Over Labor Day I was at the Boston College – UMass football game. The crowd was small, maybe 30K, but it could have been less. It was a “home game” for UMass so the Boston College fans were maybe half the crowd. Labor Day in Boston is not a great time to hold a sporting event, but for some reason they did it anyway.

The small crowd meant I could get the full marketing blast from the people who run the sports facility. That means the blasting of music, video ads everywhere and constant haranguing by the public address man to pay attention to a sponsor. I think even toilet breaks were brought to us by some corporate sponsor.

This is why live sporting events struggle to maintain attendance. Across all sports attendance is flagging. Sports marketing people always think more is better, so we get more and more marketing. More video boards. More screaming PA guys. More rock music. More side crap to draw our attention away from the game to pay attention to something or other brought to us by MegaCorp. The argument in favor of this is that sitting at home has become so good, they have to make going to the game like home, but with more ads. Always more ads.

I had club seats for the game so we went inside to avoid being screamed at by the PA guy and the deafening rock music. I asked someone about this nonsense and they told me that young people like it. That’s the catch all of all marketing campaigns. Young people like it. There’s never any evidence of this, but marketing people always say it.

The fact that young people have no money is never mentioned. No one ever points out that the blaring music is thirty years old and the young people make sport of it when outside of earshot. But, it’s hardly the point. The point is no area of daily life can be free of marketing.

No matter what it is, if people like it, the dreary dickheads from the business schools will demand they ruin it with ads no one watches. This letter to the editor in the Roanoke Times gets to the heart of the matter. Being told by some dimwit when to cheer and where to look is insulting. Adults can tolerate a little of it, but there are limits.

The same is true of the barrage of ads. Everyone gets that marketing dollars are a part of the business. The teams cannot live on the billions in ticket and merchandise sales, so they have to “leverage” their fan base in order to “monetize” the popularity of their sport and maximize their market position.

It used to be that commercial TV had ads because the service was free. You got the free service because they got to sell airtime to people trying to sell you stuff. Pay cable was supposed to be commercial free. Now it is not only packed with ads, they sell your personal data to marketing firms who use it to sell you crap on your phone or your browser. The whole racket now is to get you to pay them to send you ads. Sports fans are rationally forgoing the attendance costs because they can at least change the channel when the ads are jammed in their face during the game if they on their couch.

This is how it goes when everything is based on the madness of growth. It’s not enough to be a stable, profitable business. You can’t because the people in charge are systematically eroding those profits with currency manipulation. Your costs keep going up because your money keeps losing value. In 1984, I could get into the Red Sox game and have a beer for $10.00. The ticket was $6 for a bleacher seat and a beer was $3.50. If I did not want a beer, I could get a couple of dogs and maybe a coke, if I had some change. Adjust for inflation and that ten bucks gets half a beer today, as long as it is domestic. At the football game over Labor Day, I paid ten bucks for a slice of pizza.

That means everyone all the time has to be raising prices, lowering value and finding new customers. Big operations like football teams have to charge for everything. Breathing will soon be taxed. We’re not far from the day when the toilets will have credit card readers. The other option will be standing their watching ads while you wait for the hopper. Before you can sit, you’ll have to fill out a marketing survey.

This has to end. By that I mean, it cannot go on like this forever. I’m saturated. I can take no more. Even those with a higher threshold for this stuff have a finite amount of time and money. The stone will run out of blood eventually. Then what?

Economists are the near perfect example of the aphorism “a man good with a hammer sees all the world as a nail.” They are convinced that the totality of life on earth can be packed into one of their spreadsheets. The idea that people might not want the most efficient or most cost effective thing is alien to the mind of the economist. Despite mountains of obvious examples in daily life, they insist that people are moist robots, acting out of self-interest. Despite that, this post is worth the read.

Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states. … If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in. …

Agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more. … Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter to them. … Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.

Such loose control, says Bar-Yam, meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. …

The industrial revolution … demanded a different kind of government. … “In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did.” … Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.

