Category Archives: Culture

The Free Money Era

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For a long time I have been calling the period starting in the late 1980’s into the Great Recession the “Free Money Era.” The currency arrangements of today were put into place in the 1980’s with the Louvre Accords.  This established the system of fiat currency we have today. Not only are all currencies fiat, they float against one another according to the dictates of the main central banks. It is what has allowed China to go from a backward society to a semi-modern industrial power in one generation.

It is also what has allowed for the massive expansion of credit. That credit bubble has manifested itself in many ways. One is the housing boom and subsequent bust. The public sector debt problems are another. Easy money allowed Detroit to borrow into oblivion. The record amounts of personal and corporate debt is another result. In the 1970’s, it was impossible to run up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. No bank would every lend that much, without suitable collateral. Today, it is common.

Another, less obvious example is entertainment. Sports entertainment has boomed since the 1980’s. A big part of that is borrowed money. The owners buy the franchises on debt and since debt is easy, there are lots of people with credit money bidding for franchises, so the value of franchises skyrocketed. In fact, credit money has inflated all assets. Then you have the patrons who pay higher and higher ticket prices, because they finance their lifestyle on easy credit. The modern age is built on piles of IOU’s.

Nothing can last forever. All of this debt fueled growth will come to a screeching halt when the upper limit of debt is reached. This is a decent article on the topic of college football. touches on the underlying irrationality of the college sports model. The article goes into a lot of stuff, but skips past the root cause. The college bubble is also a product of the debt bubble. Eventually, the colleges will run out of people able to borrow for college. At that point, the financial model of college and college sports begins to unravel.

Obama the Dim

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I’ve taken to calling Obama “Obumbles” because it infuriates my liberal friends. Liberals have an emotional need to believe they are the smartest people in the room, so causally accusing their hero of being a dimwit offends them greatly. It is the hangover from the “scientific socialism” days when the Left swore their preferred arrangements were the natural order. In a better time, true believers would justify their actions by claiming they were doing God’s will. Today, Progressive fanatics believe reason is on their side.

Anyway, this article by Kevin Williamson touches on that a bit. Obama is supposed to be the smartest man in the room. He may have an above average IQ, I don’t know. Steve Sailer thinks his test scores were probably high average at worst and most likely above average. That’s not enough, of course. The Unibomber was a genius. Mao was probably genius or at least very shrewd. Personality is the hand that wields IQ. In the case of Obama, the personality is one that is disinterested and lazy.

It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.

I would add that Obama is emblematic of the modern meritocracy. Accumulating credentials stands in place of accumulating accomplishments. Starting a business takes courage. Making it successful is hard work. Getting an MBA is relatively easy and it pays much better. The result is we have a lot of MBA-toting people who cannot run a lemonade stand and a shortage of honest entrepreneurs. A fair number of those credentialed professionals could never run a small business or dare try to start one.

That’s one side effect of managerialism. Getting credentials is a straight forward process with fairly clear instructions. If you have above average test scores, it means going to a good college and doing what you are told for four years. This opens the doors to elite society. Since the number of people meeting the minimum threshold exceeds the number of seats, the meritocracy quickly becomes a game of who you know and how to game the system. The result is a lot of credentialed idiots running around elite society.

Maybe that is self-correcting or maybe it does not matter. How much damage does a John Kerry really cause? Obama is president and he has proven to be fairly harmless. The bigger issue is that the ruling class, which depends on the ranks of the managerial class for talent, because incredibly narrow. The strivers at the bottom are motivated to emulate the people at the top, because that appears to be the path to success. Over time, the diversity of thought falls to zero. Everyone thinks and says the same things.

This happened with the Chinese exam system. Initially, it was a great way to find and cultivate talent. In time, the people entering the system saw that emulating those in the system was the golden ticket. The reason is the people in the system selected for people who would reinforce their position within the system. A few spins of this wheel and the imperial administration was staffed with men who only knew esoteric stuff like lines from old poetry and calligraphy. Something similar is happening to America.

 

Riley Cooper

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The root of the word culture is “cult.” Modern people hear the word cult and think of nuts living in a compound somewhere, waiting for the aliens to arrive. If you are old enough, you may recall Jim Jones and his wacky escapades in Guyana. We never think of our culture or customs as anything like a cult, but every society has their beliefs, customs and taboos. More important, every society has its rewards and consequences for either exulting the prevailing beliefs or violating one of the taboos. It’s what makes up culture.

