Megan McArdle ponders an interesting wrinkle in the housing mess.

Playing with mortgage terms cannot prop up prices, because it cannot create more homebuyers, nor convince them to pay more than they want for a house.

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Note that, although a native African, she passes the “paper bag and ruler” test.

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Holding a “fiscal responsibility summit” at the White House in the middle of a government spending spree is a bit like having an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at a frat house on homecoming weekend.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

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A teachable moment?

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It’s not what you think.

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If the government is going to bail out the irresponsible, why be responsible?

… I had to decide if it was worth getting out of bed to earn the money to pay my mortgage or not. Like all those bankers that got a bailout, I was wondering if it might be worth more to me to default on my mortgage than to pay it. I mean, what if the only people getting bailed out are the ones who truly screwed up? Being right doesn’t mean being rich and I didn’t want to miss out.

Steve Sailer is eager to get with the new Attorney General’s program.

So, let’s talk about the Holder family’s racial background, which is pretty interesting, although he forgot to mention it during his big Black History Month speech to his new charges in the Department of Justice.

I’m sure he won’t mind us talking about his family’s race, since he just insisted that we all talk about race all month.

Be careful what you wish for, Eric.

Funny thing: Most of the “black” elite in the U.S. — Holder, Barack Obama, Colin Powell, Beyonce, Halle Berry, the Governor of New York whose name I can never remember — would pass the paper-bag-and-ruler test.

“Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” — Luke 6:42

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Men, of course, don’t have any comparable “love affair” with neckties. I suppose there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

In Japan, “nationalist economics” is a serious, well-thought out philosophy that entails short run sacrifices for the long run general welfare. In the West, our elites have been trained to scoff at nationalist economics as mere mindless populism, but the best minds in Japan have developed an economic culture that’s perhaps too sophisticated for American economists and their fellow travelers in the punditry to understand.

The Chinese, in contrast, have followed the Taiwanese model of manufacturing anonymously under contract to Japanese and American brand names. They churn out stuff and let other countries’ companies sell it as their own. For the Chinese, it’s all about meeting minimum quality and cost parameters to get the next deal, not to build a reputation with the public for high quality. How many recognizable brand names have the Chinese created so far? There’s Lenovo, and then there’s …

Megan McArdle prods our collective memory.

Our memories are distorted by two things:  first, the tendency of all cultures to focus on their own outliers (many fewer people work for silicon valley startups in real life than in either our entertainment, or the popular imagination), and second, the fact that the people who have written about the period are abnormally likely to have come from successful families who pushed them through an education.  Their memory of a well-appointed blue-collar childhood in a nice suburb on Dad’s generous steelworker wages endures; few memories of a straggling blue-collar childhood as the child of a factory janitor do, because those kids were less likely to go to college and become people of letters.  The successful and educated are disproportionately likely to be represented in all parts of our written and spoken culture, from man on the street interviews to letters to the editor.  History really is written by the winners.

Steve Sailer delves into one of the burning questions of our day.

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The problem is, there’s one group that did not assume the risks of the individual autonomy boom.  Children are not benefited by the unstable new co-habiting options that adults are devising for themselves.  Adults are merely rationalizing their own preferences when they intone that children are better off raised by separated parents than in an unhappy marriage.  Hogwash.  Most children would far prefer two unhappy married parents to two happier divorced or never-married parents enjoying their new freedom or new spouses.  Perhaps eventually, if any expectation that a procreative union is permanent is abolished, children will adjust, but I doubt it.  The preview afforded by the black community is not reassuring (though I admit that inner-city Milwaukee is not readily comparable to Lyons or Stockholm).

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For years, we’ve been among those pointing out that the really important thing in economic growth isn’t invention, but innovation. It’s the process of actually taking an idea and successfully bringing it to market in a way that people want that matters in the long run. Coming up with new ideas is only a small part of the process. That’s why we often have so much trouble with the way the patent system works. It greatly enhances the role of simply coming up with the new idea, and then makes the important part — the innovation — a lot more expensive.