The author is confusing a lot of things here. There were nation states before anyone thought of inventing passports. The British had a clear sense of national identity by the time of the Thirty Years War and most argue that the 100 Years War was the birth of nationalism. Certainly the French and English saw themselves as nations by the the 17th century. When you look at how people identified with the local polity, the Romans clearly had a firm understanding of citizenship.

That said, the idea of nationalism is a recent development. The English and French caught the fever first and then the Spanish and Italians. The Swedes had a national identity in the Thirty Years War. Central and Eastern Europe, however, were late to the game. Outside of China, India and Japan the rest of the world still struggles with the concept. If not for the West forcing these concepts on the people of Africa and the Middle East, tribalism would still be the natural method of self-organization.

Agrarian societies are not in need of a large public works projects, at least not the simple sort of farming in place for thousands of years. Maybe large scale irrigation would have been helpful, but farming adapted to the land. Road maintenance for getting crops to market would have been useful and the Romans did a lot of it, but the European model worked just as well.

As a result, in purely agrarian societies, there was never an economic need for coordinating loads of people into creating publicly held assets. The pillaging of France by the English in the 100 Years War, did change the economy, creating a demand for talent to build and maintain large estates. That probably sowed the seeds for later economic innovation like road building an irrigation projects.

Industrial societies, on the other hand, need large scale public works and that can happen in two ways. One is with the lash in low trust societies. The other is through coordinated cooperation in higher trust societies. A group of people can come together for mutual economic benefit and hire a bunch of men to do the work that the rich guys need done. There is obvious exploitation here, but it is not slavery.

It is important to note that the Industrial Revolution did not start in Africa or the Fertile Crescent. The elements for industrialization were in place in England, which is why it started there first. The combination of demographics, social structure and limited political institutions built on a national identity allowed large scale economic operations to flourish in England before anywhere else.

As industrialization flowed on to the continent, the countries with “far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialized societies” were the last to industrialize. In the case of Russia, industrialization destroyed the “far-reaching bureaucracies” needed to maintain order. The riots and revolts of the 19th century in central Europe were largely due to the collision of these existing “far-reaching bureaucracies” and the changing economics.

These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around. …

“nation building” … required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people’s Dunbar circle of family and friends. That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. … Nationalist feelings … arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large “horizontal” community that was previously impossible. National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass education.

The key factor driving this ideological process, Maleševic says, was an underlying structural one: the development of far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialised societies. For example, says Breuilly, in the 1880s Prussia became the first government to pay unemployment benefits. At first they were paid only in a worker’s native village, where identification was not a problem. As people migrated for work, benefits were made available anywhere in Prussia. “It wasn’t until then that they had to establish who a Prussian was,” he says, and they needed bureaucracy to do it. Citizenship papers, censuses and policed borders followed.

Again, national identity came to France in the 15th century. Early in the war, English armies would be stocked with all sorts, as well as English. Similarly, the armies loyal the French King were stocked with Scots, English and French. By the end of the war this was no longer true. The French fought for France and the English fought for England. French national identity is what drove France’s involvement in the Thirty Years War two centuries later. The idea that nationalism was born in the Industrial Revolution is at odds with history.

It is fair to argue that the Industrial Age allowed for the industrialization of the state. The managerial revolution is why we have a managerial class. I suppose one can argue that this then let nationalism sweep the continent. A better answer is that the barbarism of the Thirty Years War ended Christianity as the organizing force on European elites. Nationalism filled the void, eventually giving the people a new foundation myth and a sense of destiny. Still, the Industrial Age certainly helped accelerate the modern bureaucratic state along with the spread of various Rousseau-ist cults as a organizing philosophies.

One of the great benefits of old age is accepting the fact we never learn from our mistakes. Those of us who do learn are not important enough to matter. All the important people have the memory of a kitten. Thus we see stories like this over and over, despite allegedly having learned our lesson.

