Brian Doherty lays out the misleading uses, flagrant abuses, and shoddy statistics of social science about gun violence.

Arnold Kling reviews Scott Sumner’s book The Midas Paradox.

The Great Depression of the 1930s is one of the most significant events in economic history. It had an impact not only on the people who lived through it but on economic theory and policy all the way to the present. I believe there is a strong case in favor of requiring every economics graduate student to take a course on the Great Depression. Furthermore, the reading list for such a course definitely ought to include Scott Sumner’s new book,The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression.1 Its title pertains to the role that Sumner assigns to gold hoarding in triggering the Depression.

Arnold is a Really Smart Guy and a Real Economist, so what he has to say is well worth hearing. My interest was sparked by his affirmation of the damaging effects of the Aggregation Fallacy, against which I have preached much in this blog.

Have you ever noticed how much Alec Baldwin looks like Lee Harvey Oswald?

And you never see the two of them together.

Read it.

Compare Obama.

The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Bad judgment and bad morals are generally not a formula for success in life, and the fact that the men with whom Charlotte Shane hooked up via Tinder were all inadequate, disrespectful and/or immature should not surprise us. As I have explained elsewhere, the dating market is full of bad guys because all of the good guys already have girlfriends and good guys don’t cheat. Past a certain age — maybe as early as 25 — the singles scene is nothing but culls and rejects. The keepers are already taken, and if you’re still in the dating scene when you’re 30, you’re rummaging through piles of damaged goods and leftovers in the discount bin.

The one thing Charlotte Shane cannot do is consider that she could ever be at fault. Exactly how “mature” and “respectful” is she? Not very. Promiscuity is inherently immature, and it’s not respectful, either.

Check it out.

If you’re interested in Skraelings, as I am, this looks fascinating.

If you’re not, feel free to do something else.

Paul Graham speaks sense to stupidity.

I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2400 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.

So when I hear people saying that economic inequality is bad and should be eliminated, I feel rather like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters. But the thing that strikes me most about the conversations I overhear is how confused they are. They don’t even seem clear whether they want to kill me or not.

The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.

Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence.

Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence….

Even people sophisticated enough to know about the pie fallacy are led toward it by the custom of describing economic inequality as a ratio of one quantile’s income or wealth to another’s. It’s so easy to slip from talking about income shifting from one quantile to another, as a figure of speech, into believing that is literally what’s happening.

The phrase ‘share of the national income’ is a key giveaway here, making the Aggregation Fallacy of thinking that the ‘nation’ has an ‘income’ of which the only interesting thing is who gets what ‘share’.

Except in the degenerate case, economic inequality can’t be described by a ratio or even a curve. In the general case it consists of multiple ways people become poor, and multiple ways people become rich. Which means to understand economic inequality in a country, you have to go find individual people who are poor or rich and figure out why.

But that would take actual work, and it’s much easier to assume and opine, which pays the same (or sometimes better).

Traditional economists seem strangely averse to studying individual humans. It seems to be a rule with them that everything has to start with statistics. So they give you very precise numbers about variation in wealth and income, then follow it with the most naive speculation about the underlying causes.

Most economists live in Aggregation Fallacy World because that’s the way they were trained and it’s that sort of work that they’re paid for. Thinking outside the box is rarely indulged in when the box is providing your paycheck.

I’m all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich. But that won’t eliminate economic inequality, because as long as you leave open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want to get rich will do that instead.

Although the Democrats are doing their best to stamp that out. That’s the one thing at which Obama and his henchmen have actually been successful.

UPDATE: An extensive response is here — read it, and its comments.

Read it.

Among my favorite observations made by Thomas Sowell is his insistence that in economic reality human beings confront, not the possibility of solutions to problems but, instead, only trade-offs.  We can have more of this good, but only at the cost of having less of that good.  T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L.  Such is economic reality.

Steve Sailer looks under the radar.

For a dozen years or so, I’ve been pointing out that Southern California appears to be filling up with immigrants from the former Warsaw Pact.

But it’s hard to find out much about them. The media aren’t too interested in them. They’re immigrants (yeah) ,but they’re white (not yeah), so that confuses and discourages the press: What line should we take on them? Are white immigrants bad or good?

Read it.

Big Brother is not your friend. Just sayin’.

Read it.

If the first of January comes on a Friday, the winter will be temperate, and the summer and autumn, dry. Grain will be cheap. There will be eye diseases, and many infants will die, and there will be movement of knights, and there will be much oil in some places.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Voice of the Crust the New York Times sees a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand….

