the economic outcomes as well as the effects on the national ethos and character?  Do the decline and fall of empires throughout history have anything to warn us about here?  Better get that philosophical education going, or risk an intensified shitshow, huh?

Does Bezos exploit Bezos?

(A sequel to the original.)

The enemies of capitalism have a perverse (mis)understanding both of its basic moral principles and of the workings of the free market, which - in light of Rand's integration of the two points in Atlas Shrugged (and in "What is Capitalism?") under the theme of "the role of the mind in man's existence" - come to the same thing.  The way they typically employ the phrase "means of production" indicates their failure and/or refusal to grasp Rand's point that the mind/intellect/reason is the prime mover of the production process, i.e., the source of value-added over and above both technologically primitive means (natural resources excluding the most economically pivotal natural resource, the human mind) and the prevailing economic and technological infrastructure at any given point in time.  (Considerably more than anyone else, there's one man's vision behind Amazon.com.)

The anticapitalist ignorance/fallacies involved are well represented by Bernie Sanders' statement to Bloomberg at the Feb. 19 debate: "You know what Mr. Bloomberg? It wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well. And it is important that those workers are able to share the benefits also."  No one said that Bloomberg created the entire value of his company; what economics experts would say, however, is that the people involved in the running of his business were each paid roughly proportional to their marginal value-added contribution.  Bernie's language would indicate that he thinks there's some kind of (exploitative) zero-sum rather than win-win thing going on here; this kind of language/tendency is pretty widespread among socialists, notwithstanding the dramatic rise in both population and living standards in the era of modern capitalism.

(Sanders followed the above statement with the following, also a familiar one from enemies of capitalism; we'll call it the "alienation argument": "When we have so many people go to work every day and they feel not good about their jobs, they feel like cogs in a machine. I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards as well, so they can have some say of what happens to their lives."  The arguments involved here can't be covered in a brief paragraph of post.  But the gist of this problem, as best as I understand it, is that Bernie and socialists are talking here about a human problem, not a capitalism one, and it's not a problem I see being solved by the traditional socialist solutions about "seizing the means of production (sic)" or other forcible measures of putting "the workers" more in charge of decisions about the running of firms.  That being said, I'm all for voluntary 'worker'-empowerment arrangements that even a Randian 'left-libertarian' like Roderick Long gets behind.  And in any event, how do the rare, entrepreneurial skills of a Bezos get put to their optimal use under socialistic proposals?)

Sanders' statement about the "workers" creating much of the money is standard for socialist-talk and an ingrained tendency toward thinking in terms of a labor theory of value (LTV) under some guise or other.  The most (in)famous proponent of LTV, Karl Marx, had to qualify the LTV in such ways as to make it a truism.  To make a long story short, a CEO of a company qua such (i.e., not qua shareholder in the firm, which I address in a moment) is in the category of highly skilled labor, which represents a multiple of simple or unskilled labor.  And CEOs are known to often make many multiples of the lesser-skilled laborers under his or her command.  But the real villain in the Marxian/socialist framework, the source of alienation and exploitation, is the category of capital (in its privately-owned version, that is).  It's not the CEO that exploits, it's the shareholders (the capitalists) who are in the position to exploit the labor of the CEO and everyone else working in the firm.

Now, Bezos' salary as CEO is a mere $81K.  The vast bulk of his compensation comes from the value of the shares in the company he founded and runs.  IOW, in the Marxist/socialist "understanding," the shareholder-value part of the equation represents exploitation.  And Bezos is only a roughly 1/6 shareholder in Amazon, meaning to the tune of 5/6 of the company's value, Bezos the skilled-laborer-CEO is beholden to shareholder-capitalists.  It's so unfair and alienating.  (Ludwig von Mises among others went through considerable pains to make the point that entrepreneurs and capitalists are beholden to customers.  Is that what's unfair and alienating, in the final analysis?  Is the Marxist/socialist objection really about the inequalities in wealth and income arising from differences in ability to satisfy market demand?)

But the whole Marxian/socialist analysis runs into a problem that Rand solves, when we think through how Bezos qua capitalist/shareholder supposedly exploits the workers (including Bezos qua CEO)?  The question that Marx/socialists fail to answer but Rand does answer, is whether and how Bezos' shareholder-based net worth is a more or less accurate reflection of the value-added he generated as prime mover behind Amazon's success.  Never mind whether or how the net worth of other shareholders in Amazon and other companies reflect how they generated value-added through their skills, savings-and-investing, and savings-and-investing skills or vision.  (Warren Buffett - net worth of roughly $90B or 5th largest in the world - made his fortune through pure investing/finance skills an vision.  What role for a Buffett's finance skills in a socialist-style economy?  And if a highly-and rarely-skilled person holds out not merely for the minimal level of compensation that would bring forth performance, but rather holds out for what the market will bear, is that especially objectionable?)

Anyway, in 2019, Jeff Bezos divorced from his wife, Mackenzie, and as a consequence of the divorce settlement she became currently the 23rd wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of roughly $44B.  She's not the CEO; she's not usually credited with being the prime mover behind Amazon's success.  From 2019 onward, she draws returns from Amazon's productive capacity qua pure capitalist.

So, using Marx/Sanders/socialist logic, does Mackenzie exploit Jeff?

Loathsome leftist loser Leiter & Co.'s "black book of capitalism"

Note that the so-called black book of capitalism the leftists imagine there to be is a reaction to the damning evidence (namely, 100 million dead and millions brutalized/demoralized) presented in the Black Book of Communism.

I've taken the loathsome Leiter to task before on his anticapitalist/leftist intellectual sloth, his one-sided cherry-picking of the evidence,  etc.  But this just about takes the cake.  As against all the data available at ourworldindata.org, Leiter cherry-picks this one article about suicide rates in the USA as evidence of capitalism (i.e., the system of private property, if you can suspend disbelief for long enough to imagine some causal connection) - or the global neoliberal juggernaut, if you will - making life simply unbearable for ever more people.

I mean, why now, all of a sudden, did capitalism get around to upping the despair/suicide rates?  Globalization and/or automation outsourced their jobs and so it's capitalism's fault that the mostly-public, mostly-Demo-rat-run education (sic) system was too piss-poor to prepare people for the transition?  You basically are in mindless doubling-down territory if you try to keep up a leftist narrative.  You'll notice that the 3.5% unemployment rate gets no mention, capitalism gets no credit for that.  The number just isn't all that important; by definition . . . let me try to mimic leftist thought processes here for a moment, and tell me if you haven't seen it a thousand times . . . the unemployment rate only includes eligible labor force, those seeking work vs, those who have work, which excludes those who've given up perhaps in hopelessness and despair which is due to the private ownership of the means of production because . . . this is where it gets really tricky and I don't claim to know where it might go from here.  One thing's for sure, if they didn't choose to learn from Mises and Rand and the 100 million killed by Reds when they had ample opportunity to do so, then they're probably never going to learn.

Shouldn't these nitwits just stick to the climate-change-discredits-capitalism narrative?  It's a lot less difficult to keep a plausible story straight there - that is, until you dialectically/contextually/hierarchically, if you will (considering both presuppositions and implications, etc.) bring in the role of future tech (AI, etc.), in which case it looks like the leftists are losers there, too.  Yes, indeed, the age of the neoliberal global juggernaut has brought with it one of the greatest things the world has yet seen - the Internet - and it is true, despite the benefits of all that, despite all the raw data/info it makes available to your average inquirer, it hasn't resulted in  particularly improved integrators of data on average across the population.

