Read it.

What he said.

Read it.

In Piketty’s book, there is surprisingly little economic analysis.  Armen Alchian or Harold Demsetz or Yoram Barzel or Jim Buchanan or David Friedman or Ronald Coase – to choose just some examples – each has more economic analysis on any one randomly chosen page of any of his works than Piketty has throughout his entire book.

Like Marx, Piketty’s agenda is political, and only incidentally economic.

Read it.

As can be seen on the following chart, during the period from January 2011 to March 2014, there have been slightly more single-family housing starts in Houston (95,037) than in California for the entire state (94,993).

Read it.

Despite the benefits of government programs such as affirmative action – something opposed by some other minorities, notably Asian Americans – African Americans have not expanded their share of the middle class in recent decades. Indeed, racial economic disparities are growing, with black unemployment more than double the white jobless rate and reaching 40 percent among youths.

Even more revealing, many of those areas under the most complete progressive control – New York, San Francisco and Chicago – also have among the worst disparities between black and white incomes, notes a recent National Urban League study.

It may well be that hyper-regulatory regimes in the left-leaning cities tend to chase away blue collar jobs and raise the price of housing so high that minorities simply leave. Many of those who stay pay an inordinate share of their income, often upwards of 50 percent, just to keep a roof over their head.

As Thomas Sowell has observed, the black population of San Francisco, the ultimate gentry city, is now half of what it was in 1970, even as the city has experienced an overall demographic resurgence.

Read it.

At last, the truth comes out.

Varoufakis: If we think of ourselves as empiricists who judge the value of the theory on the basis of how well it predicts, then we should have ditched economic models years ago. Never have our models managed with data to predict the major turning points, ever, in the history of capitalism. So if we were honest, we should simply accept that and rethink our approach.

But actually, I think they’re even worse. We can’t even predict the past very well using our models. Economic models are failing to model the past in a way that can explain the past. So what we end up doing with our economic models is retrofitting the data and our own prejudices about how the economy works.

This is why I’m saying that this profession of mine is not really anywhere near astronomy. It’s much closer to mathematized superstition, organized superstition, which has a priesthood to replicate on the basis of how well we learn the rituals.

Video game communities, social economies, give us something that we never had as economists before. That’s something of an opportunity, a chance to experiment with a macroeconomy. We can experiment in economics with individuals. We can put someone behind a screen and experiment on the subject, and ask him or her to make choices and see how they behave.

That has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics requires a different scenario. You conduct controlled experiments with a large economy. We are not allowed to do this in the real world. But in the video game world, we economists have a smidgen of an opportunity to conduct controlled experiments on a real, functioning macroeconomy. And that may be a scientific window into economic reality that we’ve never had access to before.

Read it.

Life-hacking wouldn’t be popular if it didn’t tap into something deeply corroded about the way work has, without much resistance, managed to invade every corner of our lives. The idea started out as a somewhat earnest response to the problem of fragmented attention and overwork—an attempt to reclaim some leisure time and autonomy from the demands of boundaryless labor. But it has since become just another hectoring paradigm of self-improvement. The proliferation of apps and gurus promising to help manage even the most basic tasks of simple existence—the “quantified self” movement does life hacking one better, turning the simple act of breathing or sleeping into something to be measured and refined—suggests that merely getting through the day has become, for many white-collar professionals, a set of problems to solve and systems to optimize. Being alive is easier, it turns out, if you treat it like a job.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Something I haven’t seen mentioned in all the discussion of Piketty: Near whom would you rather live, the rich or the poor?

And there it is in a nutshell. Say what you will about Donald Trump — and who doesn’t? — I’m pretty confident that, if I bump into him on the street, he’s not going to stab me and steal my wallet and cellphone.

Read it.

Suggestion: R Lee Ermey.

Read it.

Everybody wants to know what the next bubble is, and there’s an easy way to tell: Just watch where Harvard grads are going. Then short the hell out of that.