BLUF: If Trump can get the Republican nomination, he can pull enough Democrats to win the Presidency. And the Ruling Class is getting uneasy.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A. Because there are virtually no Muslims in Japan.

And all strata of Japan, from the prime minister to the working class, intend to keep it that way.

Japan is the poster child for those who not only don’t value diversity but who actively work to exclude it.

The official policy of Japan is not to give citizenship to Muslims who come to Japan, and even permits for permanent residency are given sparingly to Muslims.

…

Japanese companies seeking foreign workers specifically note that they are not interested in Muslim workers. And any Muslim who does manage to enter Japan will find it very difficult to rent an apartment. Anywhere a Muslim lives, the neighbors become uneasy. Japan forbids the establishment of Islamic organizations, so setting up Islamic institutions such as mosques and schools is almost impossible. In Tokyo [population 13.35 million] there is only one imam.

Hard to argue with success.

Read it.

Many years ago, I put my 23andMe genetic screening results online at SNPedia where they are regularly updated so that my friends and enemies can all find out what’s genetically wrong (and right) with me. Consequences? None.

So what is Skloot advocating that has gotten me riled up? The government is proposing revisions to the Protection of Human Subjects rule that could possibly impose new and extensive consent requirements for using all sorts of biological samples derived from people. Skloot begins by asking readers if they want researchers to continue the practice of freely passing around cells derived from their bodies and the genetic information they contain?

Knowledge is not property. Let me repeat that. Knowledge is not property. A fact about you is not something you own

Read it.

Denis Kowitz has a shepherd-retention problem at his Idaho wool-growing operation, and he hopes changes in federal immigration law will help fix it.

“One was named Oscar, the other…well, I can’t remember. But he’s gone!” he says of two hired hands who left in March, just when he needed them for lambing season on his ranch in Rupert, in southern Idaho.

Mr. Kowitz said he paid about $3,000 per shepherd to find them and fly them from Peru. He said he assumed they quit to work in construction or at a dairy or landscaper. In the past 16 months, he said he has lost six shepherds under similar circumstances.

Boy, that sure sounds like a problem. Sure can’t have immigrants moving around as if they were free to choose jobs. People might think that the whole Open Borders thing is about cheap labor, not humanitarian heart-bleed.

Read it.

The first goal of taxation is to raise needed government revenue with minimum economic damage. That means lower marginal rates—the additional tax people pay for each extra dollar earned—and a broader base of income subject to tax. It also means a massively simpler tax code.

Hear, hear. Unconscionable amounts of money are wasted every year just trying to dodge burdensome tax levies.

What would a minimally damaging, simple, fair tax code look like? First, the corporate tax should be eliminated. Every dollar of taxes that a corporation seems to pay comes from higher prices to its customers, lower wages to its workers, or lower dividends to its shareholders. Of these groups, wealthy individual shareholders are the least likely to suffer. If taxes eat into profits, investors pay lower prices for less valuable shares, and so earn the same return as before. To the extent that taxes do reduce returns, they also financially hurt nonprofits and your and my pension funds.

…

Second, the government should tax consumption, not wages, income or wealth. When the government taxes savings, investment income, wealth or inheritance, it reduces the incentive to save, invest and build companies rather than enjoy consumption immediately. Taxes on capital gains discourage people from moving or reallocating capital toward their most productive uses.

Excellent analysis.

Read it.

Cowen rather coyly overlooks another aspect of the assortative mating that takes place at universities: The heritability of intelligence. Men and women now tend to look for partners who are at least as smart as they are and they tend to pass along their smarts to their children. A 2015 study reports that assortative mating correlates more with intelligence than for any other trait.

If they have kids, which a lot of them don’t; or at most one. I know at least one couple who are each only children and have only one child (and probably won’t have another). Sure, that kid will be highly intelligent but might not reproduce at all.

Gavin McInnes reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

It’s impossible to starve in this country. In fact, our biggest problem with the poor is they’re getting too fat. Everyone has a smartphone, even homeless dudes. There are more cars and guns than there are people and it’s virtually impossible to find a home without a fridge and a TV in it. When I put on my magic glasses it is impossible to understand why every so-called oppressed minority doesn’t thank their lucky stars Fortuna’s deadly wheel plopped them down on American soil.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A service offering monks for hire on Amazon has been criticised by Buddhists who say it “commodifies a religious act as a service”.

