Economics

News you can abuse from the New York Times

muricaderp Books, Economics, History, Links, Religion , , , , , , , , ,

Annoyed New York Times readers are asking why the Gray Lady recently deigned to publish an advice piece on avoiding interpersonal and legal troubles with one’s household staff. I can answer this:

1) A paper must cater to the demographic that actually buys the obscenely overpriced, and roundly obscene, items that it advertises, instead of just staring in amazement that such things exist. The Times’ gleaming new office building across from the Port Authority ain’t paying for itself, now.

You probably are not part of that demographic. When I’m cooking my own quesadillas and potato-onion stirfries in a housekeeping motel in Springfield, Oregon, I most certainly am not.

2) It is excellent click bait and a good business practice to regularly troll the poors.

My main topic tonight, however, is this week’s book review of a new Malthusian work, Countdown, arguing that the world population is overshooting its carrying capacity and nearing a crash.

I definitely find some of the alleged threats in question quite concerning, in particular the brittleness of modern crop monocultures (the Ug99 wheat stem rust is partially contained so far, but it’s no joke) and the depletion of the world’s fisheries. It’s worth noting that that’s why Somalia has so many pirates these days. Somalia has gone a generation without a coast guard. As a result, it has practically no fishery left, foreign trawlers having effectively strip-mined it in the absence of any functioning sovereign government, but as Captain Philips could tell you, it is a nation (if that) lately renowned for its fishers of men. Notice, too, that Iceland, settled by Vikings, does not have pirates or an extremist sectarian militia but does have a coast guard that opens live fire on poaching vessels within its territorial waters. These things are related.

The author, Alan Weisman, starts with a buzzkill for those who love them some Biblical living. According to the review, “Because of agricultural irrigation, the Jordan River is now a ‘fetid ditch’; pilgrims who attempt to bathe at the spot where Jesus is said to have been baptized will develop a rash and, if they swallow the water, will most likely vomit.”

Actually, Ecclesiastes was right: there’s nothing new under the sun, at least not in Holocene times. Check out this foreign army commander bitching to Elisha’s messenger in 2 Kings 5:12 about the skankiness of the Jordan, presumably not knowing its coming longue durée: “‘Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Couldn’t I wash in them and be cleansed?’ So he turned and went off in a rage.”

Dude eventually listened to the obscurantists, took his dip, and was cured. These days, the Jordan will more likely give a man leprosy, but it isn’t so much different as merely worse: thousands of years ago, rational people were scared to swim in that shit.

That said, things can get really unstable as they’re scaled up. A few tens of thousands of people watering their riverside farms from the same glorified creek may be sustainable. Several million people trying to water major cities and industrial monocultures from the same glorified creek is not sustainable at all.

The inevitable result is war. What, all sides swear that they’re holy peoples living in the Holy Land? Tough titty: they’ve still got war. In fact, they’ve got even more of it, since they’re not just desperate for resources but also inflamed by sectarian passions, the two aspects of their anger feeding one another.

As an institution, it’s good for a lot more than Edwin Starr ever wanted to contemplate. The Nazi expansion into Eastern Europe was about the glory of the Deutsche Volk, but it was also about the oil fields of Ploiesti. Hitler was a megalomaniac, but he wasn’t a total fool. Japan had an even starker motivation for its invasions of Korea (coal) and Indochina (oil, lumber, rubber): it was a heavily populated archipelago devoid of many important natural resources and, starting in 1941, under American embargo at a time when the US was the world’s top oil producer.

In a moral sense, though, Starr was right. War is a travesty. One has to be a bit dense or a lot immoral and atavistic not to recognize this. (These are great traits for government “service,” by the way.) A huge portion of the restiveness in the world can be straightforwardly explained by blatant resource shortages in times of growing population. It’s a total buzzkill for the nationalist and the End Times aficionado (similar personality types, and often the very same people, no?) but it’s true. Surely there must be an alternative to this madness.