…

Harvard is a magnet for Organization Kids who excel at coloring between the lines. After graduation, they want to do something prestigious, something remunerative, but mostly, as Kevin Roose points out, something that gives them new lines to color between. That might be Silicon Valley, or it might be Teach for America — or it might be Wall Street, if, that is, the getting looks good.

Read it.

What is remarkable regarding Piketty’s work, is that he backed his work with comprehensive data and thorough analysis. Unfortunately, like too many people, Piketty used speadsheets instead of writing sane software. On the plus side, he published his code… on the negative side, it appears that Piketty’s code contains mistakes, fudging and other problems.

In other words, he skipped a key element of any software design process: code review.

Simply put, spreadsheets are good for quick and dirty work, but they are not designed for serious and reliable work.

• All professional software should contain extensive tests… how do you know that your functions do what you think they do if you do not test them? Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing.
• Spreadsheets make code review difficult. The code is hidden away in dozens if not hundreds of little cells… If you are not reviewing your code carefully… and if you make it difficult for others to review it, how do expect it to be reliable?
• Spreadsheets encourage copy-and-paste programming and ad hoc fudging. It is much harder to review, test and maintain such code.

UPDATE: An opposing viewpoint here.

Steve Sailer illumines a disturbing new trend.

Earlier this week I pointed out that an increasing number of the identity politics brouhahas in Silicon Valley don’t seem to involve traditional victims, but instead revolve around attractive young women who hand the press a prefab narrative about the horrors of “alpha-male culture.” Large concentrations of money have traditionally attracted that type of woman formerly known as the adventuress. Some Internet searching suggests that the term “adventuress” is no longer used in polite society, although it remains a popular title for pulp novels for women. It’s considered sexist to say that Bonaparte was an adventurer while Lola Montez was an adventuress. So, the word and, increasingly, the concept are forgotten.

Read it.

BLUF: No.

Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.

Christopher Hart lays down some inconvenient truth.

But people do have a hierarchy of preferences: always have and always will. They prefer people like them. Most English people would rather live next door to their own. They can converse over the garden fence in English, the wife isn’t hidden under a burqa, and they get the allusions to Monty Python sketches. So those who can afford it live in areas of Britain where this is likely to be the case.

If not English, Dutch or Danish neighbors would probably be OK—or German, despite one or two little misunderstandings over the past century. They behave much as English people would behave. This isn’t prejudice. Prejudice means pre-judging, without evidence. This is informed opinion. If the family is Romanian, they may well be gypsy too—or “Roma,” as we are now obliged to say. And they are factually more likely to steal. Romanians are now the fifth largest group of foreigners in our jails, squeezing in between Jamaicans and Pakistanis. The cost of our Eastern European prison population is now £73 million a year, kindly paid for by the British taxpayer whom they went to jail for robbing in the first place.

If our next-door neighbors are Somalian, Afghan, Nigerian, or Pakistani, they are statistically more likely to remove their wives’ clitorises, to murder their daughters for being seen with a white English boy, to think that 9/11 or our own 7/7 bombings were a fine idea, or to behead a British soldier in a London street (see “Drummer Lee Rigby, death of”). Not all Muslims are terrorists, no; but almost all terrorists these days are Muslims.

Bryan Caplan is always worth reading.

Within economics, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely right-wing. Why? Because economists realize that this premise undermines the textbook efficiency case for governments’ massive education subsidies.

Outside economics, however, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely left-wing. Why? Because non-economists realize that this premise undermines the legitimacy of the status quo – which they think of as “capitalism.”

Read it.

BLUF: The government is shitty at running things.

Mark Stein, in addition to being a brilliant political commentator, also reviews movies.