Uh, well, it really is a service. Monks gotta eat, too, you know.

The Japanese Buddhist Federation is to formally request that Amazon stops selling the services of Buddhist monks for memorial services and other ceremonies, according to The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s daily newspaper.

Wet blankets.

A statement from the Federation, released on Christmas Eve, said that the service raises questions about Amazon’s attitude towards religion. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Freeberg does it so you don’t have to.

I can’t write funny stuff like Mr. Barry, but I must have some talent for noticing things, since I get in trouble so often for noticing things I’m not supposed to notice. Human behavior, for instance. The pattern is pretty clear: People see a problem, they come up with a wrong solution, they chase that for a little while…or a great while. Maybe forever. But if they’re capable of learning something, they eventually figure out the solution they’ve been chasing is the wrong one, and they go to work on their solving skills and start chasing a solution that is, at least, not quite so wrong.

Yes, Barack Obama won re-election in 2012. That doesn’t really prove anything, though, other than for a lot of people it took more than four years to figure out they’d been chasing the wrong solution. For the people like Mr. Barry who see 2015 as a year of pain, the feeling is not imaginary. It is real. This paradigm shift of figuring out you need to re-evaluate the solution, that you’ve been chasing after the wrong one, is never a comfortable one. It is the scraping of the blade of theory getting shaped and sharpened against the stone of practice. And 2015 seems to have taken form as the year of the Great Sharpening.

A year in which a man won the title ‘Woman of the Year’ doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. But we’ll survive this, as we have survived so much else.

Read it.

Probably got there via flying saucers.

Hey, it could happen.

Read it.

When summer rolls around, thoughts turn to how to spend the limpid months: Umbrella drinks by the pool? Backpacking through pristine wilderness? A digital detox?

But if you’re a certain kind of person, your dream destination might be Rare Book School in Charlottesville for a week of courses that include “Book Illustration Processes to 1900” or “The Handwriting & Culture of Early Modern English Manuscripts.” Rare book fanatics study not only the words on the page but also the way books were made in order to unlock a deeper cultural understanding of text. And while there are similar programs around the world, Rare Book School offers something they do not: A permanent space and a teaching collection of 80,000 items from books bound in supple goat leather to old Macintosh computers.

Scott Johnson of PowerLine has some thoughts.

Donald Trump has proved himself to be a man with substantial insight into the mind of the average Republican voter, a category in which I place myself (in case that’s not obvious from my comments here over the past many years). Having made illegal immigration and American greatness the primary themes of his campaign, he floated to the top of a competitive field and has if anything continued to increase his lead over the rest of the field, at least as measured by the national polls so far. I think Trump’s candidacy represents a reaction to the Age of Obama among Republican voters.

Obama’s promotion of illegal immigration represents a larger component of the Obama syndrome. It stands for Obama’s promotion of lawlessness for political purposes.

Read it.

It is difficult to compare 1840 to 2015, so much of what we have today didn’t exist then.  But, they had to move people and goods from place to place as we do now.  They had farms then as we do now. They used wagons pulled by horses, mules or oxen.  We use cars and airplanes. They used muscle power to farm, we use tractors, combines, grain carts, and trucks powered by petroleum fuels. In 1840 crude oil and natural gas production and use were rare. Coal was used in manufacturing, but steam engines were still in their infancy. So the world in 1840 was fossil fuel free for the most part. Biofuels, that is burning wood and dung, were common. Windmills would not appear until 1854. Hydropower was not in common use until after 1849. Solar power had not been invented yet.

The cost of gasoline can be seen on the sign at any gas station, but what is its value?  Using gasoline or diesel saves us time and manual labor. It also saves air, water and waste pollution. Let us not forget that the automobile was lauded as a great environmental improvement after the “Great Horse Manure Crisis” of 1894. Nothing like having horse manure up to your knees to help you appreciate gasoline!

Read it.

Well, when it comes to education, the schools couldn’t get it done, either. So, I’m doing it myself. The big difference is that I have to keep sending the education “experts” checks because they work for the government and the government gets cranky when you decline to pay for its services, no matter how dubious the quality. But it’s still worth it, because the results are so much better when my wife and I do it ourselves.

In many way, teaching my son is easier than laying a tile floor or installing a stove because the kid actually gives me feedback. If I screwed up installing the stove (I didn’t), I’d have to find out the hard way. My son isn’t shy about saying, “I don’t understand.” He’s just as good at saying, “I get it and I’m bored; can we move on?” If you care enough to listen, that makes it a hell of a lot easier to do it right.