If anything, given the tendencies of the left-run education (sic) institutions - the case of Leiter being representative of the intellectual rot smugly trying to pass as sophisticated and superior - it has produced inferior information-integrators.  What else is the notoriously toxic twitter sewer but a bunch of inferior info-integrators sucking each others dicks (or using mouth on whatever of each others' genitalia) and imagining Trump/America to be racist and everything is getting worse because of capitalism stuff.  No, it couldn't be because the education (sic) system is failing to meet expectations, it gets a C-minus or so in the cognitive-skills-value-added dept. despite all the extra dough poured in there, and the taxpayers' patience is wearing thin (advantage: Trump/GOP).  No, the thing for the (loathsome) leftist and twitter spittler to do is to double down and blame capitalism (private property), somehow.

But getting back to the real world here: the primary causal factor in human affairs, if you examine it thoroughly and carefully, is the mental and intellectual, with material production value-added a subordinate causal consequence (i.e., historical materialism is conceptually untrue).  And something something the fundamental role of philosophy in human intellectual life (and implications for educating children [a proven success wherever tried] as well as everyone else who's eligible in the ways of philosophic inquiry), a point I've been making a lot over the course of this blog (see, e.g., the 'Intro' link, "Better Living Through Philosophy, in broad outline," at the top of this blog posting).

And it'd sure be damn nice if the leftist losers would stop smearing Ayn Rand at every opportunity and actually make an effort to grasp her point (about, e.g., "the role of the mind in man's existence").  The "best" that the academic left has come up with these days is a hit-and-run smear piece by the intellectual thug Scumbag Lisa Duggan, saying that Rand's point is something about being a "mean girl" - that this "mean girl" thing is more centrally and fundamentally connected to Rand's worldview than (say) the role of the mind in human existence or the Benevolent Universe Premise or heroic sense of life.  Nope, it's not about any of that; it's about Rand having this chip on her shoulder about those folks who proclaim that man's life is the state's to dispose of; this makes her the mean one here, you see.

The loser-left argues against capitalism pretty much as, well, as dishonestly as it argues against its various lame caricatures of Rand.  There pretty much had to be a convergence of both methods and subject matter here (and to a lesser extent this applies to the left's non-response to Mises), since Rand made the fundamental-level identification about the role of the mind/reason/intellect in the capitalistic production process and how that had to lead to the huge advances in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (and the founding of America the nation, as Rand is quick to point out is pivotal to human progress pace the ignorant anti-America leftists smears).  As long as the left refuses to engage reality and/or Rand on this point - about the effectiveness of capitalism at bringing out elite intellectual contributions of economic producers (and this may have something to do with yet another interesting cognitive principle Rand identified: unit-economy) - they will continue to fail in their smear campaigns.  If they engage Rand/reality on this fundamental point (no thanks to the likes of Scumbag Duggan or Comrade Leiter, who actively destructively interfere with doing so), it will be a win-win.

The latest AOC idiocy (idAOC?)

Something something the recent remarkable stock market gains are inequality in a nutshell, foolish words to that effect.  Some left-leaning "news" outlet cited the 2.9% year over year gain in "wages" (vs. the exorbitant 22% or so gain in the Dow) as evidence for her thesis.  Except that the latest interpretation from the basically commonsense (and therefore far superior intellectually and morally) biggest "conservative" media outlet that the latest gains were seeing the fastest growth on the low end (which economic theorists would explain in terms of the upward pressure on wages from a ever-tightening labor market, with 3.5% unemployment as ample evidence of that - along with, not coincidentally, the conceptual truism that those on the lower end of the bargaining-strength scale are the ones most likely to become the first people unemployed come the next recession (which anti-Trumpers all over the place were all but guaranteeing would happen under the unknown, unproven President Trump's leadership, and this includes New York Slimes columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman - the part-time partisan hack, etc.).

Anyway, pretty much everything from AOC involves some obvious economic fallacy or other, or culpable ignorance of readily available data (e.g. everything at ourworldindata.org), or some obvious unseriousness of thought and mannerism ("it is fascisuuuuuuuum . . . uh, uh. uh. uh, that we're headed toward..."), but what really is so objectively anger-warranting about it is that this person wielding real legislative power could not only be so fucking intellectually lazy and reckless, but also so fucking full of hubris (which goes hand in hand with the fucking intellectually lazy part).  The economy does better (than it otherwise would - ceteris paribus, as any serious student of economics knows about) when the Dow is doing better, and vice versa.  Nobody ever asserted a 1:1 correlation between the two (a fucking strawman, since everyone concedes one is about expectations and the other is about measured output), but the Dow isn't going south when investors of capital (people whom AOC obviously knows jack shit about) are bullish on outcomes in the not so distant future, and when they're bullish people get more available and better paying jobs.

(And since of course the Dow is a measure of expectations it is part of the index of leading economic indicators (LEI); the unemployment rate is, of course, the biggest coincident indicator.  Also, not coincidentally to AOC's studied ignorance, a 2.9% growth rate in wages, with inflation as low as it is, sounds like perhaps upwards of, I'm just pulling a reasonably-well-educated guess out of my ass here, a 50% to 100% faster growth rate in real wages than what was happening under the last Demo-rat presidency.  And as I pointed out some months back, given the slow-as-ever population growth rate these days, a 3% rate of GDP growth translates into double the per-capita GPD growth rate obtained with 2% reported GDP growth, not 50% more.  If people would stop lying with statistics and go through the comprehensive data set and mentally integrate it properly, they'd not give any time, attention or credence, or the power of lawmaking/physical force, to the likes of the fundamentally character-deficient AOC.  [Note from the digression below the context-oriented treatment of "if-then" hypotheticals and consider what such a hypothetical would have to presuppose about those currently  lying with statistics and giving AOC the time of day and whether all that in presupposition and implication would wipe out the need for the very hypothetical itself, heh heh.]  Also, it's not intellectually honest to do as your typical leftist does and that is to attribute a dynamic going on within America - a widening of income/wealth as measured by the Gini coefficient or whatever - to a dynamic inherent to capitalism itself.  The widening gap in America can be explained in great part by the effects of globalization, and with the increased globalization of capitalism - that big driver of CO2 measures which leftist losers use simultaneously to condemn capitalism for its evils while refusing to acknowledge the human benefits - there has been not just a dramatic fall in global poverty rates (whatever threshold you use) but little change in either direction in Gini-inequality globally in the last few decades).  Anyway, it's hard to maintain an anti-capitalism narrative in the face of all the data at ourworldindata.org in conjunction with an understanding of basic economic principles including the role and (win-win) effects of talent differentials - and the data include a huge rise in global population in the era of capitalism . . . which, if the left wants to maintain is a bad thing, it should say so outright (it might help explain their shittily selective attention about the population-reducing crimes of left-wing regimes; the name of that deliberate starvation of millions by the brainwashed-in-Marxism regime is known as Holodomor, kids; the reckless starvation of scores of millions within a few years by that other brainwashed-in-Marxism and hence also totalitarian regime is known as the Great Chinese Famine, ffs - give Mises the relevant data and he would have predicted millions would die and correctly explain exactly why, just as he correctly explained why socialism proper would eventually fail wherever it was tried (something something once all the seed corn was consumed). Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy Che Guevara t-shirt, while the usual leftist-loser suspects just continue on saying how capitalism killed many more all the while global population exploded (just as it did in Industrial England during the Worst Period in Human History according to Marx & Co., ca. 1800-1850)  All of this failure and death enabled by the Academic Left [see tag] with a few honorable exceptions that prove the rule, mind you....)