Twenty years ago, the Rwandan genocide was, machete-wise, in full swing: They were about halfway through their seven-figure mass murder. There being no hashtags in those days, President Clinton, the Pain-Feeler-in-Chief, had to slough off the victims with a rather brusquer soundbite nixing international intervention: “The UN has to learn how to say no.” And so 20 per cent of the population of Rwanda was slaughtered, a number so huge that the world chose to hold it at a big, woozy, blurry distance. To mark the tenth anniversary, the editors of the Economist asked, ‘How many people can name any of the perpetrators?’ I’d say it’s more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? C’mon, take a guess, without looking it up.

Steve Sailer brings us up to date on the latest darling of the Left.

I’m always fascinated by the dynamics of reputation. For example, when Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz demonstrated in late 2005, a half year after the publication of Freakonomics, that Steven D. Levitt’s most famous theory — that legalizing abortion cut crime — was the result of Levitt’s sloppiness in writing Stata code (not Excel, by the way), the impact on Levitt’s career was negligible. His reputation only started to decline a few years later with the publication of SuperFreakonomics in which Levitt didn’t demonstrate complete fidelity to the climate change orthodoxy.

Basically, there was no money to be made in showing that the facts didn’t support Levitt’s conclusion. In contrast, there is a lot of money arrayed against Piketty, so we’ll hear more about it.

Sarah Hoyt rather dislikes internationalism.

The point is that the UN without universal values that all the world agrees on is a sheep and ten wolves arguing what is for dinner. It has become a vehicle for countries that would otherwise be totally disregarded – and which by culture should be. I mean, Iran is in charge of women’s status in the UN – to hit out at bigger, more successful countries. Also for countries to cadge Dane Geld from bigger, richer countries (mostly the US.)

One wonders how long the scam can go on, when it’s obvious that this is not a way to create universal peace, which is how it was billed. Instead it’s a rent seeking organization with a side order of “make the US feel guilty” which is necessary, of course, for rent seeking.

But the Crust makes money, and when the Crust makes money, the U.S. taxpayer pays the piper.

I’m going to come back to the idea of the UN, of a world body that can stop wars, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Not only is that impossible, unless we agree on one culture (Be fair to the soviets. Their internationalism was SANE. They wanted a one-world government, and that government soviet.) but is it really desirable?

It amuses me that those who agree on “diversity” in everything are unable to see that diversity of culture and thought might be desirable. At least they are unable to see it when it violates their sacred cows.

Diversity in everything except thought. That sounds familiar.

The glittery hoo ha and the rot in science fiction developed because the structure of publishing became centralized and a mono-culture and that culture Eastern Seaboard Liberal. This didn’t fit even the rest of the country and has been a resounding commercial failure. And meanwhile they, isolated from all criticism, became ever more crazy and started drinking their own ink. Which is why we have a field already dominated by women crowing about “kicking patriarchy in the balls” by giving awards the outer world ignores to people on the basis of their genitals.

THAT is what happens to cultures that are isolated and get their own feedback loop.

Pretty scary. Do we really want One World that is run by the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama? I think not.

Read it.

‘You’re workmen! You should be working! That’s what you get for not having an education!’ — Professor Hathaway, Real Genius

Read it.

A popular study from the 1970s that helps sell millions of dollars’ worth of fish oil supplements worldwide is deeply flawed, according to a new study being published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

Can Global Warming be far behind?

Read it.

What if he went straight to the raw chemical components? He took a break from experimenting with software and studied textbooks on nutritional biochemistry and the Web sites of the F.D.A., the U.S.D.A., and the Institute of Medicine. Eventually, Rhinehart compiled a list of thirty-five nutrients required for survival. Then, instead of heading to the grocery store, he ordered them off the Internet—mostly in powder or pill form—and poured everything into a blender, with some water. The result, a slurry of chemicals, looked like gooey lemonade. Then, he told me, “I started living on it.” Rhinehart called his potion Soylent, which, for most people, evokes the 1973 science-fiction film “Soylent Green,” starring Charlton Heston. The movie is set in a dystopian future where, because of overpopulation and pollution, people live on mysterious wafers called Soylent Green. The film ends with the ghastly revelation that Soylent Green is made from human flesh.