There is. Brace yourselves.

Japan.

[T]he fertility rate is so low–1.4 children per female–that the population has been declining since 2006. This might make Japan something of a best-case situation, but an aging population means there are too many senior citizens, and not enough young people to take care of them. Already Japan has a shortage of geriatric nurses. Weisman visits Nagoya Science Park, where Japan’s oldest scientific firm has built RIBA II, a robotic white bear designed to carry elderly people around the house. It has large, widely-spaced black eyes, cute little ears and a painted smile.

“I will do my best,” says the bear, as it approaches a man who is lying on a hospital bed. “I will carry you as though you were a princess.”

RIBA II slides one paw under the patient’s knees, the other beneath his back. The robot cradles the man in its arms. It carries the man across the room, and lowers him tenderly into a wheelchair.

“I’m finished,” announces RIBA II, and it’s hard not to wonder whether the robot speaks for us all.

That bear won’t be finished with me until it can respond to my follow-up command: “Fuck you. Bring me a White Russian.”

Even if you’re familiar with Hello Kitty, you’ve probably been mercifully ignorant of Fukuppy. No more. He (she? it? ooh, goody: “indeterminate gender”) is like the Maytag Man, but actually a smiling Humpty-Dumpty with angel’s wings. Don’t blame me; I’m not the one using that imagery to market refrigeration equipment.

Why do I get the vague sense that there’s something off about modern Japan’s zeitgeist that isn’t all about raw demographics? Hello Kitty, Fukuppy, girls’ shopping getaways to Vegas, the hikikomori and the dame-ren, virtual girlfriends, a popular magazine imploring young people to start having sex again, a robotic bear that promises to carry old geezers like princesses: this isn’t just a skilled nursing shortage. If the papers aren’t reporting about how similar demographic changes play out in, say, Russia, it’s probably because the results aren’t weird enough. Babushka hoeing her cabbage patch again while her grandkids shoot smack behind a disused asbestos factory, or shut-ins who only leave the house to go on “honeymoons” with pixellated “girlfriends” while bedridden grandpa is romanced by ElderBear: which would you rather read?

There is, however, a bit of good news about Japan’s demographic profile. Rod Serling would approve.

Around the Web: The Last Psychiatrist

muricaderp Economics, Links

This blog is absolutely brilliant.

On the subliminal messages behind Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In rubbish: 

Sheryl Sandberg is the future ex-COO of Facebook, and while that sounds like enough of a resume to speak on women in the workplace, note that her advice on how to get ahead appears in Time Magazine.  Oh, you thought that Sandberg’s book is news worthy in itself, how could you not do a story on this magnificence?  No, this is a setup, the Time Magazine demo is never going to be COO of anything, as evidenced by the fact that they read Time Magazine.  Much more importantly, they are not raising daughters who are going to be COO of anything.  So why is this here?

The first level breakdown is that this is what Time readers want, they want a warm glow and to be reassured that the reason they’re stuck living in Central Time is sexism.  This demo likes to see a smart, pretty woman succeed in a man’s world, as long as “pretty” isn’t too pretty but “wearing a great outfit” and that man’s world isn’t overly manly, like IBM or General Dynamics, yawn, but an aspirational, Aeron chair “creative” place that doesn’t involve calculus or yelling, somewhere they suspect they could have worked had it not been for sexism and biological clocks.  We all know Pinterest is for idiots.  Hence Facebook.

The author then analyzes a staged photograph in Lean In of women at a workplace meeting:

My personal vote for Lean In valedictorian is the woman at the bottom left, I don’t know her life or her medication history but she has the diagnostic sign of her cuff pulled up over her wrist in what I call “the borderline sleeve,” that girl will have endlessly whipsawing emotions and a lot of enthusiastic ideas that will ultimately result in a something borrowed/something blue.  Hope her future ex enjoys drama, he’s in for seven years of it.