Preach it, brother.

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Children coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s were born into families that, on average, enjoyed the greatest material prosperity and the best housing the world had ever known. The security offered by an enormously expanded and comfortable middle class allowed these children to crusade on behalf of various causes. Those who called themselves “progressive” pushed to expand individual civil rights, sometimes at the expense of what others perceived as community rights or duties, but at the same time they were often deeply suspicious of capitalism and markets and for this reason pushed to restrict the rights of private property owners in order to expand on their own notions of community rights.

Take the case of the Bay Area, where land prices were on par with urban areas elsewhere in the country up until 1970. Then, as the area pioneered in land use regulations of every kind, house prices started a steep climb. Where the rule of thumb had long been that the average American family in any given urban market would expect to pay about three times its annual salary for an average house, by the early years of the 21st century it had reached the point where that average house in the Bay Area would be the equivalent of ten, eleven or even twelve years of the average family’s income. At the same time, however, in lightly regulated urban areas, even extremely dynamic ones like those of Atlanta, Houston or Phoenix, house prices registered no comparable rise against incomes.

An excellent analysis. The people who whine most tediously about the effects of the current crisis are the very ones who created it in the first place with their short-sighted and elitist policies.

Bryan Caplan asks an interesting question and finds an even more interesting answer.

Alexander Pope said “For forms of government, let fools contest / That which is best administered is best.”

If the government provides services efficiently and doesn’t steal too much of your money, do you really care whether it’s democratic. I don’t. People forget that democracy is a means, not an end.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

In an earlier post I proposed an economics course built around World of Warcraft. I have much less experience teaching statistics than teaching economics and I suspect the game is less suited for the former than the latter purpose. But it does occur to me that it provides quite a lot of opportunities for observing data and trying to infer patterns from it and so could be used to both explain and apply statistical inference. And I suspect that, as in the case of economics, application to a world with which the student was familiar and involved and to problems of actual interest to him would have a significant positive effect on attention and understanding.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to point to things at which some would rather not have people pointing.

For a couple of years, I’ve been pointing out that because African-American culture has become so narrow and inward-looking, it’s now having a harder time producing high achievers outside of Officially Black fields such as basketball, football, and some forms of entertainment. Thus, the black race is increasingly represented at the top of many categories by half-black individuals (typically raised by white mothers or white maternal grandparents). Barack Obama is only the most obvious example of the rise of this New Mulatto Elite. (In contrast, the Old Mulatto Elite, such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, generally had white ancestors in the paternal line.)

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More evidence that Wal-Mart isn’t Auschwitz after all.

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Want a daughter with blond hair, green eyes and pale skin?

A Los Angeles clinic says it will soon help couples select both gender and physical traits in a baby when they undergo a form of fertility treatment. The clinic, Fertility Institutes, says it has received “half a dozen” requests for the service, which is based on a procedure called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD.

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The decision was made last week after California Rep. Barbara Lee, chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, and Hispanic groups complained to the White House that Judd Gregg, the Republican senator from New Hampshire slated to head Commerce, couldn’t be trusted to conduct a complete Census. The National Association of Latino Officials said it had “serious questions about his willingness to ensure that the 2010 Census produces the most accurate possible count.”

Mr. Chapman worries about a revival of the effort led by minority groups after the 2000 Census to adjust the totals for states and cities using statistical sampling and computer models. In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Department of Commerce v. U.S. House that sampling could not be used to reapportion congressional seats. But it left open the possibility that sampling could be used to redraw political boundaries within the states.

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TANF has been a remarkable success. Welfare caseloads nationally fell from 12.6 million in 1997 to fewer than five million in 2007. And yet despite this achievement, House Democrats are seeking to undo Mr. Clinton’s reforms under the cover of the stimulus bill.

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Wells saw no difference between communism and fascism and Goldberg puts a compelling case that neither should we. Mussolini began as a socialist agitator. The Nazis were a national socialist party which despised bourgeois democracy and offered a comprehensive welfare state.