Therefore, every society has its morality police who roam around testing private virtue in public ways. Paula Deen was sent off to internal banishment for being honest about dropping a now forbidden word in the before times. Travon Martin was sainted for confirming an article of faith about America, held by the people in charge. That is, white people secretly wish to kill black bodies. The morality police use these sorts of examples to both crush the wrong thinkers and warn the righteous of the consequences of sin.

Now we have Riley Cooper, a stupid redneck who was caught dropping the magic word at a country show. At this moment, his career as a professional football player is close to being over simply because he holds views that are different from the ruling cult. The pressure on the Philadelphia Eagles to cut him will be high. If he is cut, no team will sign him, fearing a visit from the morality police. It is OK to sign a murderer or rapist. Those are just crimes against people. Signing a racist would be a crime against the gods.

The same people snuggling up with a picture of MLK every night are now claiming Riley Cooper must be punished because he is white. In other words, it’s not about racism, as a universal concept. It is about hating white people as a sign of virtue. In this case, a white guy using the word “nigger” is bad because he is white, not because using the word “nigger” is always bad.  One day soon, whites will be forced to use separate drinking fountains and have to ride in the back of the bus, just like a , well, you get the point.

Civic religions operate on fear. In cases like this, it is the fear that people will notice the nutty contradictions. Cooper is not working math puzzles in his free time. He is a dumb jock, but he sees the double standard every day. His teammates call one another “nigger” all the time and it is considered cool. In other words, he foolish decision to get tanked up and start yelling “nigger” is not a problem because he said a bad word. it is a problem because it underscores this obvious double standard. He must be punished.

In the name of racial tranquility, they are now demanding that the black players denounce their teammate. It is not enough to hang the scarlet “N” on the white guy, they have to dictate the thoughts of the black guys too. A cynic would say our rulers like it when we are trying to kill one another. That implies a logical intent. The more likely answer is it is simple zealotry. They have been trained to yell at the white racist and defend the back victim. If the black guys don’t join in they must suffering from the effects of institutional racism.

The best part of this, the part that should lead one to think there is not only a God, but he has a wicked sense of humor, is the presence of Michael Vick. This is the guy who was found to be torturing animals for pleasure. He would drown puppies in buckets of water and electrocute them. If he really needed to get off, he would hang them from trees. By any reasonable standard, Michael Vick is a demented and dangerous lunatic. News actors are running to him for his opinion about the monster that is Riley Cooper.

This is all madness and it will end poorly. Humans are designed to be suspicious of and antagonistic toward those not like them. We evolved in small groups and suspicion of outsiders was always an evolutionary advantage. In the case of disputes over precious resources, tribal hatred rising to the level of religious faith. In a modern, multi-ethnic society such as ours, a certain amount of friction is natural. Deliberately exacerbating it is a good way to get a civil war, but the social justice warriors probably want that.

The Dullards Of Maryland

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Maryland has some of the worst drivers in America. If you are traveling north-south, you will be on I-95 through the state. This means you will spend a lot of time behind someone in the left lane driving below the speed limit. You are going along at 70 mph until you come up on someone doing 55. You then have to get around them by passing them in the center lane. Maybe there will be a line of cars stacked up behind the idiot, as drivers figure out how to get around the rolling road block. It’s the craziest thing, a common site.

Another oddity of the state is the person driving in your blind spot. They camp out on your passenger side usually, just off fender. You speed up, they speed up. You slow down, they slow down. What’s really crazy about it is you can speed up to 90 and they will keep up with you. Not always, but I’ve had this happen more than once. You’re trying to get over to the right and they just sit in that blind spot. The only way to shake them out of this is to cut them off. You get the one finger solute as they pass you.

The crazier version of this is the combination of the rolling roadblock and they slow down speed up guy.You come up on a slow poke in the left lane. You decide to pass using the middle lane. They will speed up as you pass trying to remain in your blind spot. They were doing 55 and then they force you to crack 100 to get around them. Once you get by them, they slow down again and disappear into the rear view. Talk to locals about this and they will get indignant. Being a roadway vigilante is the divine right around here.

Of course, part of this and other weird habits is the extreme provincialism you see in the Baltimore area. People in small states often have a stubborn localism. I’ve met people in Rhode Island who have never left the state. That’s close to impossible, given that a wrong turn takes you over a state line. In Baltimore, there are lots of people who have never left the state. I know college graduates who went to college in the state and got a jobs that never require travel. Such isolation inevitably results in weird habits and attitudes.

There’s another aspect that is peculiar to Maryland. Baltimore has a very high number of dullards.  Out of curiosity I looked up IQ by state. The first link was this one. It seems to jive with what Steve Sailer has reported. He’s one of the most reliable writers on the subject so I assume it a good estimate. Maryland ranks 32. A safe bet is that the Baltimore area is below the state average and the smart fraction is very thin. A big part of it is the demographics, but another piece of the puzzle may be the lead paint problem.

