CapitalistImperialistPig

The great thing about reviewing a biography is that you get your chance to take your shots not only at the biography but the subject as well. Adam Kirsch makes good use of the latter opportunity in his New York Times review of Anne Heller's new biography of Ayn Rand. Like Heller (and unlike YHC) he is no mad dog Rand hater. He starts with a few notes about her continuing appeal to a certain strain of conservatives: A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.” “Atla...

There are said to be two paths to knowledge: the specialist and the generalist. The specialist learns more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. The generalist learns less about more, on his way to the end state of knowing nothing about everything. Either way, I seem to be getting pretty close. What I know seems to be about less and less, and what I don't know seems to be about more and more.

It says something about my education that one of the most influential (at least in America) philosophers of the twentieth century was somebody I never heard of. Alisa Rosenbaum was a Russian Jewish emigre who came to America, became a successful screenwriter and novelist, and eventually the favorite philosopher of the right wing nutbaggery. She is in the news a bit these days because Anne C. Heller has written a new biography and is flogging it on some of the better book venues. Except for a short excerpt or two, I haven't read any of her stuff, but that little was enough to provoke a visceral dislike. She wrote novels of ideas, which is to say novels where characters give long ideological lectures. Perhaps the most famous is here . The frank worship of Mammon has made her popular with the greedy ever since, despite some flaws of logical coherence and disdain for history. By positioning herself in direct opposition to 1 Timothy 6:9-10 - choosing the role of anti-Christ in the mo...

You are considering hiring an employee. She (or he) is honest, conscientious, and has demonstrated the ability to do the work. Is there anything else you really ought to know before hiring her? Well yes, say eighty years of employment studies, or so this source claims. The upshot of this research is that general mental ability (IQ and related tests) was the best predictor and work sample tests (e.g., seeing if people can actually do key elements of a job -- if a secretary can type or a programmer can write code ) were the second best of the 19 examined. Here is the rank order of the 19 predictors examined: 1. GMA tests ("General mental ability") 2. Work sample tests 3. Integrity tests: surveys design to assess honesty ... I don't like them but they do appear to work. 4. Conscientiousness tests: essentially do people follow-through on their promises, do what they say, and work doggedly and reliably to finish their work. Not, I'm sure, what the anti-IQ people want t...

The Battle of Agincourt gets a double dollop of fame for serving as the climax of Shakespeare's Henry V as well as a pivotal moment in military history where the English longbow bested French Chivalry (and steel armor). James Glanz, writing in the New York Times , notes that historians are suggesting that it's just possible that Hal, and Will, might have exaggerated the odds that Hal and his "Band of Brothers" faced on that day. No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt. But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and...

Dubner and Levitt have followed up their best selling Freakanomics with a new book extending their shtick. They call it Superfreakanomics , probably because How to lie with statistics, part II wouldn't sell as well. Others have well-documented their systematic dishonesty on the climate question, but let me just comment on Dubner's recent gig on CNN. One of the subtitles refers to Patriotic Prostitutes, their cutsey way of proclaiming that the Fourth of July is a good day for the sex trade. This was a lead in to a discussion of their claim that street prostitute today earn about four times as much as they would in more conventional occupations, but 100 years ago, they earned ten times as much. Dubner attributed this change to the sexual revolution, claiming that the difference was due to greater availability of free sex. This may not be entirely wrong, and it might even be right, but their facile assumption is typical of the shallow nature of their reasoning. For one thi...

Senator Lamar Alexander, former President of the U of Tennesee (and US presidential candidate), thinks higher education ought to be completed in three years. His big arguments for this are that education is expensive and a three year degree is somehow the analogous to the hybrid automobile. Or at least that's how I understood his Newsweek essay . It's hard for me to see that four years is too long for a college education. Pretty clearly though, there are vast differences in what one is expected to learn for, say, an EE degree from Caltech and a basket weaving degree from Nowhere City College. It is clear that there are some serious diseases in US college education, notably the rapid run up in cost. I have never seen a convincing reason for the rate of inflation of college costs. My guess is that we do give students too many choices. I would favor programs with less choice and more rigor for most students. Other education officials writing in the same issue suggest that we...

