"An alternative explanation is the one I’ve explored in my writings on the disappearance of human labor from production.... My analysis of the political economy... is that we are experiencing a slow transition from a capitalist order in which accumulation is based on the exploitation of labor, into a “rentist” order based on rents accruing to land or intellectual property. Such a society is not, in my view, functionally compatible with the ideals of broadly-distributed critical thinking or practical work skills.
"In a rentist order, an increasing percentage of the population becomes superfluous as labor—but they are still necessary as consumers. For reasons of ideological legitimacy and political control, the fiction that everyone must “work” is maintained, but work itself must increasingly be pointless make-work. What kind of populace is suited to this habit of passive consumption and workday drudgery? One that accepts nonsensical and arbitrary rules—whether they are the rules of endless work or endless consumption. Students who learn to answer the questions the testing bureaucracy wants answered, irrespective of their relationship to scientific knowledge or logic, will be well trained to live in this world."

Comment: This line of argument seems to me much better suited as a rhetorical attack on these (truly stupid and awful) educational practices than serious social analysis. It's a way of saying "You think you want X? Let me tell you what X is good for, let me tell you what you'll get along with X, and you see if you really want it." Bertrand Russell used to argue like this all the time, but he didn't really believe that (e.g.) opponents of sex ed. truly wanted more syphilis. Similarly, I don't think that fools do things like this to schoolchildren because it makes them more suitable for the rentist society of the future; I think it is even more pointless and accidental than that.

" But it’s not a philosophical dispute. It’s a simple case of her making up false claims based on extremely elementary errors.
And this is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery. "

"To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy: A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report: 'The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.'
"When he publishes his report, somebody points out: "You know, there was a hurricane here last week." The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, "I'm writing about housing, not weather." "

---All parts of Frum's review are worth reading.

"Hate Whitey Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have all the pressure to be perfect, like Christmas, or everybody getting along, like Thanksgiving. Just white people cowering in their houses/retreating to their heavily armed compounds in rural Oklahoma while America’s non-white population runs riot, more or less totally burning shit down. And the clean-up and re-building costs always add a bump to the January jobs report, as Matthew Yglesias has noted."

Actually, I suspect that Ferguson knows _all too well_ what "western civilization" has historically meant...

We've come to a pretty pass when one of our best economic historians can write about the idiocy of the gold standard, and it counts as a _public service_.

"I just got a form-letter blog pitch from a PR agency congratulating me on my “bludgeoning career“.
I’m going to assume they meant “burgeoning”.  I’m also going to assume they sent this form letter out to hundreds of other bloggers.  Which is kind of hysterical....
My reply:  That’s very kind of you, but honestly I haven’t bludgeoned anyone publicly in years.  And I was certainly never so adept at it that I would have considered it “a career”.  I do appreciate the recognition though.
Surprisingly, there has been no response from the PR agency."

Nooo!! See comments for a link to a petition agains this petty idiocy.

F. A. von Hayek as a "useful idiot".

I remember realizing about 15 years ago just how easy it would be to set myself up as a prophet of this kind, and having to consciously resist the temptation. (It's not exactly a job with high barriers to entry.)  On my bad days, I sometimes wonder if I didn't make the wrong choice.

"Knowing that the market is good, their task is to figure out why a good market has decreed that employment in America needs to fall by 8 million relative to trend. (It's not unlike grappling with a just and all-powerful God who doesn't mind a tsunami every so often.)

The workers-have-no-productive-skills explanation is the only one that makes sense, if we first start from the premise that the market is all-good. Never mind that we have a lot of evidence that the market is not good — that we have been periodically suffering from these finance-driven grand mal seizures of the body economic that we call the industrial business cycle for 185 years.

Nevertheless, you can shut your eyes — and economists are very good at doing so. It was Joseph Schumpeter, one of the smartest economists of three generations ago, who began a lecture with: "Gentlemen! A depression is a healthy shock! It is like an ice-cold douche!""