As you would expect from an article in The New Yorker, the Upper West Side ‘canoeing among the natives’ tone comes through perfectly.

Gavin McInnes lays out some inconvenient truth.

Some of my best friends are black and many of them turn purple with rage when I suggest this possibility. The most common response is that I may not even ponder such things because I’m white. One woman told me about the hell she goes through as a person of color because store employees follow her around like she’s a shoplifter. She is the only individual in her family who has an education. Her sister is in jail and both her brothers are dead from gang-related murders. The shopkeepers who are suspicious of her are only off by one sibling. That’s not prejudice. That’s postjudice. What’s more important than leering stares is that she had the same opportunities as everyone else. Because she tried hard in school and refused to waste time partying, she became a successful and happy Woman of Color.

Lileks scratches his head.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the new fad among Kids These Days, which is jumping into cold water. Goes by many names: the Polar Plunge, the Cold Water Challenge, the Frigid Folly, doesn’t matter. It’s simple: Kid goes into the water. Friend shoots a video of the event, because the point of doing anything these days is to do it for the camera, and then it’s posted online, because otherwise it didn’t happen.

It’s for charity, supposedly. Perhaps the American Association for Halting Hypothermia Health Hazards, or AAHHH, which is the sound you make when you jump into cold water.

…

Why is it popular? Because it’s all about the dare. They say it’s not, but that’s the heart of it. If you are dared, you must comply, or you are chicken, and this stays with you the rest of your life:

“Well, Ms. Horgensted, your résumé is most impressive, and your multilingual aptitude is just the sort of thing our international branches are looking for. I’d say you were a natural fit for our French office, but we’re looking for someone who can meet new challenges square in the face, and according to our NSA intercepts of your social media activity from 10 years ago, you declined to walk into cold water when taunted by a peer. I’m sorry, but we’re looking for a leader. Someone who jumps off a bridge, and everyone else follows.”

One thing I’ve always wondered about is the mystical power of the phrase ‘I dare you.’ (Sometimes the ante is upped by ‘I double-dog dare you’, which is really stupid when you think about it, which of course nobody ever does, except in bootless ruminations such as this one.) The classic measure of susceptibility to peer pressure, at any age, is what you will do in response to ‘I dare you’. Of course, the desired outcome is a successful doing, followed by an admiring ‘I can’t believe you actually did that.’ The key here is the admiring tone, which Makes All Worthwhile; the same phrase, uttered in a appalled tone, would rip off the facade of fashionability and reveal the cold hard truth that this was actually an incredibly stupid thing to do. But peer pressure has one of the lowest IQs on the block.

I suspect that my response to such a phrase these days would be ‘Why? Why is it so important to you that I do this (probably) very stupid thing?’ To which, of course, the dare-er has no ready response–other than, perhaps, ‘Well, that’s what we do.’

My theory is that it’s all about control. If I can persuade you to do a stupid thing merely by saying ‘I dare you’, then I exercise a degree of control over your actions. In this regard I think it is important to appreciate the context: We don’t accept dares from people whom we don’t respect, whose regard we do not value. Accepting a dare is a way of validating our membership in a particular social circle, sort of like voluntarily submitting to a humiliating fraternity initiation ritual. ‘I value membership in this group sufficiently to sacrifice my dignity and perhaps risk life and limb; please honor this sacrifice and welcome me into the group.’

Unfortunately, none of us realize this at twelve, when it would be most valuable. As my granny used to say, ‘We is too soon old, and too late smart.’

Larry Summers does Thomas Piketty.

A brief look at the Forbes 400 list also provides only limited support for Piketty’s ideas that fortunes are patiently accumulated through reinvestment. When Forbes compared its list of the wealthiest Americans in 1982 and 2012, it found that less than one tenth of the 1982 list was still on the list in 2012, despite the fact that a significant majority of members of the 1982 list would have qualified for the 2012 list if they had accumulated wealth at a real rate of even 4 percent a year. They did not, given pressures to spend, donate, or misinvest their wealth. In a similar vein, the data also indicate, contra Piketty, that the share of the Forbes 400 who inherited their wealth is in sharp decline.