I have decided to eliminate the ratings stars, but I don't know how. Has anybody dealt with this problem? The ratings seem to be used only by people who hate everything I write. I don't mind that, but if they don't explain themselves their feedback is merely useless and annoying. UPDATE: Never Mind.

While surfing some sourpuss film critic's HP 6 blog, I found this in the comments: If you're over the age of 20 and dig HP without an accompanying child, you're engaging in aesthetic regression. My first thought was to wonder whether aesthetic regression is linear or not. Later I wondered whether such an engagement might be illegal or immoral. I guess the author's point is supposed to be that an aesthetic regressor is enjoying things as a child might, and that he intended the comment as a slam. Stephen Jay Gould used to emphasize the role of neoteny - retaining childlike characteristics beyond normal childhood - in evolution, and especially in human evolution. It seems plausible that art and science are each consequences of human neoteny. Einstein attributed his revolutionary insights into relativity to the fact that he, as an adult, was still sorting out basic notions of space and time that most people dispensed with in early childhood. The artist story teller is agai...

The great challenge in explaining the origin of life is the chicken vs. egg problem. The most primitive life we know of is utterly dependent on a complex web of chemical reactions that depends on accurate transcription of detailed blueprints for the construction of the molecules that make metabolism possible. All known life requires a cell membrane, an elaborate set of metabolic pathways guided by carefully tailored enzymes, DNA blueprints that preserve genetic information, and complex ribosomal factories for manufacturing the proteins specified by the blueprints. It's very difficult to imagine how such a complex, interdependent mechanism could have evolved by selection, since it's very difficult to imagine intermediate states that function well enough to support the degree of faithful reproduction required for evolution. Nick Lane, writing in New Scientist , explains a new idea that bridges some of the difficult steps required for development of living cells. My summary can...

The Truth? You can't handle the truth!........ A Few Good Men The Nicholson quote is a theme of every big Dan Brown novel. There is always some set of events which must be concealed from the credulous masses. The Lost Symbol is no exception, only this time that which must be hidden is so banal that I can hardly guess who would care. The other invariable theme is the existence of some sensational but long hidden mystical knowledge, which the hero must unravel by virtue of his decoding skills. These themes served Brown pretty well in The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons , but here they are starting to look a bit threadbare. Brown's novelistic virtues are easily summarized: he knows how to create page turning suspense, his ultrashort chapters package the suspense into bite size tidbits, and finally, the richly detailed architectural research that underlies each book gives them a vividness beyond their otherwise modest virtues. His faults are plenty obvious too: weak and w...

Conquest is hardly a new theme in human affairs. One of the most dramatic events of prehistory was the vast expansion of the Indo-Europeans, whoever they may have been. Their linguistic and cultural conquest seems to have extended to nearly all of Europe and vast chunks of Asia. In most cases that conquest does not seem to have annihilated the conquered peoples, so some sort of colonization must have occurred, with the conquerers dominating culture and language but being gradually absorbed into the local gene pool. Similar events seem to have occurred with subsequent historical empires like those of Alexander, Rome, and Mohammed. Such episodes of conquest seem more likely to originate on the fringes of the highest civilizations rather than the center: from Macedonia and Rome, not Greece and from Arabia and Mongolia rather than from Constantinople or China. The overseas European empires that arose in the 15th century are not too alien to the pattern. The dominant seapower at the da...

Another Q&A borrowed from Marginal Revolution (plus the first sentence of Tyler's reply) Joanne asks a good question: Everything else being equal, are there subjects that lend itself to better teaching by professors? I've always chosen classes mostly on professor teaching quality as measured by anonymous student surveys, but was wondering if there are certain classes of subjects where one could find better or worse teachers? This may sound odd, coming from someone with a Ph.d, but I don't feel I have much experience being a student. Whatever your answer, it probably isn't math or physics. The one useful thing teachers in those subjects can do is show you how to work problems, but books probably do a better job than lecturers even at that. I did have some excellent teachers for acting, literature, and philosophy though. Anybody?