This is low-hanging fruit at this point; all told, AOC is a fucking moron who happened to be in a far-left congressional district and has some charisma (and more clever than wise, etc.).  Also it appears that a degree in "International Relations and Economics" from Boston U. is empty paper nowadays; if you want to present to the American taxpayer Exhibit A of the academy's intellectual . . . credibility deficit . . . look no further than AOC.  (Philosopher's question: If it isn't outright intellectual bankruptcy, how much further along the deficit spectrum does one have to go before it is reached?  And do we really want to find out?  How good can the standards be there, as things are now, when for instance a Scumbag Lisa Duggan at a top-10-ish university (NYU) dishonestly smears Ayn Rand in a public-university-published book, and then evades and insults those calling her "scholarship" into question - i.e., did she seek out contrary input, e.g., philosophy professors who are favorable toward Rand, or did she run it by the editors of the Journal of Ayn Rand studies for QC purposes, or did she make any effort to so much as know about the Peikoff courses, that sort of thing, all of which she made every effort not to do, basically - all without accountability or consequence?)  She (AOC) actually seems otherwise natively smart/bright but crippled by the education (sic) establishment's selective-worldview-cultivating procedures.  That should be enough to piss anyone off.  Rand's "The Comprachicos" presages what has become of the whipped-by-the-left university and its most loyal, necessarily hubristic spawn (AOC, e.g.).

But next up I think I'll take to task philosophy blogger (already in the intellectual stratosphere by today's lamestream media standards[*]) Michael Huemer's attack on doing the history of philosophy, and in particular his dictum, "don't be Aristotelian."

[*] [* for reasons I won't polemicize about in this here post, the author of the "world's most popular philosophy blog" serves as a complicated case seeing as there is little in the way of non-destructive "philosophy" that ever actually goes on there]
[Digression that should be transferred to the next post & multiple-paragraphed.]
(Obviously he's not aware, for instance, of state of the art interpretations from the likes of David Charles and Allen Gotthelf that a final cause or telos is irreducible to the other causes and associated with this idea is that the final cause achieves a good (so we're in normative/value-theory territory, not the realm of mechanics, physics, chemistry, or 'unevaluative' biology).  And more generally, from the standpoint of a perfectionistic methodology: if we learn nothing else from the history of philosophy, and if we're good learners, we glean from the study of the past greats just what about their thinking styles made them first-rate thinkers with such lasting influence (such as Aristotle has in ethics, specifically with the recently-revived virtue-ethical tradition - duh).  And if we're really perfectionistic we should be able to devise methods by which to reliably and accurately rank-order the great thinkers on a scale of greatness (be it in cardinal or ordinal terms).  By any good measurement system Aristotle comes out pretty much well ahead of the competition in virtue of a monumental body of writings (and lost dialogues likened by some of the ancient wisdom-lovers to rivers of gold to Plato's silver).  (By virtue of her identification of the principle of ordinal rankings in terms of teleological measurement, as well as the identifications made throughout the rest of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, does(n't) Rand rank pretty high on the scale of overall philosophical greatness?  By parity of reasoning, if indeed Rand along with the other giants of the history of philosophy - all by repute and nearly all in fact first-rate minds - each had their own well-edited and cross-referenced Lexicon demonstrating with great effectiveness what first-rate minds they pretty much all are, wouldn't that increase people's interest in doing philosophy?  Huemer seems to short-change this possibility or something, in which case I suggest he get more dialectical/thorough in reasoning through what value things like history of philosophy provide.  Also, I've explained in my book (namely in the most-important second chapter, 'Aristotelianism') that I'm an Aristotelian in terms of a tradition of thought defined by certain fundamentals but not beholden to all of Aristotle's arguments (as he himself would have wanted it, duh).  And fundamental to his very-impressive-results-getting intellectual enterprise was his philosophic method, which the scholar writing about Aristotle in the Oxford Handbook identifies with dialectic.  But the dialectical method should be treated most fundamentally, not merely as a matter of consulting, giving a fair hearing to, etc., the varied learned and reasoned-sounding opinions, weighing them and deciding on a best explanation; it is most fundamentally the art of context-keeping, for which Huemer can consult Sciabarra's Total Freedom, where Aristotle is treated as the fountainhead of this methodological tradition while its being formulated in terms of Sciabarra's art-of-context-keeping fundamentals (and in terms of the proper application of "both-and" reasoning to competing and partial claims to the truth, in addition to the proper "either-or" reasoning involved).  So far as I know, no one's presented any good reason to doubt Sciabarra's thesis, not even the ultra-wisdom-loving Prof. Huemer.  Also not widely known: for Rand, her concept of mental integration is, well, integral to her concept of context(-keeping).  And that is integral to her concept of hierarchy of thought.  (A proper approach to hierarchy would help inform us on if-then style hypotheticals that philosophers to pose; what are not just the implications of the if-clause but the presuppositions?  Like, "if the Aristotelian end of history as defined in UP's book were to eventuate, then...".  Like, for instance, would UP's book have to have been written first?  Is it a realistic hypothetical in the first place?  That kinda shit you should get stoned and think through very carefully and thoroughly.)

Darn it, I lost a certain train of thought here, for which I blame the weed.  Oh wait, now I remember: I supersede 'Aristotelian' and 'dialectic' in the sense that I identify my methods in terms of a principle of intellectual perfectionism, which means (among other things) doing the activity of philosophy as close to perfectly as one feasibly can, but also learning a bunch of shit (for which don't ever trust AOCs under 30) and also possibly fanatical attention to (hopefully the most crucially relevant, philosophically essential) detail.  Like Aristotle, Aquinas and/or Rand, for instance?  (Also, I think with a probability approaching 100% that a Hegel Dictionary of the sort built by, who was it, Solomon in the 1980s perhaps or Houlgate ca. 2000?), might be part of a whole revived "understanding Hegel" effort that may actually pay off for once, but idk.  Just call it the Hegel Lexicon and voila, we've got a volume 2 in a much-anticipated-by-me series.  I just get a bit of a kick out of inductively identifying tantalizing principles like that one there.)

[Background music/soundtrack to the foregoing: Pink Floyd favorites, a listing of which is available]

Minimum wage increases & recessions

One more-or-less obvious crock of shit the Democrats peddle to the American people is that they are morally superior on the subject of the minimum wage.  They don't care that most economists think minimum wage increases are not a good idea if employment opportunities for less-skilled workers is the goal.  They are more interested in being (seen as) morally correct irrespective of whether they are precisely, factually and semantically correct.

The Dem-majority House just passed a hike in the federal minimum wage to $15/hr.  This is not at all surprising given the Dems' antipathy toward the free market and the fact that the economy is in the stage of the business cycle it is in.  Given the history of these things, this does not bode well for the economy in the coming years.  If Dems want a recession in '20 - surely their best shot of winning back the White House - they would do well to have a minimum wage hike signed into law.

Here is the history of the federal minimum wage (the dark blue is the nominal rate, the light blue the inflation-adjusted one):

[Note: the highest the inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage has ever been is just shy of $12 in today's dollars.  And the Dems want to jack it up to $15?  I don't think they're nearly as intellectually superior as they think they are.  While they're at it, why stop at $15 ffs?]