Read it.

“It really is an amazingly distressing situation,” says Pennsylvania State University glaciologist Sridhar Anandakrishnan, who was not affiliated with either study. “This is a huge part of West Antarctica, and it seems to have been kicked over the edge.”

The researchers say the fate of the glaciers is almost certainly beyond hope.

Remember this when it a couple of years they come back and say ‘Oops! Never mind!’

Read it.

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world’s leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

How can he do that? I thought that ‘the science is settled’? I thought that ‘the debate is over’?

Read it.

Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.

That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”

Read it.

It’s such a great, simple idea: Young Brazilians want to learn English. Elderly Americans living in retirement homes just want someone to talk to. Why not connect them?

FCB Brazil did just that with its “Speaking Exchange” project for CNA language schools. As seen in the touching case study below, the young Brazilians and older Americans connect via Web chats, and they not only begin to share a language—they develop relationships that enrich both sides culturally and emotionally.

Read it.

You hear the word “poverty” tossed around a lot. There’s been a “war” on it for some 50 years, and I am hardly the first person to notice that either poverty is a tough opponent, or the goalposts keep moving on what constitutes “poverty.” Or both.

…

Follow these 6 simple rules and you may struggle, but you will never be in poverty:

1. Stay in school and actually pay attention. Do your homework, graduate.

2. Do not do drugs at all or drink alcohol to excess.

3. WORK. At anything. Currently, 20 percent of families have nobody working.

4. GET MARRIED. Marriage is the single-best anti-poverty tool there is. If you have a spouse, remember that two crap jobs are equal to one fairly-decent one.

5. Do not have a baby you have no intention of supporting. Do not have a baby without a lawfully wedded spouse, preferably your own.

6. Do NOT be a criminal. It is evil and hurtful to others, but most importantly, the habits and attitudes you will develop are the worst thing you can do to yourself. When you believe that you are entitled to take, by stealth or violence, something someone else has earned, then you are close to a lost cause as a human being.

Not one of these rules calls for a government program. But if every American followed them, poverty would end overnight.

 

Theodore Dalrymple exposes the latest fad in economic ressentiment as the zombie that it is.

Resentment is the one emotion that can last a lifetime and will never let you down. All other emotions are fleeting and unreliable by comparison. I have tried hating someone for years, but found it impossible: hatred fades like the colors of pressed flowers. But resentment! It is the perfect solution to one’s failure in life. And we are all of us failures in some sense or other, thank God, for no one would be as intolerable and the cause of so much resentment as the complete success.

Read it.

Just lucky, I guess.

President Barack Obama’s fundraising pilgrimage to California included all the liberal stations: Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and La Jolla.

Two patterns stood out: first, that Obama continues to be heckled even by friendly audiences; and second, that America’s richest political donors not only tolerate attacks on wealth but enjoy them, nodding and murmuring their approval when the president tells them they are the nation’s enemies.

What do they know that you don’t? Hmmm?

Read it.

And these are just the good things….

Read it.

• Democrat governors have enacted over $58 billion in higher taxes since 2011.

• This stands in stark contrast to Republican governors, who have signed over $36 billion in tax cuts into law since 2011.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Republicans and Democrats.

Read it.

It all started with beavers. When Alex Pentland was three years into his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan, in 1973, he worked part-time as a computer programmer for NASA’s Environmental Research Institute. One of his first tasks — part of a larger environmental-monitoring project — was to develop a method for counting Canadian beavers from outer space. There was just one problem: existing satellites were crude, and beavers are small. “What beavers do is they create ponds,” he recalls of his eventual solution, “and you can count the number of beavers by the number of ponds. You’re watching the lifestyle, and you get an indirect measure.”

Angelo Codevilla continues to document our descent into Liberal Fascism.