Why am I not surprised?

"But McArdle, I think, doesn’t really care if she’s wrong or risible. Her real goal is to advance the notion that government action informed by reason and empirical knowledge is impossible. So here she just says that you can’t trust the analytical models — and even if they do turn up evidence of economic improvement, they don’t matter: who are you going to believe, me or your lying pocketbook? ... This isn’t about the stimulus, in other words, or appropriate tax policy. It’s about the impossiblity of governance. .., the key fact to remember is that McArdle’s lapses of reasoning and fact are features, not bugs. Remember the mission as declared by her home institution: “TheAtlantic – shaping the national debate on the most critical issues ....” McArdle is indeed trying to shape the debate, to constrain what might be possible in the exercise of government power. Mere logic, paltry fact may not be permitted to get in the way. She is Always Wrong™ — by design."

"Obviously, this data I’ve cited is perhaps open to some criticisms or alternate interpretations. But Flanagan doesn’t dispute it, doesn’t cite alternate data, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of discussing social trends in terms of evidence rather than assertion."

In which MY is correct: "Whenever I bring this up, people quickly rush to assure me that Goldwater didn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important political issue of his time out of racism, instead at the decisive moment in his career he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists out of principled constitutional reasoning that made it impossible for him to do otherwise. But this is actually more damning. You could imagine the founder of a movement being afflicted by an unfortunate character flaw that his followers lack. But the argument is that Goldwater didn’t suffer from a character flaw. Instead, having acquired a major party presidential nomination he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important issue of the day because his sincere political ideology led to horribly wrongheaded conclusions."

"Still, just as a brief refresher, recall that over the past two years, the movement’s flagship publications and most prominent pundits have found it urgent to discuss: Bill Ayers’ potential authorship of Obama’s memoir, the looming threat of death panels, the president’s crypto-Islamic background and allegiances, his attempt to create a “private army” via the health care bill, his desire to see America come to ruin, the imagined racism of Sonia Sotomayor…"

Here, here.

Watching MYL debunking tendentious appropriations of neuroscience _again_, the phrase "One must imagine Liberman happy" comes to mind...

What exactly was the polling method here?

David Brooks is an idiot with no grasp of what American society is like or has been like; in other news, water is wet.

"So there are a lot of people out there who think that we need to kill the moral hazard of having your savings account insured. Grandma has $12,000 in her savings account, and doesn’t worry about whether or not the bank is solvent – so let’s force her to worry by removing the FDIC protection. This worrying will result in her providing discipline to her bank on their risk. ... How will grandma know what to do? ... I know the simple way you do it, some techniques that I’ve had some training in: You place out the payment structures using monte-carlo simulations with lognormal random walks; you take a metric of correlation in the market, perhaps in a gaussian copula structure and use that to run correlations at each step between the instruments; you take the distribution you generate and apply a “value-at-risk” logic to it, looking at some piece of the tail distribution.
... a 16-year old who wants to open a savings account for his part-time job will need to know these techniques..."

"what I worry about when I hear that there are too many “relativists” around: that the people complaining the most about that supposed surplus are the most supremely relativistic folks you might ever imagine encountering."

WTF???!? I knew we hadn't caught whoever did it, but I had no idea it was this much of a clusterfuck.

Naturally, the dungeons & dragons rulebooks are in there.

Looking at the quiz: most of these are either not wrong at all (split infinitives, of all the superstitions! "if" vs. "whether"!), or at best quite grammatical sentences which could be _improved_ a bit. Some are just bizarre, like saying "one another" implies three or more members of the group (my dictionary just defines it as "pronoun: each other"). The only ones I will give him are 6 (though it's perfectly comprehensible, and "whence" is increasingly archaic), and 7. Otherwise, feh.

I thought everyone knew this? (Hopefully the "utter stupidity" tag will be completely obscure very soon.)