It seems likely that the next priority after healthcare will be a jobs bill. One element will doubtless be a subsidy to employers who hire. What about a direct jobs program though - something like the WPA? I think that would be a good idea, but what work should the employed be put to? I would favor some sort of work-study plan where those employed would be obliged to upgrade their work skills as well as labor, but that doesn't answer the question. A few possibilities: (1)General cleanup and maintenance of public and other facilities. (2)Tutoring when the tutors are qualified. (3)Activities in support of public safety. Clearly, some better ideas are needed. Any suggestions?

From deep in the heart of libertarian economics comes this question for Tyler Cowen, and his answer: Jason asks: What are some examples of successful government bureaucracies? Wars aside, here is a short and very incomplete list: the NIH, the Manhattan Project, U.C. Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Fairfax County, the World Trade Organization, the urban planners of postwar Germany, some of the Victorian public works and public health commissions, most of what goes on in Singapore, anywhere that J.S. Bach worked. The European Union has been very good for eastern Europe. I'll leave aside the health care issue because we've debated that plenty already. The real question is what all these examples have in common. I don't think this is such a hard question, and I don't think the answers are specific to government bureaucracies. Here again is a place where Tolstoy's Anna Karenina principle applies. ("Every happy family is the same. Every unhappy family is u...

I'm from Montana, and I live in New Mexico, so I thought I knew something about empty. Far West Texas still had a lesson or two for me though. My wife and I drove over to Carlsbad on business but stayed to see the caverns again, and then decided to drive down 285 to Big Bend, which we had never seen. It's a bit like rolling yourself down some hundred mile long bowling lanes - start out pointing the right way and you can go a lo-on-ng way before you need to correct your steering. There are big stretches in Montana with no people, of course, but most areas have some relief - mountains, hills, forests, lakes and rivers. That part of Texas - not so much. That all changes as you approach Big Bend though, with real mountains, limestone arroyos that are really canyons, and a real canyon for the Rio Grande. In my town, the big river has been thoroughly domesticated by dams and is often reduced to a muddy trickle, but while we were there, it was a real river, small but swift through the...

I will be off the grid for a few days. Feel free to post your brilliant or crackpot theories of the universe in the comments thread while I'm away.

I have never noticed that Tyler Cowen is overflowing with compassion for his fellow man, but it seems that his heart does bleed - for the insurance companies. There is talk of repealing the antitrust exemption enjoyed by the insurance industry. Whether the exemption is a good idea or not, I do not know. The relevant event is that the insurance industry seems to have turned against Obama's health care reform. Everyone who cares about American democracy and rule of law should be complaining about Harry Reid, Patrick Leahy and their allies in this move. So far I don't hear the outcry. Because making insurance companies follow the same laws as most other companies is surely an outrage to rule of law and especially, democracy. Welcome to the space cadets, Tyler. Your helmet is in the starboard garbage chute airlock.

One of the challenges of being a colonial power is that of keeping your local agents in line. Many of our difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq arose from trying to simultaneously indulge the colonial ambitions of the neocons and Bush's conceit that he was a liberator. We once had a legitimate mission in Afghanistan: capturing Osama bin Laden and his principal lieutenants. Once Bush let him escape, that mission was over. In Karzai, we seem to have a de facto agent that we can neither remove nor control. Kevin Drum catches Tom Friedman saying something sensible about Afghanistan. If President Obama can find a way to balance the precise number of troops that will stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, without tipping America into a Vietnam there, then he indeed deserves a Nobel Prize — for physics... Because when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. If that government is rotten, your whole enterpr...

Gideon Rachman frets that Obama may be looking like a pushover. The notion that Mr Obama is a weak leader is now spreading in ways that are dangerous to his presidency. The fact that he won the Nobel Peace Prize last Friday will not change this impression. Peace is all very well. But Mr Obama now needs to pick a fight in public – and win it with a clean knock-out. In truth, the Norwegians did the US president no favours by giving him the peace prize after less than a year in office. The award will only embellish a portrait of the president that has been painted in ever more vivid colours by his political enemies. The right argues that Mr Obama is a man who has been wildly applauded and promoted for not doing terribly much. Now the Nobel committee seems to be making their point for them. The rightwing assault on the president is based around a number of slogans that are hammered home with damaging frequency: Obama the false Messiah; Obama, the president who apologises for America; Obama...