And this appears in the most left-wing major newspaper in Britain. Go figure.

Steve Sailer has some fun with a Great Metropolitan Newspaper that believes a fellow whose father is Jewish and mother is Korean is a “white supremacist”.

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In S.M. Stirling’s Draka books, the Citizen class don’t bear their own children, but rather have serf host-mothers do it, and the host-mother is retained as the child’s nanny until it goes off to school. Serfs are, of course, typically non-white. Perhaps we’re gradually backing into this system.

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Read it.

Google says that Latitude is a new way to keep in touch with people, but it’s not as if there is a gap in the market for this. If I want to keep in touch with people, I could email them or find them on Facebook or follow their tweets on Twitter or – and here’s something for the good people at Google to get their clever heads around – I could call them up and ask them where they are. Indeed, if somebody created some sort of technology that allowed me to keep out of touch with people, I might kiss their face.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading. This is especially sharp.

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Tradition is there for a reason….

The Hog isn’t doing politics any more. Nope. Wouldn’t think of it.

The bailouts will prolong our economic problems, because they will keep inept people in control of major businesses, and they will also permit overpaid workers to continue charging too much for their work. They’ll also hurt good businesses by preventing them from taking the places of their failed competitors. In a healthy economy, bad companies fail, and good companies take their places, and everyone is better off. In the Bush-Obama socialist utopia, we keep bad companies alive and prevent good companies from replacing them. It’s like having the opposite of an immune system. We are generating antibodies to success and attacking it without mercy.

Just tools, food, and religion. No politics here.

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Or just your poopsie-woopsie, depending on how the numbers come out.

Darwin award.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

David Friedman discusses the strategic implications of picking the right name.

A well chosen name wins an argument by assuming its conclusion. Label cash subsidies to foreign government as “foreign aid” and who can be so hard hearted as to oppose them. Call subsidies to the public schools “aid to education” and you neatly skip over the question of whether additional spending in the public school system results in more education. Label something “pollution” and is no longer necessary to offer evidence that it is bad, since everyone knows pollution is bad—even thermal pollution, otherwise described as warm water. Occasionally we even get dueling names. Both “right to life” and “pro-choice” are obviously good things; how could anyone be against either?

Of course, only stupid people are deceived by this practice; but, since that’s at least half the population, it’s important.

Jerry Pournelle tells an inconvenient truth.

I believe that the worst threat to the future of the United States is a continuing trend: we are not properly educating the brightest 25% of our young people, and that will being about disaster; while our failure to teach relevant skills to the below average children contributes to the coming disaster. A nation of uneducated bright people coupled with a large part of the population who haven’t been taught to do anything and thus are not only pretty well useless but know it can lead to a number of scenarios, few of them pleasant. And that, I put it to you, is where we are now, and those who continue to promote the idea that every child deserves a world class university prep education is an enemy of the Republic.

Read it.

Robert Matthews, who retired as Chief Assayer of the Royal Mint in 2002, said: “If the public starts losing confidence in coins and notes, you get people refusing to take them.

I have a question: Who would care? It’s not as if the coins (or notes) have any intrinsic value. If people can’t tell the difference between the “real” ones and the “fake” ones, the only people to whom it could possibly matter are government bureaucrats.

Read it.

I suspect that the Illuminati are somehow involved.

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… is getting very little attention — which is a pity, because it’s the best alternative.

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Gee, I wonder which religion will be the first to hit the publishers with death threats?

I just wonder.

Megan McArdle has some interesting thoughts on the Porkout.

It is very obvious, now that we have the stimulus plans, that the Democrats are using stimulus as an excuse to spend money on things they want to spend money on.  Their demand for things like alternative energy programs is inelastic; it’s just that it happens, right now, to be convenient to bill them as stimulus.

Steve Sailer nails it yet again.