Now, everyone who's been paying attention knows that before ca. 1973 the U.S. and world economy were structurally different enough that the pre-1973 economy could withstand the more "progressive" policies such as marginal tax rates north of 70%.  Globalization since the 1970s has put increased pressure on the U.S. labor market, making more sense at the margins for businesses and finance capital to offshore or outsource.  (The result has been close to a miracle for the rest of the world (mostly China...), in terms of living standards.  See all the relevant numbers at ourworldindata.org.)

And since the 1970s, increases in the minimum wage have usually (with one exception) been associated with recessions.  As any economist worth anything will tell you, an increase in wages (ceteris paribus, of course) in recessionary conditions can only make the recession more protracted.  Sizable inflation-adjusted increases in the federal minimum wage happened in 1974, 1990-1991, 1996-97, and 2007-09.  Except for 1996-97, these increases happened at the peak of the business cycle - when the politicians have the most leeway for doing so - and recessions followed.

Now, this is not to imply that the minimum wage increases were the sole cause of the recessions (it didn't cause a recession in 1996-7, after all; and the main cause of the Great Recession starting in '08 was a financial crisis), but they almost certainly made it harder for the economy to recover from recession.  If you doubt this, ask whether the politicians would raise minimum wages during a recession or early in the expansion phase when unemployment is still high.  Is this the sort of thing we want to take a chance on, business-cycle-effects-wise?

(Not that anyone cares about, oh, freedom of contract in this context.  We're talking vulnerable exploitable workers and greedy predatory businesses, after all.  A superior moral compass dictates a govt role here, right?  [AOC, exemplar of altruist morality as Rand defines it, declares as an incontestable axiom that the right to things like a $15/hr wage takes precedence over the privilege of earning a profit(, Comrade).]  Meanwhile, the most vulnerable workers are indeed the most vulnerable in a recession when the greedy businesses are trying to stay afloat and deal with all the challenges and/or bullshit involved in running a business.)

Now, what is a good sign that we are currently at or near a peak point of the business cycle?  The treasury yield curve and/or spread between short and long term rates has historically been a very accurate predictor of recessions (the shaded areas):

An inverted yield curve is a situation where short term rates are higher than long term rates, and recessions have reliably followed such situations.  The yield curve at present is U-shaped (which I don't recall seeing before).

So is it any wonder that Democrats are licking their chops at raising the minimum wage in the current state of things?  Or maybe their intentions aren't wicked and they're just ignorant of the history and economic logic of these things.  It's hard to tell these days.

But one thing's for damn sure: The Dems who cry "racism!" so much that they've lost all credibility even were a legitimate example to arise, are promoting - in action - a policy with racially disparate effects, i.e., the very sort of thing they say is racist.  It goes hand in hand with an entire menu of destructive policies the Dems have inflicted upon the black community in the name of helping it.  No, the minimum wage doesn't make the targeted worker more productive or increase the worker's earning power.  It only makes it more difficult, at the margins, for the worker to be employable.

President Trump is already decrying the Federal Reserve's short-term interest rate policies, and he has data to back him up.  If the minimum wage hike somehow makes it to his desk (meaning the Republican-majority Senate would have to pass it), he has as much reason to veto it as he has to oppose an inverted yield curve.  But with this president, it's hard to know who he might pander to at a given time on a given issue.  His tariff policies can't be helping his reelection chances (just ask any economist how protectionism affects economic growth) even if they might yield a more favorable trade situation long-term.

(On a related note: commonly cited GDP growth numbers don't adjust for population growth.  Since population is growing about 1% per year, a 2% GDP growth rate means about 1% per-capita growth.  This means that a 3% GDP growth rate means a doubling of the per-capita growth rate over the 2% commonly-cited growth rate.  This means that the economy under Trump so far is growing at roughly twice the rate it was under his predecessor, although he's expanding the deficit to fuel this growth; this fiscal year - at a peak phase of the business cycle no less, when this isn't supposed to occur - the federal deficit is expected to reach 5% of GDP, more or less an unsustainable figure where nominal GDP is growing at any less than than 5%.  These would be points the Democrats might capitalize on effectively if they weren't so intellectually bankrupt and credibility-squandering.)

[Addendum: I take it that in addition to such wonderful ideas as open borders combined with a generous welfare state - is it that, and not an Aristotelian ethos (say), that is their conception of the end of history, and if so, how pathetic is that? - the Dems, were they in charge of what AOC termed "all three chambers [sic] of government - the House, the Senate, and the White House," would indeed push through a $15/hr minimum wage as signs of economic slowdown loom?  (Keep in mind, using the GDP math I just mentioned, that any GDP growth rate below about 1% means a contraction in per-capita terms, meaning pretty likely an increase in the unemployment rate, the #1 main-street indicator of recession.)  Would a president in the new Democrat mold be that fucking stupid when all is said and done?  Or is the $15/hr idea more of a virtue-signaling thing?  Do we really want to find out?  Given the laws of supply and demand, how would that $15/hr interact with that whole open borders plus generous welfare state idea?  What happens to the marginal productivity of labor if tons of laborers flood over the border?  If it turns out that they can't find work at the otherwise attractive $15/hr, do they go on the dole?  Then what?  Will the Dems find yet another way to cry racism and demand immediate agreement, and double down with more of the same policies?  Again, do we want to find out, given the nature of today's Democrat Party?]

Answer to Prof. Wolff on inequality

The loathsome leftist loser Leiter links to (Marxist/museum piece) Robert Paul Wolff critiquing what he takes to be standard lines of justification for income/wealth inequality used by defenders of capitalism.  I've addressed the essential point in this blog fairly recently using the example of Amazon/Bezos, but I elaborate on my argument further below.  First, Wolff:

In order to focus our attention and make the argument concrete, let me take as an example the Columbia University Sociology Department in which I shall again be teaching this fall.  There are upwards of forty members of the department, including many distinguished scholars, and a support staff of four.  Since Columbia, unlike UMass, is a private university, it is of course impossible to find out easily how much each of these folks makes [whereas at UMass this is public knowledge], but I think we can assume that there is a considerable pay gap between the senior professors and the departmental secretaries – maybe three hundred percent or more.  How can this be explained and justified?

The standard answer is that it takes both long preparation and really rare talent to be a Columbia Sociology Professor, and the big bucks are needed to get the right people into those jobs.  I freely grant that being a Columbia Sociology Professor requires long preparation and really rare talent.  But do you need to pay big salaries to get the best people into those jobs.  [Alert:  I am going to ignore the effect of competition among universities in all of this.  I trust it is obvious that that consideration can be bracketed for the purposes of this analysis.  If it isn’t obvious, sit and think about it for a bit before you rush to comment.]

Well, think about it.  Setting to one side the cost of job preparation and the foregone income [see above], suppose we ask Shamus Kahn [currently Department Chair] whether he would prefer to remain as a Professor of Sociology or take over the job of Winston Gordon III [one of the support staff.]  Leave aside being Department Chair, which Shamus, like any sensible academic, could do without [or so he told me.]  As a Professor, he would be expected to be on campus 32 weeks out of the year, two or three days a week.  He would be in class 4 or 5 hours a week, would hold office hours 2 hours a week, would prepare lectures, and [ugh] would grade papers once or twice a semester.  He would also be encouraged [but not required] to do any independent research he wished and every so often to publish the results.  Contrariwise, as a departmental staff member, he would be expected to be on campus 48 weeks a year, five days a week, seven hours a day.  He would answer the phone, file papers, respond to student inquiries, assist professors with secretarial tasks, run errands, and perhaps manage the finances of the department.