On the other hand, Rhode Island ranks 33 on the IQ list and they don’t have the demographic challenges nor the bizarre driving habits, but maybe they have other strange habits with which I am unfamiliar. On the other other hand, Baltimore used to be a city dependent on low-skill labor. It could simply be a carry over from when the city was a natural magnet for the stupid looking for work. It;s hard to know, but I do know I have never experienced the combination of dullness and provincialism anywhere else.

A Slap Fight

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Governor Tiny has the chattering classes talking about the brewing fight between “libertarians” and “conservatives” over the direction of the GOP.  Here’s a representative example of the coverage. The writer labels one side the establishment and the other insurgents, but calling the GOP conservative is serious error. That’s the official line, but that’s gratuitous nonsense. America’s ruling elites range from fanatically left-wing to mildly liberal. They agree on everything, except how fast to proceed. That’s the only dispute.

The Republicans are mostly a governor on the Democrats. The Democrats want to rush off and implement their latest fads right now, while the Republicans try to slow them down, but largely supporting them. These “cooler heads” used to be in the Democrat party, but they were chased off in the 1990’s. In every fight, the establishment types find some reason to give into the Left on most of what they want. Not everyone is happy with this arrangement.  As Michael Walsh noted on NRO, it is a good time to have the fight.

It makes for some good theater, but nothing changes until there is catastrophe. That’s why every epoch is book-ended by violent conflicts and great turmoil. The people in charge like the ways things are, so they will not fundamentally alter anything. It’s only when the system becomes unstable or untenable that change can happen. The old guard will not leave quietly, so that means a new guard will have to force them out. That’s the best case scenario, but that’s not the way to bet. What comes next is not going to be pleasant.

Complex Systems

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One of the things you learn quickly when working with complex software is that one tiny change in one area of the program can result in unexpected behavior in another, unrelated, part of the software. Even when you know the software in detail, you are often surprised by the results of small changes. The reason for this is complexity does not grow linearly. Every new condition added to the program, results in multiples of processes and outcomes. The possible results easily exceed your ability to keep track of in your head.

Anyway, the social planners never seem to get this or even recognize it exists. They are so confident in their power to model the new socialist man they blithely assume all sorts of things about the human condition. ObamaCare is a good example. They started with one goal in mind. They wanted to transfer the costs of giving middle-class health care to the poor from the government to private business. The obvious solution was to force employers to pay for their employees insurance, as part of their regular compensation.

Then they realized that the unemployed and seasonal would not get coverage so they came up with the individual mandate to solve that one problem. This sounded like a brilliant solution. If you did not have health insurance, then the IRA would chase after you and maybe some other agencies would harass you. Then some one noticed that the people in the underclass could not afford insurance and were no scared of the IRS. After all, the IRS only terrorizes taxpayers and no one in the ghetto pays taxes. What to do.

The solution was expanding Medicaid and subsidizing private insurance. This means passing new laws and regulation to force states to expand Medicare. On and on it went until the result was a 2,000 page bill requiring tens of thousands of regulators writing tens of thousands of pages of regulations. All of which would be layered on top of the existing tens of thousands of regulations. A massively complex system was going to bolted onto an already massively complex system the legislators did not understand.

Since becoming law, we have been treated to a series of unexpected results. Employers are afraid to hire, not knowing the consequences. Their lawyers quickly figured out a way out of the mandate by moving full time people to part time. Hundreds of thousands have lost benefits because they are now considered part time. Now, cities in financial trouble will follow suit by throwing their workers onto the government system to avoid paying health care bills. It turns out that more complexity was not the answer to the problem.

The result of all of this is pretty much the opposite of what the ObamaCare designers expected. Instead of decreasing the cost to government, costs will go up faster. Instead of more people with insurance, you will see fewer people with insurance. Doctors, seeing their earnings prospects decline are leaving the system and finding ways to carve out private systems for upper middle-class clients. On and on it goes. A myriad of unexpected outcomes accelerating the collapse of the health care system.

Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know. The opposite of that is being in Congress.

 

Stupid Party Update

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Looks like the Stupid Party is preparing to make Obama a hero this fall. The hilarious part of it is they will not just make Obama look like Lincoln they will end up giving the store away at the end. It is a familiar story. The Stupid Party looks around and sees that their base is wandering off in disgust. They think the way to get them back is to pick a pointless fight with the other guys over the budget. They will make a bunch of noises intended to get “their side” ready for battle. It’s all a big show intended to fool the people back home.