Portland, Oregon is, of course, near the top of any list of Stuff White People Like. It has it all: environmental restrictions on suburban development, trams, liberal social attitudes, bicycle trails, awareness, an upscale population, microbreweries, sterility, and so much more. Not surprisingly, white people like Portland. In fact, it was the only city in the country where reporter Jonathan Tilove found, while researching his book The View from Martin Luther King Drive, that white gentrifiers were driving blacks away from the local MLK Drive. Similarly, it’s one of the few cities in the country with a growing population of Reform/Conservative Jews.

Nonwhites, eh … not so much.

Read it.

Apparently the Obama Nation may include a bunch of freeloading relatives. Africans are apparently a lot like Arabs that way.

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A German scholar of ancient languages takes a new look at the sacred book of Islam. He maintains that it was created by Syro-Aramaic speaking Christians, in order to evangelize the Arabs. And he translates it in a new way.

Like Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, I find fascinating the stories about how various sacred books aren’t what they seem.

On the other hand, bear in mind that St John Damascene, who worked as a bureaucrat for the Caliph in the 8th century, discussed Islam as if it were a Christian heresy; and presumably he knew more about it than we do.

Read it.

When I got to my office this morning here on Capitol Hill, I picked up the Washington Post and started looking for its story on the annual March for Life, which usually brings somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 people to the city to mark the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. There are times when the advance story makes the Metro front, but most of the time you look for something short inside the paper somewhere.

I’m still looking. Did I miss something?

Well, it serves as a useful reminder that the Washington Post isn’t really a newspaper but rather a spin machine for the Chattering Classes.

But beyond that, this incident serves to illustrate my earlier point that the Establishment Media no longer function as effective gatekeepers to the public brain; they no longer control what news is available and what slant that news will take. A good thing, I’m thinking.

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A significant distinction that many overlook.

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The whole system of handling returns in the publishing business is insane. One of the silver linings of the current economic panic is that the system may be fixed.

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Read it twice. This contains some highly significant ideas.

I argue that we should abolish the Freedom of Information Act and instead make transparency the default for government’s business, which should occur digitally and in the open, so citizens may search, link, comment on, and analyze it. Rather than our asking the government to release our information, the government should ask our permission not to.

Well, that ain’t gonna happen, and anybody who thinks that it might is smoking and not sharing.

The most interesting point is the one that the author entirely misses: The internet allows public officials, especially public officials who are trying to move beyond the comfort zone of the Nomenklatura, direct access to the public.

Reagan used radio and television to speak directly to the American people when he couldn’t get his programs past Congress and the bureaucracy. Then the dinosaur media caught on — and when Bush had some twitches in that direction, they went all passive-aggressive gatekeeper on him. But the Internet seriously degrades the establishment’s gatekeeper power, whether broadcast or print. And the various government-sponsored web sites are the key to that revolution.

IF OBAMA IS AS SMART AS HIS WORSHIPPERS ALL KEEP SAYING HE IS, the White House web site will have links to his position on every single scrap of legislation and every single controversial issue that pops up its ugly head — and he will have a position on every such issue. If you want to know what the administration’s position is on any subject, you won’t have to depend on the Spin Cycle media; just go right to the source and ask the horse. The danger here is the White House internal bureaucracy. As in any bureaucracy, control of information is power, and bureaucrats like sharing information/power about as much as they like spending their own money.

Let’s see if he (a) understands the opportunity and (b) has the balls to use it.

These will be interesting times.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

And quite often he’s dead on, too.

The Hog doesn’t do political commentary any more. Nope. Wouldn’t think of it. Just tools and food, and some religion here and there. That’s all. Nothing else.

I can’t help feeling some excitement over the inauguration of a black President. I just wish it were someone else.

Hear, hear. Thomas Sowell, perhaps. Or Walter Williams.

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

As I reported last September, even though the four Sand States (which have 21% of the country’s population) accounted for about half the foreclosures, they must have accounted for an even higher proportion of the defaulted dollars, which is the key variable in setting off the world financial crisis. That’s because median home prices in California were almost triple that in the rest of the country at the peak of the bubble.