In order to explain why it is necessary to pay Shamus three or four time as much as Winston, we must assume that if Shamus were to be offered the same salary as Winston, he would respond, “If it is all the same, I would just as soon do Winston’s job.”  Since the excellence of the Columbia University enterprise really requires that Shamus agree to be a Professor, we may suppose that a negotiation would ensue, with Shamus offered more and more money until finally, he replies, “Weeell, all right, but only if every seventh year you give me six months off from the grind; call it a sabbatical.”

Seriously?  You can do the same thought experiment for a corporate manager and the man who cleans the toilets in the home office.  To get the right people into the right jobs, you need to test them and sort them and sift them.  But do you also have to pay the suits so much more than the shirts?

Now, if you're a leftist/anticapitalist with limited understanding of how (pro-)capitalists think - especially the most intellectually challenging/formidable capitalists - you might find this an impressive counter to the supposed defender of capitalism.  (The loathsome Leiter says it's "sensible commentary.")  Heck, one of the Marxists in Wolff's comments section links to this imbecilic strawman of Rand and capitalist thought at Existential Comics, "making Wolff's very serious, and not silly, point."  (In what cannot be but an irony, the main Achilles Heel of EC is its ignorant anticapitalism.  The same Marxist linking to EC's imbecilic strawman later complains about how Marx is widely, ignorantly caricatured.  Gee, it's like dialectic has broken down, or something.  On a completely unrelated note, why isn't Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle all the rage?  And when you do hear from leftists about philosophy you might hear quite a bit about Marx, and then some Hegel, maybe some Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze (& Guattari), Frankfurt School . . . but what about the greatest philosopher of all, Aristotle?  I mean, Marx is reacting to Hegel, who is reacting to Aristotle and developing Aristotelian-teleological themes which aren't exactly superseded by anything after Aristotle.  Here I was told the left is really woke and advanced?  And what about philosophy for children/everybody?  How did they manage to miss that one, pray tell?  Misplaced priorities, perhaps?)

Here's my reply to Wolff, reproduced from the comments section and with some links added:

Ultimate Philosopher said... 

I'm not following. I assume you're all familiar with Nozick's example of Wilt Chamberlain, and the $100K salary. Well, today, the top sports stars (think Mike Trout, Tom Brady, LeBron James) make upwards of $40M a year, an even greater cause of disparity compared to what, oh, say, the concessions workers make. 

Concessions workers are readily replaceable. Mike Trout could do concessions work, but there's comparative advantage. The concessions workers can't do what Trout does. 

True, if Trout were offered the same wage or salary as the concessions worker makes for playing baseball, his love of playing baseball would still lead him to prefer the baseball playing. 

Heck, we're talking about people who play a game for a living, and have fun much of the time doing it. Many of the concessions workers are stuck doing whatever their skill set qualifies them for, and they're likely not having much fun much of the time. They have to deal with lots of stupid and crappy customers, for example. They're perhaps acutely aware that they don't have the talents that the customers are coming to pay the most money to see. Etc. 

But Trout is commanding what the market will bear, enjoying a big surplus over what he *would* be willing to play baseball for. (And on top of that, there are performance metrics these days tied to the concept of "Value Above Replacement Player," and Trout is shooting up the career leaders list there at almost astonishing speed. And even a replacement-level player, ready to be knocked down to AAA, has talents that are in-demand enough to make several hundred thousand a year. [We can bracket for now baseball's antitrust exemption, particularly given that the customers prefer to watch as undiluted a talent pool on the field as is consistent with a few dozen big cities, but not many more, having teams.]) 

And so, I ask along with Nozick, where is the injustice exactly? Is commanding what the market will bear unjust, or lacking in justification? (Of course, you should all know Nozick's justification by now: it's what people choose to do with their holdings.) (There's also Robin Hanson's rather mangled attempt to apply leftist reasoning about justice to the market for sexual and/or romantic partners. Guess what: a lot of people are SOL there no matter what they do, while a select few can get "10" partners even if they *would* settle for 7s. [Hanson's "creepy" in-jest proposal to force the more fortunate to have sex/romance with the less fortunate can be toned down to something more like a system of tax incentives/disincentives, something much more to the liking of statists who insist on separating human rights from property rights.] The point being, life isn't fair, but you sure get a lot of selective outrage about that from anticapitalists who, to a lot of procapitalists, appear to be rationalizing envy. A retort along Rawlsian lines is that what is fair is not nature but how we as a society respond to such natural unfairness, e.g., to maximize as much as possible the opportunity set of the least advantaged. Nozick's rebuttal is something to the effect that what's fair is when I dispose of my life as I choose, i.e., that it isn't others' to dispose of [and that otherwise nice-sounding ideas about maximin should be left to people to implement voluntarily {for which a good place to start might be philosophy for children, for which see the SEP entry there}]. Oh wait, that's originally Hospers/Rand....) 

UP/CRC  

Does Bezos exploit Bezos?

Does Bezos exploit Bezos, according to Marxist exploitation theories and generally leftist notions about the relationship between labor and capital?  Does Bezos stand over and against Bezos in a condition of alienation?  Bezos has labored and labored and labored with his intellect, as CEO (this guy runs the company at the behest of the capitalist owners) to create a company approaching one trillion dollars in market value, and yet, what does he have to show for it?  Only about $120 billion of that.  Bezos owns, like, one-fifth of Amazon, a publicly-held company.  I guess in effect his one-fifth of the shares is the main form of compensation he takes from the capitalists.  But he's also one-fifth of the capitalist ownership here, so apparently capital (Bezos) is extracting an unjust share of the proceeds from labor (Bezos)?

If socialists and their ilk don't get this example right down to the economic foundations of value-added, they simply can't and won't characterize the nature of the capitalist system properly.  Or maybe they're just somehow a lot more clever than the defenders of capitalism?

[Addendum: Perhaps the exploitation is that it's all Bezos's creation, value-added-wise, and it's the owners of 4/5th of Amazon who have exploited him.  So we have Bezos being exploited to the tune of having a net worth of only $150B.  But certainly he didn't do all the creating himself, there were other minds involved that had to implement subordinate-level work and they create value-added in their own way, and what if the owners of 4/5th of Amazon stock are being compensated directly or indirectly for the labor, intellectual or otherwise, that they do?  But then when you carry out that analysis to the very end, isn't it more or less plausible to say that everyone does in the end get roughly the proportion of value-added they created in return.  Does this ever occur to socialists?  Could you tell based on the things they say?]

Do minorities do better under Democrats?

(I was doing a bit of reading up on Ta-Nehisi Coates and some Jason Riley - there's no real dialectic going on here on the Coates/"progressives" side of things, from what I can find - and ended up here, which led me to the materials below.)

The title here is also the title of a Slate article from 2014.  The article links to a study published by the American Political Science Association's journal, Perspectives on Politics.  The author rightly notes that there's a considerable amount of uncertainty involved given the way politics interacts with the economy.  But the study appears to show that minorities do indeed "do better under Democrats," based on which party is in the White House and shifting by a year or two into each administration to determine the "starting point" for when the administration's policies began to have major impact.  Visuals help me quite a bit, and they may help you, as well.