Drawn in thick marker along the map of upstate New York, the line snaked down the Niagara River and zigzagged east to outline a swath of Buffalo and its surrounding neighborhoods.

But one area of the city — neighborhoods in east Buffalo, where more than 75 percent of the city’s African-American population lives — was explicitly excluded, cut off from access to mortgage credit.

That map, ringed by a line, is at the center of a sweeping investigation by the New York attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, into whether banks are “redlining” — deliberately choking off mortgage lending to predominantly minority communities — people briefed on the matter said.

The investigation was expected to reach its first target as early as Tuesday, the people said, with Mr. Schneiderman’s office taking aim at Evans Bank, a regional lender whose business in the Buffalo area dates to 1920, accusing it of denying mortgages to African-Americans regardless of their credit.

The case, expected to accuse Evans Bank of violating the Fair Housing Act — a federal law intended to ensure equal access to credit — is a harbinger of other lawsuits that could be brought against some of the nation’s largest banks, several people briefed on the investigations said.

We nearly blew up civilization with insane lending rules in the last decade. That stampede to the cliff’s edge began with lawsuits claiming the banks were not lending to black people. Here we are again, doing the same thing expecting a different result.

In the suit, expected to be filed in state court, prosecutors were to outline how, since 2009, Evans Bancorp has created a map that defined the “trade area,” places in the Buffalo metropolitan region where the bank would make mortgages and other loans. The bank, prosecutors contend, deliberately excised much of Buffalo’s East Side.

Rival banks, the authorities said, lent to neighborhoods on the East Side at a far higher rate than Evans Bank, suggesting that the lending patterns did not stem from a dearth of willing minority borrowers.

If the bank actually had a map with a red line around the black neighborhoods, then they deserve what they get. That’s just stupid. If they simply refused to market to poor neighborhoods based on credit bureau reports, then that’s their business. The fact that the other banks were charging “far higher rates” says this bank is not interested in high risk lending. That’s why banks charge high rates. The risk is high. That’s news to the NY Times, but not to people with an IQ above room temperature.

That unequal access to credit, the authorities say, threatens to exacerbate the country’s yawning wealth gap. Part of the problem is that the foreclosure crisis disproportionately affected black and Hispanic communities, wiping out billions of dollars of housing wealth, federal mortgage data shows.

Mortgage lending is critical, the authorities say, to bolster homeownership — a cornerstone of upward mobility — in minority communities still trying to dig out from the recession. Denied access to credit, state and federal authorities warn, minority communities are helpless to address problems like boarded-up homes, foreclosures and blight that have long ravaged neighborhoods.

You cannot help but wonder if the writer is mildly retarded. People with high default rates should not be getting loans. The reason is they have no money. That’s why they defaulted on the loans.

As far as those boarded up homes, that’s the fault of the same “authorities” whining about inequality. Those homes should be condemned and bulldozed. But, the rich guys who own them give generously to those authorities complaining about the wealth gap. Alternatively, the homes can be condemned and taken by eminent domain and then sold off to developers. But then the prices would go up and the poor would be moved out so the children of rich white liberals can live in crime free hipster-villes.

As I wrote in another post, I think the Ted Talks site will keep me supplied with material for years to come. The attraction is the shallowness that is weirdly masquerading as high brow intellectualism. It’s a post-modern version of the old Three Stooges bit Swingin’ the Alphabet. Well, if it were on purpose. Lampooning high culture can be quite clever, when it is done on purpose. The TED Talk crowd is doing it by accident. This one on inequality is funny to me for some reason.

The great inequality of income and wealth in the world, and within the United States, is deeply troubling. It seems, even to many of us who benefit from this inequality, that something should be done to reduce or eliminate it. But why should we think this? What are the strongest reasons for trying to bring about greater equality of income and wealth?

One obvious reason for redistributing resources from the rich to the poor is simply that this is a way of making the poor better off. In his TED Talk on “effective altruism,” Peter Singer advances powerful reasons of this kind for voluntary redistribution: Many people in the world are poor, and the improvement in their lives that richer people can bring about by giving money is enormous by comparison with the small sacrifice that this would involve.