It seems that Lumo was a cute kid . Happy Birthday!

Suppose you have an original theory of how the world works. Consider the following. Do physicists tend to find excuses to go visit their mothers-in-law when you show up? Do you find yourself banned from a lot of physics comment threads? Does your brilliance tend to go widely unrecognized? If you have considered the conventional explanations for this kind of shunning and they don't cut it, it's possible that you might be a crank. My version of crankology depends on two simple tests. Have you learned the tools of the usual physics, as demonstrated by being able to work, say, the problems in Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics ? Can you describe a quantitative test that reveals the difference between your theory and conventional physics? If your theory of the world fails one or especially both of those criteria, you are probably a crank, and may I just suggest that you try another line of endeavor? Physics already has its share of such prosetelyzers. Perhaps you would...

The headline at the TimesOnLine: Barack Obama ready to pay Afghan fighters to ditch the Taliban . As I have said previously , this is a no brainer, though apparently it only occurs to those of us with brains. Of course there is a moral hazard argument, but I don't find it persuasive.

Obama has to feel a bit like the boy who lived. Celebrated for a deed he can't remember and despised just for living by the Draco Malfoys of the world. Despite the challenges of living with the acclaim, he managed to be as gracious in acceptance as his scorned foes were petty and petulant.

We are spending ten or hundreds of billions of dollars every year to occupy a country with a gdp of $12 billion, a country whose insurgency is fueled largely by the absence of jobs or other ways to make a living. Why not just hire every Afghan who wants a job and put them to work building schools, building roads, defending their towns against the Taliban, etc? It's got to be cheaper than our present strategy, and far fewer American soldiers need to be put at risk.

If you were going back and forth on whether Michael Moore might have socialist leanings, Capitalism, a Love Story ought dispel any doubts. It's a pretty forthright call for a democratic revolution. That's not the subject or real business of the movie, though. Rather, he is mainly exercised by some blatant abuses of crony capitalism that extend back at least to Reagan. There is no shortage of outrages to point out: the private juvenile jail in Wilkes Barre Pa that bribed judges to sentence young teens to long incarceration for trivial or non existent offenses (in one case, for posting insulting remarks about a vice principal), the so-called "dead peasant" policies that many corporations take out on their employees, causing the employees to be worth more to them dead than alive, the bribes to Senators and Representatives, and, most centrally, the systematic scamming of homeowners by the mortgage game. As usual, Moore has a repertoire of childish but amusing stunts. One...

President Obama must feel a bit like the high school student who turns in his chemistry mid-term only to be told that it's so good that he has been awarded a full scholarship to Harvard. I doubt that he can be very gratified to get the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George Bush. He must be tempted to refuse it and say "consider me again when I've done something." It's not too unusual for the Peace prize to be given as a wish and a prayer rather than for accomplishment, but in Obama's case I fear that it will be more a nuisance than a help. Not to minimize the importance of not being George Bush. UPDATE: See Arun's Musings for some interesting details and not too dissimilar reflections. I scratch my head in puzzlement - what for? It can only be for potential and not actual achievement. It is a highly political award, perhaps meant to make Americans realize how scary the previous administration was to the whole world.

Discover has an interview with Roger Penrose, and the Lumonator takes strong exception to what Penrose has to say - unsurprisingly, since Penrose himself calls his opinions "sacriligious" in physics. Lumo's religious zeal is aroused mainly by Penrose daring to doubt the conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, though he subscribes to a few other outrages as well. Lubos doesn't ascribe his outrage to religion, but he can't (or won't) articulate it either, more or less mumbling "stupid, stupid, stupid." Penrose's qualms put him in the same boat with such other stupid physicists as Einstein, Planck, Schroedinger, J S Bell, and 't hooft. Even Feynman allowed that "quantum mechanics is not only stranger than you imagine, its stranger than you can imagine." Feynman was no doubter though, or at least he didn't express any public doubt. He seems to have believed that the strangeness was just part of the deal you had to a...