Some things I notice about this: A *lot* of percentage growth in black median family income occurs under "JFK/Johnson."  Now, one thing JFK did that present-day Democrats wouldn't do is cut income taxes from a top marginal rate of 91 percent to 70 percent.  (That would be a more than tripling of the after-tax return on marginal income.)  Just as the numbers boom, right around the same time, there was also passage of Civil Rights legislation (opposed by southern Democrats, as it happens).  Then, right around the time both these things were happening, the Moynihan Report (discussed at the Salon link above) pointed to what appeared to be disturbing trends in the black community as they relate to family structures.  Since that time the family structures among all demographics in America showed a trend toward more single-parent families.  This is believed by many social researchers to contribute to criminality and inter-generational poverty.  Combine this with policies supported on both sides of the aisle aimed at getting "tough on crime," including the failed Drug War with all its well-known disparate impacts on minorities.

(As far as toughness on crime goes, national murder rates peaked in the early '90s.  Prison populations have swelled since then; can that be interpreted as tough-on-crime policies working, or massively unjust criminal-justice policies that victimize the incarcerated even as crime rates fall?  How do we go about interpreting that sort of thing?)

So that's a lot to put into the mixer as we try to figure out which administrations had which effects at which periods of time.  The economic situation from roughly 1969 to roughly 1983 appeared to have especially ravaging effects on the economic well-being of black people.  During that period there were both Democratic and Republican administrations, while Democrats controlled Congress.  (Well, the GOP controlled the Senate for a short period of time in the '80s.)

During all that time, all over the country, Democrats have usually been running the big-city political machinery.  They've been more or less running the schooling system.  (I hesitate to call it an education system.  You have to qualify things and address complexities to separate the educational aspects from the non-educational ones.  You have to note the irony of a dialectically-impoverished 'democratic socialist' with a BA in Econ from Boston U. saying in the latest episode of '60 Minutes' that the USA pays more for healthcare and education than anyone else while seeing middling results.)  It is decidedly non-conservative cultural movements that legitimized promiscuous sex and single-parenting.

We could also think this thing through from the standpoint of economic-theoretical understanding (which helps to make sense of the data).  What is it about Democratic economic policies, as they contrast with Republican ones, which would leave one to believe that one is more likely to improve the situation of minorities than the other?  But we should also apply the standpoint of cultural-theoretical understanding: do the sorts of norms associated with Democrats (e.g., their supposedly superior but limited moral compass) tend to improve people's circumstances, economically or otherwise?

Social science is ripe for partisan exploitation.  So we'd better be careful in assessing the social-scientific evidence if we don't want to be one of those exploiters.  (And how exactly should social science inform our values, anyway?  Does it tell us whether individuals' lives are exclusively their own to dispose of, or can agents of the state or demos rightly dispose of them if 'social science tells them to'?)   How careful would you say today's partisans are?  Do you find the study to be as persuasive in its findings as the Slate author does?

[Addendum: More things to throw into the mix: (1) The Volcker Fed's monetary tightening which was the primary cause of the deep 1981-82 recession occurred during both Carter and Reagan administrations, making the negative numbers for either president's tenure in this case pretty irrelevant from a policy standpoint; monetary policy was the dominant factor here.  Things like the negative consequences of Carter- and Democrat-supported windfall profits taxes, causing long lines at gas stations for instance, didn't help matters.  Reagan's 1981 tax cuts did help matters considerably as much research has shown, starting with, say, Lindsey. (google it ffs)  (2) Among confounding effects to avoid as we seek to establish proper controls/variables: the more relevant number here would be economic improvement for blacks relative to whites under Democratic vs. Republican administrations, as that would tell you whether there are different impacts on otherwise comparable economic groups under different administrations.  Getting clear on "economic groups" would mean distinguishing between whites taken as a whole vs. blacks taken as a whole, and whites compared to economically-comparable blacks (this being relevant since blacks taken as a whole are less well off than whites, and so Democratic policies may be titled toward benefiting the poor relative to the rich, which might well be the real signal involved?  From (2) we get: (3) It makes better sense to view this from the perspective of Democrats posing as defenders of 'underdogs' and the downtrodden and so on, and they seem more concerned about doing more to correct what they see as a historical injustice that hasn't been corrected enough yet.  (If they want to take a look at the whole picture, the Dems should also take into account the possibility of their own policy and cultural failures in failing to advance the overall position of minorities in the last half century as much as they had hoped; the remaining shortcomings they attribute mainly and primarily to "vestigal white racism."  So instead of taking seriously Republican critiques of Democratic (and/or D.C. Establishment) policy and cultural failings, the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates pin the whole Trump phenomenon on race factors.)  From (2) and (3) we get (4) Even if Democratic economic-social-cultural policies and values do tend to benefit poorer and minority populations relative to the rich and whites, and therefore a move toward greater equality in economic outcomes, what about the absolute benefit for blacks and minorities?  Why, after such a big jump in median family income - note the metric involved here, median family income, the bourgeois-values social conservatives would point out - in the 1960s would there be such a (relative to before) stalling under the stewardship of plenty of both parties, etc.  (5) Another confounding factor is that the breakdown of family structures over the last half century that the social conservatives are always haranguing about has occurred among both minority and white populations, even though the Moynihan Report was reporting on a trend in the black community, before the Sexual Revolution really began to kick in.  So this breakdown of family structures problem didn't happen uniquely with blacks, although the rates of single parenting were and remain higher compared to whites.  (6) Anyway, the best thing the Dems and everyone else can do to really advance the condition of minorities and everyone else is to implement a philosophy for children program.  Surely all the Democrats running the schools with all their intellectual and moral resources/superiority are most capable of implementing such a no-brainer idea as soon as yesterday.  So why haven't they yet?]

Items for the Day

1. Why so aloof?

So, what have I been up to lately to occupy my time? In short: consulting various online information bases, e.g., wikipedia, reddit, rateyourmusic, acclaimedmusic, Scaruffi, Amazon, Oxford philosophy podcasts, Arts & Letters Daily, Greenwald, Sullivan, etc., really studying up on the world of Western classical music (next: rock, jazz and popular music), following lots of links, and vigorously applying the motto just below this blog's headline. (C'mon, whatever else you think of Rand, she's really right-on with this one.) How many of your "leading philosophers" out there today can lay claim to be doing all that? :-) (Next up: publishing the results of all this research ASARP.)

2. Mahler = the first supermusic?

That's the question that arose in my mind recently, since I absorbed his music more deeply and observed how it really seems to take music to the next level. That only prompted further curiosity about the rest of the world of classical music I had yet to "get," including especially Bach, Wagner, Bruckner, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich, or music I had been downgrading for not being robustly Romantic enough, e.g., Mozart. This also leads me further to question what I may have missed about the world of rock, jazz, and popular music. At the present time I have yet to find music that exceeds Mahler's in power and beauty, and there hardly seems any music since that matches it. From my experience the closest that comes to it in rock music, I believe, is work like Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer (emerging over time, as younger generations age, as the most acclaimed album of the rock era). I don't think it meets or exceeds Mahler, however, and my hope is that one day the younger music fans out there will see this, too (along with having a general education in philosophy / critical thinking).

3. Politics and the 2012 election

Unless either of the two major presidential candidates has the balls to address $46 trillion dollar fiscal elephant in the room that are the Medicare and Social Security trust funds, I may find it hard to get at all excited about this year's race. (We already know they won't touch things like long-term climate change and potential resource-depletion, issues a science-literate polity would be concerned about, with a ten-foot pole.) I've seen estimates go as high as $70 trillion.