How much you want to bet that T. M. Scanlon, the guy responsible for those lines, gives next to nothing to charity? The people most troubled about the poor tend to do the least for the poor. That’s unfair of me, I know, but I’m not a nice person. As to his query, that answer has been supplied a million times in a million places. Lefty gets comfortably set in the upper middle-class and then starts to feel guilty. Lacking any sense of self-awareness, they declare it a “deeply troubling” social problem, which means more laws and more taxes on the rest of us.

Amazingly, the idea that there may be a reason why some people have nothing and others have extra is never mentioned in these disquisitions on inequality. I see poor people every day. I can give a lot of reasons for it. I’ve been to some dirt poor countries. In five minutes I can point out a dozen reasons why they are poor. Giving these people money is not solving anything. Once again, the people who are most concerned about poverty know the least about poor people.

Further along, the reasons he gives for wanting to force you to do something about inequality (as long as it does not cost him time or money) are interesting.

1. Economic inequality can give wealthier people an unacceptable degree of control over the lives of others.

If wealth is very unevenly distributed in a society, wealthy people often end up in control of many aspects of the lives of poorer citizens: over where and how they can work, what they can buy, and in general what their lives will be like. As an example, ownership of a public media outlet, such as a newspaper or a television channel, can give control over how others in the society view themselves and their lives, and how they understand their society.

Where has this ever been otherwise? Name a newspaper of any size owned by poor people. Name a poor person owned TV station. How about a government staffed with hobos? Under every imagined form of government in human history, the rulers have been in charge of the ruled. That’s why they are called rulers. They also have more stuff, more food and power over the lives of the ruled.

2. Economic inequality can undermine the fairness of political institutions.

If those who hold political offices must depend on large contributions for their campaigns, they will be more responsive to the interests and demands of wealthy contributors, and those who are not rich will not be fairly represented.

Steve Sailer likes to point out that liberals forget they have been in charge for close to a century. For forty years in America we have had laws against rich people making big contributions to office holders. In that time the influence of the rich has grown so much that government pretty much caters to them exclusively. Europe has seen a similar results. Maybe that’s a clue?

3. Economic inequality undermines the fairness of the economic system itself.

Economic inequality makes it difficult, if not impossible, to create equality of opportunity. Income inequality means that some children will enter the workforce much better prepared than others. And people with few assets find it harder to access the first small steps to larger opportunities, such as a loan to start a business or pay for an advanced degree.

Again, when has this ever been otherwise? The various Marxist schemes that professor Scanlon prefers have produced exactly this result. In fact, they were exaggerated under communism.

4. Workers, as participants in a scheme of cooperation that produces national income, have a claim to a fair share of what they have helped to produce.

What constitutes a fair share is of course controversial. One answer is provided by John Rawls’ Difference Principle, according to which inequalities in wealth and income are permissible if and only if these inequalities could not be reduced without worsening the position of those who are worst-off. You don’t have to accept this exact principle, though, in order to believe that if an economy is producing an increasing level of goods and services, then all those who participate in producing these benefits — workers as well as others — should share in the result.

But what did they produce? In my neighborhood, there are households that have not produced anything but mayhem for generations. In some of our more vibrant neighborhoods, there are three generations of some households in the same state prison. How about the guy who sells meth for a living? He may not be a burden on the state, as far welfare and prison costs, but he is burden on society. What’s his share?

The trouble with these disquisitions on inequality is not that they are mere sentimentality. The trouble is the sentiment is imaginary. No one really believes inequality is a problem, save for maybe a few bitter Marxists in your local state college faculty lounge. These are those old rancid hippies who have posters of Che Guevara on their office wall. No, the people who prattle on about inequality simply wish to replace the current inequalities that don’t favor them with a new set that do favor them.