Confirming ordinary experience, the polls leave no doubt that the majority of Americans now regard the U.S. government as more a threat than a protector, acting beyond law or popular control. How government in America became “them” rather than “us,” what government’s loss of legitimacy means for this country, and whether lost confidence and legitimacy may be reclaimed any more than virginity, are questions we must ponder.

…

When some 200 paramilitary agents of the Bureau of Land Management dealt with a Nevada rancher using armored cars, took his herd of some 400 cattle, shot his bull, and tasered his son supposedly to collect a million dollars in unpaid grazing fees, few imagined that those cattle had eaten a million dollars’ worth of grass. Everyone who receives a bill from a government agency knows that the agency quickly multiplies that bill with interest and penalties, and that at best, ordinary citizens can argue before a judge (not a jury) only whether the agency followed its own procedures—not whether its judgments were just. Also, the American people’s near-universal experience is that merely pointing out a mistake to the IRS—or to any other agency—likely leads to its finding pretexts for imposing other, even heavier costs on you.

Moreover, no one was surprised to learn that the family of Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader and senior senator from Nevada, stood to benefit from the rancher’s dispossession. Rory Reed, Harry Reid’s son, is brokering the construction of large scale solar energy farms in the area. Some of the land where they are being built contains wildlife which is to be transferred to the land on which the rancher’s cattle have been grazing. The Bureau of Land Management, which decided to clear this particular land of cattle so that the transfer of said wildlife could proceed, is headed by one Neal Kornze, whose career consists exclusively of service to Senator Reed.

Americans are learning the hard way that the modern administrative state serves the powerful at the expense of ordinary citizens. That is why, the peculiarities of the rancher’s dispute notwithstanding, the American people reacted with something like “That, but for the grace of God, could be me.”

Steve Sailer writes one of the best explanations of ‘race’ I’ve ever read.

Q. What’s race all about?

A. Relatedness.

Race is about who is related to whom.

Q. Do you mean a race is a family?

A. Yes, an extended family. (To be precise, a particular type of extended family, one that’s more coherent over time than the norm, a distinction I’ll explain below.)

Q. Race means family? I’ve never heard of such a thing!

A. It’s remarkable how seldom this concept essential to understanding how the world works is mentioned in the press. Yet, in my Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, the first definition of “race” is:

“1. A group of persons related by common descent or heredity.”

Q. If races exist, then, pray tell, precisely how many there are?

A. How many neighborhoods are there in the place where you live?

Science fiction writer Sarah Hoyt discusses gender roles.

And that’s where we start. You see, it wasn’t that women didn’t believe men were smart or good at stuff. They did. They would actually brag about their husbands. Qualities such as ingeniousness, ability to climb the job ladder (such as it was. In the village most people were self-employed craftsmen and small time farmers) and to make money, ability to hold their own in a discussion, etc. all of these were highly valued. Women also valued men as protectors (they ARE bigger) and as influences in the kids’ lives.

What they didn’t think – and forgive me, I’m just reporting what I see – was that men were competent to run families or groups, or, frankly themselves, at least in some regards. For instance, if a guy appeared in public in utter disarray (or drunk) it was considered a grave fault on his wife’s part. Unless his wife was beaten and abused, in which case it was considered a REALLY grave fault on HIS part and often something the village women decided to do something about. (Meeting a bunch of very upset women in a dark alley at midnight cured some of them – if not all.)

Read it.

Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then; so it is with The Nation.

At a panel titled “Grassroots Organizing” at the Network for Public Education conference in Austin in March, an audience member asked the all-white panel for its definition of “grassroots.” The conference had been called to “give voice to those opposing privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing.”

As the questioner pointed out, those disproportionately affected by these developments are poor and minority communities. Chicago, for example, a city that is one-third white, has a public school system in which 90 percent of the students are children of color and 87 percent come from low-income families. When the city schools shut down last year, 88 percent of the children affected were black; when Philadelphia did the same, the figure was 81 percent.