[EDIT: Okay, so for those of you reading this in 3012, what does $46 trillion mean? Well, in 2012, the national debt is somewhere around $15 trillion, nearly the size of the U.S. economy (GDP). This figure is actually the "gross federal debt" figure which includes some $5 trillion or so which is owed by one part of government to another, namely, the money in the Social Security and Medicare "trust funds." The $15 trillion figure is what gets cited a lot in the media. It is widely considered a staggering sum perhaps never to be paid back, though we have a number of commentators telling to take into account the load of debt relative to GDP and put this in historical context. Alright then: At the end of World War II, the USA had a national debt of around 125% of GDP. What that dollar figure was in 1946 I have an admittedly vague idea, but it is somewhere around $100 billion. $100 billion in today's dollars would be less than one percent of GDP. That was money all owed to "the public," being that Social Security was in its infancy and Medicare had yet to be formed. Further, the USA at the end of World War II was in such a position relative to the rest of the world that the 25-year postwar boom was pretty much inevitable, and since that time real median living standards have only crept up slowly and are now almost stagnating, with an increasingly uneducated and undercapitalized populace, particularly relative to world standards. On top of that, now consider this: the $46 trillion dollar figure is a present value figure, that is, the estimated obligations to come due to these "trust funds" in the future comes to around 3 times our present GDP. Present value means the time-discounted value of a sum divided into equal payments over a period of time. We actually have to discount by two factors: the time discount (the rate of interest) and the inflation discount. In the case of the United States government, the assumed time period involved approaches "the infinite horizon," and over that same period the present value of expected accumulated future GDP comes out to somewhere around $1 quadrillion dollars. In other words, as things are on there present course, we are basically on the hook for about 4.6% of our nation's entire productive future to cover coming Social Security and Medicare obligations. This is in comparison to the approximately 1.5% of our nation's entire productive future committed to paying off the national debt. In non-discounted terms, this comes out to the hundreds of trillions, or perhaps more, some decades down the line - an amount that seems staggering to us now the way that $100 billion doesn't seem like so much to us now, the way it did in 1946. Anyway, bottom line: if we're going to be crippled by debt nearly equaling our current GDP, then what about the looming obligations presently valued at around 3 times our current GDP? Think what might happen if 1946 USA were on the hook for obligations coming due totaling around $400 billion in then-present value with an annual GDP of $80 billion? And without the ignorant and decadent citizenry that is the norm today?]

Anyway, in a well-educated educated citizenry, this $46 trillion would not go almost entirely ignored while nearly everyone can tell you who Ryan Seacrest is (but few could tell you who Immanuel Kant is, much less who Rawls, Nozick, or Chomsky are). And were it to be addressed more than nominally, you'd have one side, driven along by the Occupy Wall Streeters, blaming capitalism (not enough taxes) and another side blaming government (too many promises in face of domestic and global economic reality). I can see where the capitalism-blamers are coming from, and still think they've got some head in sand about some economic fundamentals, stuff that the likes of Krugman, Mankiw, Cowan or Caplan wouldn't buy into. As for who is to blame, it really all comes down to how ignorant and decadent the American public have gotten over the years; the consequent vices comes out in both private and public sectors. As to whether the GOP has dodged its political bullet by nominating Romney (the only GOP candidate besides John Huntsman minimally qualified to mount a serious challenge to President Obama), that certainly remains to be seen. The crazy is strong in the party (the birfer stuff still won't go away, for one thing, and its approach to science is now certifiably pathological), and never forget 2008: a "reasonable" candidate was nominated, and we still got a flaky, fundamentalist ignoramus proposed - with an actual straight face, mind you - as ready to have control of the red button. Now that's crazy. In fact, seeing what the party base might still have up its sleeve in the train-wreck department may be the only motivation for watching the whole electoral charade.

4. Is it just me... or was the internet just a lot smarter back in the days of Usenet? Try as one might, I don't think one could find the true equivalent to alt.philosophy in today's internet. (Anyone who remembers those days and uses reddit much for discussion knows that reddit's format simply doesn't cut it compared the Usenet's newsgroups.) Which begs the question: What happened?!

The Economic Left: Irrational Bigots?

[See here for context re: this blog entry's headline title.]

It's no secret that left-liberals fancy themselves more intellectual, more informed, more enlightened, etc. than the population at large. Just look at the makeup of university faculties, after all. The people who spend the most time thinking about things just have this inevitable tendency to lean "left." (The illustrious thinker, Robert Nozick, thinks through why this is, and comes up with a fine explanation: there are plenty of thinkers out there who are also doers, namely, business-creators. You'd be hard-pressed to find Marxists teaching at business schools or running Fortune 500 companies. That requires a kind of smarts and skill-set that Marxists and the rest of their left-wing academic ilk either don't possess or don't much approve of. [I take an example like George Soros to be roughly like a Glenn Greenwaldian "voice of conscience" with extreme financial smarts. An example like Warren Buffett, I don't think would really reflect the left-ward bent in the academic humanities. You'd have to look to the economics departments to get a much closer match.] Of course, to be fair, it does cut both ways; I don't much admire, say, Wall Street philistines who are conspicuously out of touch with the more plausible grievances of the "Occupy" movement, or - put more generally - those who've allowed their own circumstances to bias them and blind them to certain realities.)

I just bracketed-parenthetically mentioned the economics departments. There, you don't see much of a left-ward bent at all; it's a very pragmatic - which is to say, quite centrist - profession. Several Nobel Laureates come from the "right." Many economists are out in the business world. There's this old adage, "those who can't do, teach." According to that adage, the ones who don't go out into the business world, can't do. Teaching is a kind of doing, though, and the adage over-generalizes anyway; it's intended to be partly humorous. But there is a ring of truth to it as well, because it applies to at least some academics - and if employment out in "the real world" is any indication of this, the hard sciences have the greatest number of "doers," the social sciences presumably less so (with economics among the social sciences boldly standing out as the least left-wing), and the humanities presumably even less so. I don't know the percentages, but it just intuitively rings true and Nozick's explanation makes plenty of sense.

This is all preface to the following observation: left-wing teachings when it comes to economic matters tend to be toxic. There's quite a lot of it that not even "mainstream liberals" in the economics profession would endorse. But certain memes get out there among left-wing thinkers and the connection between these memes and (a responsible reading of) the facts is tenuous. Now, take your typical liberal college student, place him or her in a large online social gathering to partake in meme-spreading, and what do you get? The reddit.com politics site. (I count this site as among my daily reads among several others, including the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.) This site is particularly a breeding-ground for "Occupy"-movement memes. The thing with the "Occupy" movement is there are some worthwhile or semi-worthwhile memes all mixed-up with some really toxic ones. I'd like to focus on a very toxic meme in particular, one based on shady numbers, having to do with wealth and income inequality.

The very Marx-inspired narrative feeding this toxic meme is one of continuous impoverishment and immiseration of "the working classes" and, seemingly, of ever-widening inequality, absent the democratically-controlled state stepping in to correct the problem. "Democracy before capitalism" is the basic political ethic going on here. Democracy, properly practiced, will work in the best interests of the People, while capitalism tends to devolve into plutocracy.