You’ll note that the people convulsed by Piketty’s book are the managerial classes. These are the maidservants and coat holders for the ruling elite. A guy like T. M. Scanlon looks at a Mitt Romney and wonders how this boob got to be a billionaire. An Elizabeth Warren, making calls to beg for campaign cash wonders why she, a Harvard professor, should be begging these rich bastards for money. The credentialed members of the managerial class want more power and thus they complain about inequality.

I’ve been calling American Liberalism a cult for a long time. I get some grief for it from normal people, because they think I’m engaging in name calling. The word cult has some baggage. We typically think of cults having a charming leader. That leader is more than a little nuts and eventually leads his followers to a Jonestown like end. The messianic nature of American Liberalism is not always obvious, but it’s right there if look hard at the Left.

Modern times and the trendiness of the Left means their various beliefs burst forth for a while and then recede into the background, only to come around again with a new marketing pitch. State rationed health care is a good example. The American Left has been dreaming of it since they discovered Bismark. Every ten years or so they have a new way to pitch having their cult decide how much and how often you get medical treatment.

The cultish properties of American Progressives is clear in the story of ObamaCare. It was supposed to be the final step into the Eden of free health care for all. The rank and file members of the Cult of Modern Liberalism were convinced that a fountain of unlimited health care was hidden away somewhere, maybe next to the golden plates Joseph Smith found out west. If they could slay the evil insurance monsters that guard it, the people would be free to dip their cups into it and get all the health care they desired – free! They used different words, but that was the sales pitch and they truly believed it. They still do.

Then reality, that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it, came roaring into the room. Millions saw their policies canceled. I’m on my third cancellation. Rates went up and the public went crazy. As was described in When Prophecy Fails, the Left was at first stunned into silence. The disconfirmation was soul crushing. Instead of Eden, the result was chaos. Then, the faithful rallied and they are now ready to proselytize once again.

You’re looking at the biggest story involving the federal budget and a crucial one for the future of the American economy. Every year for the last six years in a row, the Congressional Budget Office has reduced its estimate for how much the federal government will need to spend on Medicare in coming years. The latest reduction came in a report from the budget office on Wednesday morning.

The changes are big. The difference between the current estimate for Medicare’s 2019 budget and the estimate for the 2019 budget four years ago is about $95 billion. That sum is greater than the government is expected to spend that year on unemployment insurance, welfare and Amtrak — combined. It’s equal to about one-fifth of the expected Pentagon budget in 2019. Widely discussed policy changes, like raising the estate tax, would generate just a tiny fraction of the budget savings relative to the recent changes in Medicare’s spending estimates.

In more concrete terms, the reduced estimates mean that the federal government’s long-term budget deficit is considerably less severe than commonly thought just a few years ago. The country still faces a projected deficit in future decades, thanks mostly to the retirement of the baby boomers and the high cost of medical care, but it is not likely to require the level of fiscal pain that many assumed several years ago.

The reduced estimates are also an indication of what’s happening in the overall health care system. Even as more people are getting access to health insurance, the costs of caring for individual patients is growing at a super-slow rate. That means that health care, which has eaten into salary gains for years and driven up debt and bankruptcies, may be starting to stabilize as a share of national spending.

You see? The prophesies were true! The prophesies were true! The Great Pumpkin will bring free health care for all!

Keep in my that this what “data driven journalism” really means. It is the old time religion sprinkled with statistics. To the faithful, “data” are a topping, like jimmies on an ice cream sundae. The “data” presented here are both fanciful and useless. The threat to Medicare is not cost per patient. The threat is the number of patients when the Boomer retirement is in full bloom. Driving the cost per patient down a few bucks is nothing when the number of patients is growing geometrically.

But, that’s how it goes in a cult. They need to believe and so they will always believe. It took 100 million corpses and 150 years for Communism to finally die. In my youth, American lefties would say that communism was never really tried and that Bolshevism was not true Marxism. I don’t think they were ever convinced to drop it. The Left just decided to go with Cultural Marxism, figuring the economics would take care of itself.