Read it.

Would it be “racist” of me to suspect that ever since the War Between the States, every political move designed to protect the “oppressed” was also designed to enhance federal power? Is it paranoid to ponder whether under all the nonsense we hear about civil rights and hate crimes and terrorism are convenient covers for what is essentially a bald-ass, butt-naked power grab?

Read it.

Is war good for anything? In the long run, the Stanford historian Ian Morris argues, it’s good for almost everything. In War! What Is It Good For?, Morris makes the case that war has played an essential role in mankind’s development and in the growth of human well-being. The book endorses not just strong government but imperialism; as applied to recent history, this translates into strong support for the historic role of the British Empire and the current global policies of the United States.

Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

Read it. And watch the video.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Whenever I’m reading a science fiction story that involves an alien species, I put it down if the alien species isn’t at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

Guns don’t kill people – video chat kills people.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Dude, take the hint: This is not the girl for you. Think of yourself as having dodged a .50-cal bullet.

One often reads of people who aren’t confident that they’ve really learned a foreign language until they ‘start thinking in it’.

Feh. I don’t think in English, or any other language. I think in ‘me’.

If you see me hesitate before speaking, it’s the process of translation. This can sometimes be pretty heavy lifting, since the brilliance of my thought is usually such that mere human language is inadequate to contain it.

So whatever you hear me say — or write — is never as good as the original. Trust me.

Consider that before you make a response.

Read it.

The Slippery Slope Argument is often called the Slippery Slope Fallacy, usually by those favorably disposed toward the bottom of the slope and anxious to get there as quickly as possible with a minimum of tumbling and bruising along the way. But it is really neither a fallacy nor an argument.

History is replete with examples of “give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile.” The pre-war course of Hitler’s micro-aggressions provides a nicely Godwinesque illustration of a slippery slope. Give ’em a Saarland, and they’ll take a Bohemia. Recall also that Griswold v. Conn. legitimized the sale of contraceptives to married couples only, precisely on the grounds of the privacy of the marriage bond, and the thought that this might lead to unmarried couples using contraceptives was dismissed as slippery slopitude. Ho-ho, that will never happen! Likewise the forecast was poo-poohed that such availability would eventually weaken the whole concept of marriage and turn women into sex objects. And yet, here we are. So too the late Daniel Pat Moynihan’s “defining deviancy down.”¹

Read it.

Most people who are rich chose their parents wisely. Bill Gates might not have ever figured out 1960s-style computer science but he had the foresight to pick a father who is one of the richest, most prominent lawyers in the state of Washington. And before he and Paul Allen made the deal with IBM that gave them a monopoly on the PC operating system, Bill had the foresight to choose a mother who was personally acquainted with John Opel, CEO of IBM Corporation. None of this would have worked if Bill hadn’t been willing to take tremendous personal risks. Should Microsoft have failed, of course, Bill Gates would have had nothing to fall back on but a million dollar trust fund from his mother’s parents (bankers) and the resumption of his degree program at Harvard College.

Lord Ridley looks at the Zuckerberg ‘charity’ kerfuffle.

We have reached new depths of cynicism when a couple say in a letter to their newborn child that “our hopes for your generation focus on two ideas: advancing human potential and promoting equality” and some people can only sneer. Much of the carping is deeply confused. The Zuckerbergs have been criticised for not handing their shares to a tax-deductible charitable foundation now, which would net them a big tax break up front, and in the very same breath for not handing over their fortune in tax.

Welcome to my world.

The greatest beneficiaries, by far, of vast business ventures such as Facebook are not the founders, but the customers. When Lancashire entrepreneurs made cotton textiles affordable for all, it was all who benefited; when Rockefellers did the same for oil, or Carnegies for steel, again the overwhelming majority of the benefits flowed to the customers. One study, by William Nordhaus, found that entrepreneurs end up with less than 3% of the societal value that they have created. Some goes to financiers, but the vast bulk of the benefit turns up as consumer surplus.

Likewise with today’s magnates: the fortunes amassed by the Messrs Gates, Jobs, Bezos and Zuckerberg are as nothing to the value that has been captured by their willing customers in the form of better services delivered far more cheaply and easily.