You’re going to try and counter that this is a staged publicity photo, but my rum makes me fearless against your rebuttals.  During my two months of radio silence I’ve been writing a book of/on pornography, so I know it when I see it, and I see it.  Main thing to observe about this girl-girl feature: all the chicks are white.

Back up, wildman, the easy criticism to make is that there are no blacks in the picture, which is why you made it.  Everyone knows that the presence of blacks in such pics is staged, yet we still notice it, still want it.  Why?   Even though we roll our eyes if a black woman is artificially included in the pic, why are we still satisfied by her presence, or uncomfortable her absence?  Because we have no power to change the underlying reality.  “Better than nothing.”

This is a porno of a white woman’s workplace, no room for blacks in this fantasy, they don’t watch The Bachelor.  Don’t confuse aspirational with desirable, Halle Berry is ass-slappingly hot, no one wants to be her.  “If I worked at a female-friendly place like Facebook,” says anyone masturbating to this picture,  “I’d totally have time to get my nails done.”

No, the insightful criticism isn’t that they didn’t artificially include a black woman, it is that they artificially excluded Asian women– that this photo could only be made by activelydenying a reality: among women, Asian women are proportionally overrepresented in successful positions, especially tech jobs, especially Silicon Valley, and yes, Apple Maps, India is in Asia.  Putting this shot together is like staging an NBA publicity photo without any neck tattoos or handguns.   “What?”  When I was in my 3rd year of medical school and we all had to select our tax bracket, the Asian women went into surgery, ophthalmology, or the last two years of a PhD program, you know where the borderline sleeves went?  Pediatrics, which I think is technically sublimation but I’m no psychiatrist.  The logic was straightforward: they wanted  kids, and, unlike surgery, pediatrics offered future doctor-moms a bit of flexibility, while the Asian women apparently didn’t worry about working late because their kids would be at violin till 9:30.

This porno, for the Time et al demographic, cannot allow this bit of reality to be shown, because the moment you see Padmakshi or “Megan” at the table it is too real,  it undermines the entire sexism thesis and suggests that something else may be going on, it’s like watching an awesome gangbang and suddenly noticing all the empty Oxycontin bottles and that they’re speaking Serbian.  “That just makes it hotter!”  I just logged your ip address.  This doesn’t mean Asian women don’t experience sexual discrimination, it means that when an Asian woman succeeds, the other women in the office don’t get to experience sexual discrimination, so they’re left only with sexual harassment.  Read it a couple of times, it’ll make sense and you won’t like it.

On Salon’s Hipsters-on-food-stamps troll job:

While the idea of a Metafilter post-doc receiving food stamps AND telling me they’re entitled to it makes my eyes go Sauronic, it’s that rage that requires some examination.  Why rage?  Why not just roll my eyes and go back to drinking rum and soldering op amps?  What is the social importance of my rage?

Society is nothing more than individual psychology multiplied by too many to count.  If narcissism is what drives this society, then only narcissism will explain it.

So start with an interesting hypothetical: does everybody need to work anymore?  I understand work from an ethical/character perspective, this is not here my point.  Since we no longer need e.g. manufacturing jobs– cheaper elsewhere or with robots– since those labor costs have evaporated, could that surplus go towards paying people simply to stay out of trouble?  Is there a natural economic equilibrium price where, say, a U Chicago grad can do no economically productive work at all but still be paid to use Instagram?  Let me be explicit: my question is not should we do this, my question is that since this is precisely what’s happening already, is it sustainable?  What is the cost?  I don’t have to run the numbers, someone already has: it’s $150/mo for a college grads, i.e. the price of food stamps.  Other correct responses would be $700/mo for “some high school” (SSI) or $1500/mo for “previous work experience” (unemployment).  I would have accepted $2000/mo for “minorities” (jail) for partial credit.

The comment threads are a blast, too:

Rome understood the Christian Problem (leeching / dependency creation) more intuitively than any civilisation since, with the possible exception of cannibals.