A handful of Congressmen, who really want to reign in the blob, will be front and center making their case. The press will play it cool for a while hoping for a shutdown. Then they will pile on the hapless Stupid Party like convicts on a new inmate. After a week of beatings, Boehner will cave and give the White House a blank check. Conservative Inc. will chatter on about about the need to get more Stupid Party members in Congress and win back the White House for the SP’s. Rinse. Repeat.

I’ve been reading a lot of European history of late. One thing that always strikes me is how the nobles were able to set themselves up in power and maintain that power. They were clearly better educated and certainly in the top tier of intelligence for their respective populations. There were some blockheads springing from the royal loins, but they self-policed. If the next in line was an idiot, he would often “fell ill” in his youth and never made it to adulthood. If that did not work, then death by misadventure was an option.

Democracies are supposed to work the same way, just without the inherited positions. and cool pageantry. Even the children of pols have to stand for election. That’s the self-policing. The retarded Kennedy can be placed in a safe Congressional seat, but he is not going to be running for president. The smart ones are groomed for bigger things. Plenty slip through the net and make it to the senate or a prominent position in the Executive, but the legislature tends to be the main collection point for those who rose too high.

What explains the Stupid Party?

I have not had time to think this through, but my sense is the parties have changed since the 1980’s. The “new” economy born out of the Louvre Accords allowed the ruling class of America to sever itself from the middle class entirely. From the 1930’s through the 1980’s, the Democrat party was the home of cultural elites and the working and middle class voters. The GOP was the home of the business and financial classes along with upper middle and some middle class voters.Both parties were dominated by whites.

Today, the Democrats are the authoritarian party. They are the aristocrats. They jealously guard the interests and prerogatives of the state and the elites. There’s a reason we have gone through three major financial crisis and no one has gone to jail. There’s a reason why Wall Street gives 2-to-1 to Democrats. As has always been true of authoritarians, they gain popular support by promising the lower classes free stuff from the middle class. It is the classic top plus the bottom against the middle approach to politcs.

On the other side, the GOP has become the home of the white middle classes. They still have plenty of upper class businessmen who run the Chamber of Commerce, but those are folks decidedly not in the elite. The body shop owner is now solidly Republican, but so are most of his employees. Government, Gays, Guns and God is what unites the working class whites with the middle class whites. The GOP is now the plebeians, except they lack anyone with the skill and courage of a Gaius Licinius.

The Stupid Party not only has an IQ deficit, they also have another problem. They don’t get it. They look at the fight as just one group of loyal Americans against another group of loyal Americans. They think they can have honest dealings with the other side. In reality, the other side wants them dead. We are in a cold civil war and the establishment elites are playing to win. They are not interested in compromise. The result is the Stupid Party shows up to every fight hoping to appeal to the other side’s sense of fair play.

Smart Fraction Theory

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John Derbyshire has a bit in his weekly transmission bout Smart Fraction Theory. The argument, one that John describes well in his broadcast, is that a society needs to have a certain percentage of the population with high IQ in order to maintain the institutions necessary for a functioning society. The author of the paper argues that there is a threshold number of “smart people” described as possessing an IQ above 108. About 30% of the American population falls into that category, as of the date of the paper.

A basket case like Equatorial Guinea probably has less than 1% that fall into this category as they have an average IQ at about 60. The few truly intelligent rule over the rest in the same way the one eyed man is the king of the blind. In fact, the result of this tiny smart fraction is that the powerful few are always on the hunt for smart people who could compete with them. The result is a brain drain, where the smart either flee or risk being killed. Then there is the issue of the smart breeding with the stupid, rather than the smart.

John raises the topic in relation to Detroit. No one says it publicly, but the general belief is that when Detroit went black it was never coming back. The crime, corruption and dysfunction were baked into the cake and would follow the predictable path. Coleman Young, the first black mayor, was so openly hostile to whites that he could fairly be described as the Robert Mugabe of American politics. Like post-colonial African leaders, he combined Marxism with a hatred of white people. The results were predictable.

The conclusion many make is that since there are no majority black societies that are thriving, the cause of the problem must be IQ. Prior to the 60’s, Detroit had a majority white population who supplied the bulk of the “smart fraction” needed to carry the underclass. Once they left, the remaining black population lacked the number of smart people to carry the underclass. The result is what we see in sub-Saharan Africa. That tiny elite then began looting the city like termites. Collapse was the inevitable result.