We've been bitten once already by Marx's prediction of the collapse of capitalism. (How many times do we need to be bitten before we figure out the real problem here?) Needing some theoretical modifications and looking for some semblance of intellectual leadership, the left these days has latched onto (most prominently) Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky is brilliant and authoritative on many things, and serves as a voice of conscience in the face of American wrong-doings and double-standards, that doesn't mean he's got his economic narrative correct. But he's a darling of the left in any event, and his pronouncements are treated accordingly. Taking his lead, the Economic Left - and its representative end-result on the politics reddit - filters and interprets economic data to fit its narrative-worldview.

Now, to throw a wrench into that whole inequality/immiseration narrative.

(I mean, shouldn't they have known better? Shouldn't they have seen this coming? Shouldn't they have been more objective and fact-oriented?)

Here it is:

(Clickable link in the image. To play the academic-credentialism game: the article is written by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Department of Economics, MIT, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics, Columbia University.)

The really "weird" (read: "counter-intuitive," with special emphasis on the scare qoutes) part about this is that world-scale inequality has fallen as globalization has expanded, and this fall has accelerated after 1990, i.e., after the fall of Communism and after NAFTA and GATT.

Now, why aren't international data on inequality in wealth and income ever cited by the Occupy crowd and their academic enablers? Is it because they're unaware of it? Is it because they've ignored it? Do they consider it irrelevant? Do they consider the data flawed? What might account for the Economic Left's failure to address the most comprehensive and global data set available?

The favorite data of the Economic Left concern wealth and inequality here in the United States, which by all indications is increasing. There seems at least to be an awareness that globalization has something to do with it: many lower-skilled and manufacturing jobs have gone oversees. There's also the effects of illegal immigration taking American jerbs, though that's more of a right-wing meme. While the rich Americans retain residence here, their capital goes more and more abroad, they get the returns from that while the middle-class and poor do not, hence the widening income and wealth gap among Americans.

Left out of the intra-American discussions about the growing wealth and income gap is the effect of globalization on global wealth and income inequalities. It's probably of little consolation to Americans that their now-outsourced jobs improve the quality of lives of foreign workers, but it is nonetheless a fact that needs to be taken into account if we're to build a narrative, correct? If the narrative is "widening inequality in wealth and income," then you'd need to have the data to back that up, right? Some philosopher-level amount of intellectual curiosity should lead people to seek out and consider global data and not just data about Americans, yes?

From the way Chomsky and the reddit-hive-mind tell it, the multinational corporations, seeking Profit over People, ship the jobs oversees where people are exploitatively paid 15 cents an hour, pretty much a deadweight loss for all concerned except for the Evil Corporations/Stockholders. From the way they tell it, you'd expect inequality and immiseration on the world scale to be exacerbated by these turns of events. I mean, isn't that what capitalism without democratic intervention, is all about? That is, after all, the very narrative they push about the American historical experience prior to the New Deal. (Presumably, so the narrative goes, it's what's supposed to happen in any industrially-developing nation.) I strongly suspect we've already been bitten there, too.

The reality of the matter is that while many Americans have it tough and things might well get even worse in the future for them, a global-scale perspective will shed light on the reality of the matter: there are some billions of people around the world who are dirt poor, by American standards, willing to work for improved wages but still dirt cheap, by American standards. If enlightened cosmopolitanism and altruism are supposed to be our motives, we should be welcoming these developments. There seems to be something quite toxic here at work, though: a rejection of economic reality, a rejection driven by fear, envy, prejudice, what have you. Much the same as what happens on the Right when it comes to the Right's pet anti-reality issues.

That being said, there is something to the "Occupy" narrative that all pro-reality people should acknowledge: our government is bought by moneyed interests, and is corrupted accordingly. The People have a large part in letting this happen by electing unenlightened and cynical representatives. So, e.g., while budgetary reality says that deficit reduction will require (in part) raising taxes on the only people who have the money these days, the political reality is the insanity that this isn't even on the table at present (due to the Republicans, who have their own anti-reality narratives on fiscal matters. I.e., supply-side tax cuts make a lot more fiscal and economic sense when marginal tax rates are 70% than when they're in the 30s; and the deceptive "only 50 percent of the people pay taxes" meme should have been dead long ago).

A pox on both of their houses.

[ADDENDUM: A case in point of shady numbers, even applied to the "global" scale. ("On Monday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a massive 400-page report surveying the state of inequality around the world. The report, United We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising reaffirms that inequality is now rising not just in the United States, but globally." Bold emphasis mine.) The study in this case involves the 34 OECD member countries - which doesn't include China or India (which make up more than a third of the world population) much less more than a hundred other nations. How exactly is that "global"?]

America: A Dumbed-Down Plutocracy?

The Left and the Right are all about constructing narratives targeted toward certain segments of the population. The Left tend to be more self-aware about this; after all, that's where I get the phrase "constructing narratives." The Right usually aren't that bright. Their constructed narrative, after all, is that American Decline is attributable to increasing secularism - "turning away from God." Now, that's a really stupid narrative-construction right there. I'm not sure it's more stupid, though, than the Left's constructed narrative - in effect, that American Decline is attributable to a dumbing-down to serve the interests of a corporatist oligarchy-plutocracy.

The Left's narratives are a holdover from another religious viewpoint - Marxism. It's about as anti-reality an ideological narrative as whatever spews forth from the Right. Anyone with anything resembling a sound understanding of economics is quite familiar with the ideas of Mises and Hayek on the benefits of the private property, i.e., capitalistic order, while the Marxian-inspired ideas are against the Mises-Hayek understanding of things. So if you apply the neo-Marxian analyses to the current state of America - with its demonstrably-ill-informed public and corporate ownership of politics - you end up with the theory that this is an outcome of the capitalistic order. More wealth accumulates in fewer hands, which in turn fuels more pro-wealthy policies at the expense of the populace, who are further dumbed-down in the process, etc. This stuff is very cliche' and could fit right on a napkin just like the Laffer Curve (which is a truism, actually, while Marxism in its various guises is pure shit).

The basic reason we have what we have in America today is that people are often very pragmatic: they go with what they think is the best available to them, all things considered. The current set-up we have now, is what we have because that's what the American people have chosen. They do realize in a pretty clear-cut way that the current state of things is pretty lousy; they have a commonsense "instinct" that the politicians are totally cynical and aren't squaring with them; they have a commonsense understanding that their government has done things in their name that are not too admirable; they have a commonsense perception that they are indeed ill-informed but what can they really do about it? What better alternatives are there, anyway? In a country with a mixed culture - a product, fundamentally, of mixed premises - the best results you can expect will be mixed.

If, however, Americans were shown a viable alternative that's clearly better than the status quo, then there's hope for this country after all. They just haven't been shown the better alternative yet. That better alternative does not, however, come enmeshed in left-wing narratives about a dumbed-down plutocracy that needs to "go Euro" to save itself. Rather, it comes enmeshed in a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels. That means not fucking up a commonsense understanding of what capitalism, i.e., the private property order, is all about. It means abandoning the various retarded (usually Marx-inspired) notions that capitalism is, in effect, zero-sum and exploitative. It means actually embracing the capitalist ethos, while recognizing what it takes, intellectually, on the whole, to do so - again, a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels, which entails enhanced cognitive (and therefore economic) efficiency. Americans do want to think critically; they have the intimation that doing so would greatly enhance their flourishing; they just need a guidebook of some sorts that they haven't yet gotten....

(Next on my radar: the Right's obvious narrative failures - fundamentally, a disrespect for the intellect and reason, purportedly in the name of spiritual enrichment.)