“Whenever a cannibal is on the brink of starvation, the Lord, in his infinite mercy, sends him a fat missionary.” (Oscar Wilde)

Standard Oil, Like a Phoenix Rising from the Ashes (Bust the Trusts! The Right Way for Once!)

henrymoore Economics, Law , , , , , , , , , ,

What is it with me and bashing evil corporations of late (not necessarily on this blog, though I’m sure if you look through the archives…)? I hope it’s not habit-forming.

Well, could be that some of them, at least at some point in their history, became what they are with special thanks to the government. Could also be that some of them have been grandfathered in and are protected from competition from those who haven’t been grandfathered in. Might also have a little something to do with the fact that some of them have benefitted from foreign policy meddling and institutionalized theft committed by the state. But other than that, I have few complaints. Here’s a comment I left (since edited) at the end of a survey that sparked this article:

“I like surveys that have political and societal relevance. I believe in the desirability and functionality of free markets. And Exxon Mobil is a great company all things considered. However, they could not have gotten to where they are today without a little outside help. Some of this came from the consumer, to be sure. But some of it came from the state through the virtual cartel status granted to all major [US, Dutch, and British, at least] oil companies going back at least to the 1953 [CIA instigated] Iranian Coup… [This] greatly benefitted the Seven Sisters oil companies (a number of which [were Standard Oil descendants that later] merged to become Exxon Mobil) and is one of the main causes of unease in the Middle East and around the world today. They, like all oil companies, great and small, foreign and domestic, have also benefitted from oil’s status as de facto commodity backing for the US dollar. The world reserve currency known as the Federal Reserve Note is denominated in crude oil. The oil companies have a vested interest in maintaining this corrupt arrangement.”

Federal Reserve Octopus

What say you? Are some/most/all big corporations what they are today more thanks to competition or more thanks to monopoly? Here’s one for extra points: what about “small business,”? Aren’t they also protected from competition, in certain industries more than others, by regulations that keep newcomers out and by subsidies that keep competing technologies down?

For the record, anti-trust legislation actually has the effect of restraining competition, thereby securing monopoly, so when I say “bust the trusts” I don’t advocate anti-trust legislation, I simply want to let free market competition give some of these bigger guys a run for “their” money! The burden of proof is on them to show that they would really be as big as they are today were they under a system of laissez-faire capitalism. I guess you could say I’m with the left-libertarians on this one (except for the fact that I dared to use the word “capitalism”).

Standard Oil Octopus

Also, Brandon and I had our little chat on conspiracy theories. The collusion of big businesses (usually involving the state at some level) to form cartels (take note that Standard Oil, known to us today as Exxon Mobil and Chevron, was owned by John D. Rockefeller, who also had a hand in creating the Federal Reserve; I wouldn’t say everything that has happened in regards to these two was meticulously plotted, but I wouldn’t call it mere coincidence, either) happens to be one of the ones that I subscribe to. I think Adam Smith can back me up on this one. And unlike some who use the quote to support anti-trust legislation, I’ll give you more than just the first two sentences in order to show why such laws are not the best conclusion:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

Monopoly Octopus

Brookline Selectmen decided to upset their Econ 101 professors

Rick Weber Economics, Liberty ,

Brookline Selectmen decided to upset their Econ 101 professors

Cab medallions is one of the most popular textbook examples of destructive government policies. Despite this, Brookline’s government has decided to implement a medallion policy. In 2013 I can only assume this was done specifically to anger economics professors in the Boston area.

Relative or Absolute Advantage: A Question of Conditional Cooperation

Brandon Christensen Economics , , , , ,

A while back I posted a summary of a question posed by economists to various groups of people in a book I am slowly but surely getting through:

The Harvard political economist Robert Reich […] asked a set of groups of students, investment bankers, professional economists, citizens of the Boston area, and senior State Department officials this question: for the United States which of the two following scenarios is preferable? (1) one in which the US economy grows by 25 per cent over the next ten years, while that of Japan grows by 75 per cent or (2) one in which the US economy grows at 10 per cent while the Japanese economy grows at 10.3 percent (132).