I think that looking strictly at IQ misses a wide swath of observable facts that play a role as well. Lebanon is not exactly brimming with geniuses. If not for outside intervention by Israel and Syria, it would be a peaceful and prosperous land, by the standards of the Arab world. It would not be a rich country, but it would not be Detroit either. West Virginia is brimming with pinheads, yet manages to avoid the pathologies we see in Detroit and other black cities. Culture can and does provide a structure within which people make choices.

Much of what plagues sub-Saharan Africa is anti-colonialism. The ruling elite that replaced the Europeans rulers were motivated by what turned out to be an insane desire to scrub away the stain of colonialism. That led to doing the opposite of what made sense in many cases. Killing the white farmers in Mozambique resulted in the exodus of all whites, along with their wealth and expertise.  Robert Mugabe eventually went down the same path and Zimbabwe is now one of the poorest nations in the world. Negative identity is death.

Detroit went through a similar process. The same is true of many cities, particularly those in the north. Blacks had moved from the Old Confederacy to the north for factory and service jobs. Whites found a way to segregate without resorting to the same tactics of the South. Eventually, blacks figured out that the anti-racism of Northern whites was just a pose so they could pretend to be the moral superiors of Southern whites.The bitterness of blacks who came along in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s is due in large part to the realization.

That’s the big question raised by the Detroit bankruptcy. We’ll probably never have a public debate on IQ. We can have a public debate on culture. The Left’s desire to nurse black hatred of whites cannot hold up if every majority black city in the nations is falling into bankruptcy. Even a few is enough to get the attention of the public. The fact that race relations appear to be getting worse, despite the election of Obama twice, says the gap between public debate and on-the-ground reality is getting big. That can’t last forever.

The Drawbridge Effect

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The drawbridge effect is a phenomenon often noted by bad thinkers. That’s where a group of over-class types gentrify a formerly beaten down area. Once it gets going, they begin to raise the drawbridge to keep out the hoi polloi. That usually means jacking up property taxes, layering on building regulations and limiting development. The city of Cambridge Massachusetts is a good example. Try building a house or building an apartment building in that city and you will be met with waves of regulators and community activists.

That’s why the population of Cambridge Mass is lower than it was in 1950.

We may be seeing something similar in the world of college sports. This story shows how it works. In this case, the big five conferences have hoovered up all of the good properties. They have left the undesirable properties in what they call the mid-major conferences. All of the conference commissioners have indicated two things. One is they are no longer interested in adding teams. The other thing is they now want special rules for themselves. They are, after all, the elite and being elite means not abiding by the rules

In America these days, there is one set of laws for the prols and another set for the people in charge. As we see in college sports, the people at the top lock in place a set of rules that give them the bulk of social benefits. Those same rules will spread the costs onto everyone else and make it impossible for the prols to compete. The drawbridge is the set of rules and regulations promulgated by the people in charge. Throughout America, the sound you hear is the raising of the drawbridge. What matters is which side you’re on.

What’s Wrong With The Right

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When I was a lad in the 1980’s, the Reagan Revolution was just starting and being a right-winger was the hip cool thing. Those dreary lefties with their shaggy hair and linen colors were sad reminders of what went wrong with America in the 70’s. Low taxes, reducing regulations, free trade, getting government out of the way and making money were suddenly cool. Twenty years of liberalism will do that do a nation. The disastrous results on the 60’s and 70’s meant the first step was to roll back those errors. The fact that the state was not rolled back was hidden by the economic boom of the 80’s 90’s.

Ever since, the American Right has been locked in the 1980’s. No matter the circumstance, they offer up the same solutions. It is always cut taxes, cut government and boost business. Thirty years have passed since Reagan, yet the Right has not changed their message. A good example is James Pethokoukis in this National Review piece. He blames liberalism for Detroit’s problems. He suggetsts tax cuts as the solution., believing people will risk their lives to live and work in Detroit if you give them a tax break.

The men and women who ruled over Detroit for five decades did not come from another planet. They are the product of the Detroit culture. They were elected by the people of Detroit. They promised to do what the people of Detroit wanted from their government. Further, Detroit is no more liberal than San Francisco or Portland or Boston or Cambridge. Vermont is a whole state full of liberal gay guys. None of these places suffer from anything like we see in Detroit. Heck, everyone knows why Oakland is not San Francisco.

The problem is this. White people like and support civil society. They will do what it takes to make it work, even while conducting experiments against reality. Black people like chaos and mayhem. That may seem harsh, but chaos and mayhem are the rule every black people rule, so you have to assume they like it. This is the iron rule of life. Societies are result of the people. Black people make black societies and whites make white societies. This is true in all times and all places. Economics is a result, not a cause.

Unless and until the Right figures this out, they will be chasing the sunset.