So let’s ditch the zero-sum mentality and remember that an entrepreneur who makes something that was once a preserve of the rich cheaply available to ordinary people has done an act of philanthropy through his business, even if he also makes a fortune in the process. To reach the number of followers anybody can now have on Facebook once required either a large sum of money to spend on paper and stamps and secretaries, or an even larger sum to buy a newspaper or a radio station.

Good luck convincing the Usual Suspects that. Let’s start with Hillary Clinton.

Read it.

This makes an interesting contrast to Scott Adams’ Master Persuader analysis.

Tyler Cowen has a new wrinkle on the ‘gun control’ debate.

Sarah Hoyt reflects upon evolution and politics.

In a way when the left started its long march through the institutions they were just practicing ancient hunting practices, with Western Civilization as its prey.

Now their long march might or might not come to fruition, but you can’t avoid realizing that for people whose ideas are at best silly and at worst downright harmful, they’ve achieved remarkable success by taking over what they could and grooming their kids to take over more.

…

However, again, for a philosophy whose proudest achievement is the killing of a hundred million human beings (and that’s lowballing it, as Colonel Kratman says) to take over those many institutions and not to be laughed out of polite (or worse, impolite) society is a testimony to the effectiveness of the long march.

Read it. And watch them.

Read it.

IN this age of terror, we struggle to figure out how to protect ourselves — especially, of late, from active shooters.

One suggestion, promoted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security, and now widely disseminated, is “run, hide, fight.” The idea is: Run if you can; hide if you can’t run; and fight if all else fails. This three-step program appeals to common sense, but whether it makes scientific sense is another question.

…

A vivid example of freezing was captured in a video of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. After the bomb went off, many people froze. Then, some began to try to escape (run), while others were slower on the uptake.

This variation in response is typical. Sometimes freezing is brief and sometimes it persists. This can reflect the particular situation you are in, but also your individual predisposition. Some people naturally have the ability to think through a stressful situation, or to even be motivated by it, and will more readily run, hide or fight as required. But for others, additional help is needed.

Those who have been properly trained, either deliberately or through combat experience, will not freeze but rather react, typically in a violent counterattack.

Read it.

The chief benefit of a business school is that it gives training and practice in working with a team — including how to compensate for the slacker(s) with which every team seems to get saddled — and in making presentation to a group without choking.

The law school trick of the Study Group is also vastly underused by undergraduates.

Read it.

Progressives and Terfs are both wrong: sex differences in behavior have biological roots – men and female brains are different. I mean, if male rhesus monkeys like toy trucks and females rhesus monkeys don’t, as they do, it’s hard to attribute to social pressure. Boys are much more likely to like rough-and-tumble play, blah blah blah. The stereotypes are true. Trans men aren’t little girls inside, anymore than someone with a Napoleonic complex is ‘really’ Corsican. They’re just crazy. Now that craziness probably has some biological origin, but we don’t understand it. Even if it does, it is likely that the form of that craziness is shaped by social influences, just as Malays run amok with a bloody kris rather than going postal with a Glock.

It is possible to support a theory with implications you don’t like if it happens to be true. Although maybe that’s a guy thing.

If you want to make your stupid dream real, you need to have a realistic picture of the world. If you want a society in which men and women have the same brain, or one in which feminism actually works, you would have to make it so, with advanced biological engineering. John Varley writes fiction: so did Joanna Russ.

I’m sure you’ve seen the breathless headlines “Guns Now Killing as Many People as Cars!!!!!!” in the Drive-By Media. (Of course, actual humans had no role in these killings, except as victims. I suppose Society’s To Blame.)

Reason magazine actually gives us some context:

Read it.

Year after year here in our Dusty Little Village (DLV), the education establishment puts an initiative on the ballot to increase property taxes for schools. For eight years and counting, it has failed. It will fail again.

Most of us Geezer-Americans have scant interest in donating even more to educate half of Mexico or to fund all the Diversity Drones and special programs whose gentle ministrations crank out the annual crop of psychotic ninnies infesting our colleges.

Read it.

Yair Elbaz sent to Russ and me this very interesting interactive graph from McKinsey Global Institute. It arrays more than 750 paid occupations in the United States according to their average hourly wage rates* and the estimated percentage of how much of these workers’ tasks can be automated with existing technologies. Not surprisingly, the occupations that are most able to be automated – that involve the performance of the greatest number of tasks that can be automated with existing technologies – are generally at the lower end of the wage scale. The percentage of a surgeon’s tasks that can be automated is lower than is the percentage of a baker’s tasks that can be automated.