Ryan Lizza has a long profile of Larry Summers , chief of Obama's Council of Economic Advisors, in the New Yorker. His combination of broad experience in government, combined with solid economics credentials and a famously quick mind makes him the most influential force on Obama's economics team, but it's not a team of shrinking violets or yes men (or women). It's a friendly portrait. Even the blunders Summers made are portrayed in a relatively favorable light, and I found him impossible not to like. The most famous of these blunders, the occasion where he told a meeting a feminist scholars that they shouldn't reject the hypothesis that women might be less successful in science and math because of inferior talent, is hardly an expression of prejudice. Rather, it's a statement that all reasonable hypotheses should be evaluated. It was, of course, the wrong thing to say to the wrong group of people, and was ultimately a significant factor in his being forced out o...

Few aspects of economics are as interesting to the public as the frequent fluctuations of the economy, especially recessions, panics, and depressions. Unfortunately, then, we find that economists are utterly divided as to the causes of such cycles and as to what, if anything, can or should be done about them. A theory popular with those of the freshwater persuasion is the so-called Real Business Cycle theory , or RBC. One basic aspect of RBC is that it seeks explanation of the business cycle in so-called exogenous factors, sometimes called technology shocks: bad weather, new inventions, environmental regulations. In particular it rejects the so-called endogenous causes postulated by Keynesian and monetarist economists. Most fundamental, though, is the idea that the markets response to the exogenous factors is optimal in that it maximizes utility. Keynesians and monetarists, by contrast, see recession and depressions as market failures. Consequently, any interventions, either monetary o...

My masochistic tendencies kicked in enough this morning to get me to tune into a bit of the Sunday talking heads. Or what we used to call the talking heads. Now, they are more like talking backs, as the camera focusses on the host while we are left looking at the backs of the members of the round table panel discussion. The view we get is that of a waiter standing attendance on a table of diners. This might bother me less if they spent more time talking about interesting things. They did venture briefly into the question of jobs and the stimulus, and E J Dionne even had some relatively intelligent things to say about it, pointing out that the Snowe, Collins, Specter trick of getting aid to the States taken out of the stimulus bill had significantly weakened it.

Those whose memories can reach back to January may recall that Paul Krugman and other economists predicted at the time that Obama's stimulus package was too small, and even it was further shrunk to attract three lousy GOP votes: Collins, Snowe, and that PA guy who switched parties [Arlen Specter]. The latest economic news seems to be proving them right, with the consequences Krugman predicted: And that gets us to politics. This really does look like a plan that falls well short of what advocates of strong stimulus were hoping for — and it seems as if that was done in order to win Republican votes. Yet even if the plan gets the hoped-for 80 votes in the Senate, which seems doubtful, responsibility for the plan’s perceived failure, if it’s spun that way, will be placed on Democrats. I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things ar...

Today is the 140th birthday of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi , probably the most influential moral leader of the twentieth century. Despite the progress he inspired, I imagine that he would be quite disappointed to see how far the world still has to go.

It's unsurprising that the right wingers were cheering against America in the bid for the Olympics. Unsurprising but still contemptible.

Steve McIntyre ventures once again into hockey sticks and thinks he finds something amiss. The usual suspects jump up and down in in their cages and throw some shit around. Real Climate (aka Gavin Schmitt?) responds but the Pig remains puzzled by significant obscurities in each's utterances. (Steve's and Gavin's that is). So here is the the Pig's attempt to decipher all. Tree ring temperature reconstructions always seemed like a black art to me, but so far as I can tell, it goes a bit like this. To start with, you have a collection of old living trees and trunks from fossil trees. It most places, the living trees are at most a few hundred years old, so to get information about earlier times you need to add fossil trees, and they need to be matched up in a continuous sequence up to the present. To present a simplified example, you might have a fossil tree that lived from 1200 to 1500, another that lived from 1400 to 1750, and a living tree that sprouted in 1675. Becau...