You’d think black people might have something to contribute to a discussion about that process and how it might be resisted. Yet on this exclusively white panel at this predominantly white conference, they had no voice.

…

This ought to be a civil conversation among friends. Those born white and wealthy should not be slammed for developing a social conscience, becoming activists and trying to make the world a better place. But neither should the nature of their involvement be above critique. When their aim is to fight alongside low-income people and people of color as brothers and sisters, real advances are possible. But when they look down on these people as younger stepbrothers and stepsisters to be brought along for the ride, precious few gains are made.

Freeberg makes up a useful new word.

1. Humankind’s very first liberals, the cavemen who never bothered to learn to hunt or to brew ale; when the cave-conservatives dragged a big carcass back to the fire to carve up and feed everybody, the cave-pussies felt the need to justify their share of the meat, and so contributed some rules about how to divide it all up. Later on, they invented claiming credit for the meat, blaming the conservatives for whatever food poisoning might have happened, and vegetarianism.

2. Any modern day successor of the original cave pussies. Any liberal who implies, directly or indirectly, successfully or otherwise, that he and his friends are the ones who acquired this meat, just because he and his friends are the ones who are making rules about how it’s to be divided.

3. More broadly, anyone who confuses the provisioning of a valued commodity, with its regulation, and erroneously credits the rule-makers with the actual production of the assets.

Read it.

I’d be tempted to take Mr Glock with me.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

In practice, isn’t a “demagogue” just a political opponent with a silver tongue? Isn’t “demagoguery” simply rhetoric that hits political nerves you wish would stay eternally numb?

But before you ditch the whole concept, let me propose the following refinement: Demagoguery is the politics of Social Desirability Bias.

The heart of Social Desirability Bias: Some types of claims sound good or bad regardless of the facts. “Helping people” sounds good. “Acquiring luxuries” sounds bad. “Saving American jobs” sounds good. “Cheap nannies for upper-middle class families” sound bad. “Supporting our troops” sounds good. “Sympathizing with the enemy” sounds bad. “Raising the minimum wage” sounds good. “Measuring disemployment effects” sounds bad.

Any competent philosopher can construct cases where what sounds good is bad and what sounds bad is good. For instance: The minimum wage, good as it sounds, would be bad if it sharply increased unemployment of low-skilled workers. But when our competent philosopher runs for office, he has a clear incentive to keep his doubts to himself. If X sounds good, saying “Hooray for X” is a much easier way to win over an audience than “Sure X sounds good, but let’s calm down and consider the possibility that X is in fact bad.”

Read it.

If you want to understand why ‘climate change deniers’ refuse to bow to ‘the scientific consensus’, the history of what science ‘knows’ about nutrition is a good place to start.

For decades, Americans have organized their diet in a way to minimize their intake of saturated fats like butter and red meat. Vegetable oils and carbohydrates became a bigger part of our diet, because, we were repeatedly told, animal fats led to heart disease.

Today, however, we are learning that this advice was bogus. A recent landmark health study has concluded that there has never been a link between saturated fats and heart disease. The “settled science” on nutrition wasn’t quite so settled.

Read it.

Count Sir Bela of Eastmarch shows us how it’s done.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

More here.

The Other McCain is on the case.

To anyone who had been paying attention to cultural trends during the 1970s, the landslide election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was not really surprising. The average American who pulled the lever for Reagan might have had difficulty articulating what it was they were voting for, by they damned sure knew what they were voting against. It wasn’t just the manifest incompetence of Jimmy Carter’s administration and the political/economic “malaise” that they opposed. From the mid-1960s onward, Americans had felt a growing sense of helpless anger toward the youth counterculture that manifested itself in rock music, drug use, radical protests, and orgiastic sexuality. That counterculture had never really represented the mainstream majority of American youth, but by 1980, young people themselves were as fed up with the counterculture as their parents had been for the past 15 years.