"If I am reading the figures right, there were about 370,000 babies born in Canada in 2008. Our infant mortality rate is about 5 per 1000 live births so presumably something like 1850 babies died soon after being born in 2008. The US infant mortality rate is about 6.9 per 1000 live births so if we adopted the US system and then had similar infant mortality rates, the net effect would be similar to if we kept our current system but began tossing 700 viable babies into the hyena enclosure in the nearest zoo. Sorry, that should be 700 per year. Instead of spending 11.9% of the GNP on health care, we would get to spend 17.6%. This means that we'd get much the same benefit from adopting the US system as we would if we kept out current system but set fire to a stack of currency containing about 88 billion dollars. Per year."

In which Denny Borsboom and friends take their turn bashing their heads against the wall.

Reading this makes me feel like I should go make an offering in memory of Vannevar Bush and the other founders of the American research system, that we are spared such self-destructve idiocy.

"Kaplan is merely highlighting the fundamental difference between neoconservative thinking and thinking undertaken by people with a moral compass. As Alex Massie says, present-day Europe’s state of peace, prosperity, and physical security is a good thing. Neoconservatives, however, see war and death as good things. Irving Kristol told Corey Robin that market-oriented conservatism is too “boring” (”The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”) so you need to inject some death and destruction into the mix to keep things interesting.

The world would be a better place if people looking for cheap thrills would stick to the black metal scene or maybe take up extreme sports rather than foreign policy punditry. But the point is that it’s extremely dangerous to take advice from people with this mindset—they’re not even trying to enhance the country’s security, they’re trying to embroil the country in wars."

"To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us." --- I would like to say that this is unfair to science fiction, but that would involve some special pleading...

"When we look at impressive growth over the past 30 years were looking at policy shifts in China, the success of container shipping, and to an extent shifts in developed world trade policy."

Now this is what I call an epic take-down.

Jesus fucking Christ. Levitt actually put his name to this?!? This is the kind of thing I cobble together as a "what's gone wrong here?" assignment for my classes; maybe I should give 'em this.

To be explicit: in addition to all the problems Klein notes, the reason we frown on drunk driving more than on drunk walking is that one puts an incompetent in control of several thousand pounds of high-speed machinery, and the other a few hundred pounds of shambling biped. It's the DANGER TO OTHER PEOPLE that matters.

Sounds like nothing so much as the worst excess of early science fiction fandom, only without the redeeming artistic and cultural value.

Genius.

Causal inference FAIL.

Wow does Caldwell sound like a thoroughly unpleasant idiot.

Context for "Retreat, hell . . . we’re simply attacking in another direction."

I had never heard of these instruments before, and, reading this, I find myself thinking "the idea that buying these is a good idea for anyone is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard." ("Rortybomb" is very good on all the reasons why.) The problem with reading a lot about finance is that I have this reaction about once a week.

Text classification PRECISION FAIL

"My understanding of statistics is limited": no shit. Tagged "to teach" as an example of a generic, content-free way of deriding any statistical analysis whatsoever whose conclusions one dislikes.

Oh sweet heaven no: "We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy."

To be clear, the utter_stupidity tag refers to the people peddling the meme, not Silver.

This is really not good. Strogatz knows much better --- why is he doing this?

There is, of course, nothing wrong with pursuing research into life-extension; at the same time these people are deeply silly.

"You know, were I the guy whose unit failed to capture a seventy-year-old, two meter tall man on kidney dialysis, I wouldn’t be mentioning that as proof of my skills in intelligence gathering."

The Hon. Dr. Rush Holt says: bring back OTA! (I recall a mid-1990s physics seminar at Madison where the speaker, an executive-branch science-policy official under Bush I, talked about how one of the GOP Congresscritters who pushed to get OTA eliminated gave as an example of its waste its studying Doppler radars --- "why not just ask the Doppler Company?" [I want to say that the GOPC in question was Gingrich but that may be my memory playing tricks.])

Mark Penn, flaming innumerate.