It is too early to say we are witnessing a new youth backlash against the dominant progressivism of the Obama years, but why else would Princeton University freshman Tal Fortgang unload a powerful denunciation of the regnant left-wing campus orthodoxy?

Read it.

If you’ve ever met a Texan, you know that Texans love bragging about their state. You’ve probably heard the endless list—the bigness, the freedom, the trucks, the barbeque, the pride, the football—and, like many others, you’ve probably rolled your eyes. So please forgive me, for as a new-ish resident of the Lone Star State, I’d like to add one more item to that long, rambling list: No one in Texas seems to be talking all that much about Thomas Piketty.

If that name rings a bell, it’s because you’ve been reading the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, or basically anything on the Internet for the past few weeks. Piketty, described by the Times as “the latest overnight intellectual sensation,” is a French economist whose new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”—you know, as opposed to the Kapital that Marx wrote about—bemoans income inequality, exposes various flaws in our global economy, and calls for confiscatory global wealth taxes in order to stop Richard Branson from having all that fun.

I hate him already. ‘Well, damn the French!’ — John Cleese

Once you look past the patent silliness and First World problems of the almost-rich mentally scapegoating the already-rich, it becomes increasingly clear why income inequality has become the anxiety of choice for the upper-middle-class left. If you’re mad about your neighbor’s private jet, after all, it makes it a heck of a lot easier to ignore the poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks who was just denied access to a quality charter school—thanks, of course, to the charter-blocking policies of the politicians you voted (and perhaps raised funds) for.

Got it in one.

It’s quite timely—and telling—that Donald Sterling, the inarguably horrible man at the helm of the L.A. Clippers, was scheduled to receive a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles NAACP this month. Despite being outed as one of the most over-the-top racists in recent American memory, Sterling had donated sizable amounts to the civil rights group. It probably made him feel good.

It certainly made the NAACP feel good — race hustlers don’t come cheap; the problem is that they don’t stay bought.

Somewhere, you see, there might be a rich man kiteboarding right now off the coast of his private island. It is not confirmed, but he may have a supermodel riding on his back. One thing is sure: He does not have to go to the post office. We must stop him. Things like embarrassingly horrible government schools, and the kids trapped in them, can wait.

Freeberg has an opinion.

I hate the metric system.

Not that it doesn’t have its uses. If I’m calculating the accumulation of kinetic energy in an accelerating mass, and the capacity of that kinetic energy when it’s converted into something else, the metric system would be my first choice.

It is the advocacy for the metric system that cheeses me off. The idiotic arguments. “Ten is sensible”; that right there, that’s it. No, ding-dong, ten is not sensible. What is two-thirds of ten? You want to build a house that way?

See, for guys who have hammer-loops in their jeans that they use to actually hold hammers, and carry a tape measure clipped to their belts, twelve is better. It’s better for actually building things. Twelve is a composite that is the product of a low prime times the square of an even lower prime. Ten is just two primes, great for multiplying but lousy for dividing.

I remember the day I realized that ‘progressives’ were really reactionaries with long hair — it was the day I read a diatribe against the metric system by some hippie in the Whole Earth Catalog, reciting all of the arguments that the Duke of Wellington would have used against it (except, perhaps, the expression of contempt for the Lower Classes).

Steve Sailer likes to push on ropes.

As the topic of race continues to pop up in the news now and then, what with the Los Angeles Clippers imbroglio and whatnot, it’s worth reconsidering the conventional wisdom on the subject, which has congealed into: “Race does not biologically exist because, uh … Science!”

Nicholas Wade, the New York Times’ chief genetics reporter, has published 1,052 articles in the newspaper of record since 1983. For most of this century, Wade has been methodically waging war in the Science section of the NYT against the liberal creationist myth that race isn’t real. He has now written a definitive book on the existence of biological differences among races, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, which will be published on May 6.

Read it.

Do they really care, or do they just care about hangin’ with the Cool Kids?

Read it.

Of course, there are many English expressions that have no precise equivalent in French, too, but articles like this one are fun to read.