I then asked readers the same question, although only Dr Amburgey answered (thanks a lot jerks!). Professor Amburgey stated that he would prefer scenario #1. As an academic who specializes in strategic management at a prestigious business school I would have expected him to pick scenario #1 as well. Why? Here is how Agnew and Corbridge summarized the findings:

Most people in each group except one chose (2). The economists, thinking quantitatively, unanimously chose (1). The magnitude of difference in (1) may have pushed some people towards (2). What is clear, however, is that most of the respondents were willing to forego a larger absolute increase in ‘their’ economic well-being to prevent a larger relative advantage to Japan (132).

Okay let’s slow down for moment. Does everybody see why economists chose scenario #1?

Because economists (and normal people, too) would rather live in a society where the economy grows by 25% instead of 10%. This is what Agnew and Corbridge mean when they write that economists are thinking quantitatively. So why did everybody but the economists choose scenario #2, including high-ranking State Department officials?

The inclination to forego getting richer (‘absolute increase’) if it means the other guy doesn’t get as rich as he otherwise would (‘relative advantage’) is something anthropologists call ‘conditional cooperation,’ and it seems to be a human universal. Here is what academics are stating in plain English: people are willing to forego gains in wealth if it means that others will lose out, too. The question of “How much?” is relative to a given situation.

Why humans do this is the subject of vigorous academic research, but if humans do this is acknowledged by everybody.

Economists and other academics trained in quantitative analysis are not the only ones who prefer absolute gains over relative ones, though. Libertarians are, by and large, also more likely to choose scenario #1 (I wish it were the case that libertarians were unanimous on this, but as the movement grows, so too does the number of less than intelligent people in our quadrant). Some of this may have to do with IQ, but I think the cooperative nature of our worldview also plays an influential role in the way we make our choices.

One doesn’t have to be economically-adept to choose scenario #1 (though it helps). A question that libertarians may ask is, in response to the prompt, “Why should I care if the Japanese get richer, faster than I do?” This question would more than likely be followed with a statement along these lines: “As long as they are not gaining their riches through force or fraud I see absolutely nothing wrong with this scenario.”

And it would be this response that explains why I consider myself to be a libertarian.

By the way, here is the book I’ve been reading that sparked the post. It’s titled Mastering Space… and it was written by a couple of Marxist geographers in 1995. The book is an interesting attempt to reconcile the world that stood before them (a liberal, democratic world) with the one that they believed would occur through socialist revolution (with the Soviet Union leading the masses out of the dark depths of capitalist slavery). Some of the most fascinating research to come out of the Marxist paradigm has been produced since 1991. I think it would be wise to heed Orwell’s suggestion that the Left-Right paradigm be abandoned and replaced by an authoritarian-libertarian one.

Around the Web: Harvest moon over Uranus

muricaderp Economics, Law, Links

Why? Because it’s Friday. My workweek this week happens to start (and hopefully not also end) on Saturday, a circumstance that would totally blow the minds of drive-time radio hosts across the land. Nevertheless, for everybody else, it’s Friday, one of the great days of Lenten fasting at the opposite time of the year, or so we’re instructed, but statistically a day to puke in gutters from Manayunk to the Gaslamp Quarter just like we did last week. Let’s get vulgar.

1. Books are good. Books are edifying. Books encourage us to slow down, focus, develop an attention span longer than that inculcated by lolcat videos, hone our intellects, and increase our funds of knowledge. Books like Boris the Shitting Buffalo.

The same author also maintains a blog, and Good Lord of the High Plains Hunt, the man is shrill. By his reckoning, picking crops commercially apparently isn’t enough to offset the great deficit of manliness that I incur by not being totally head-up about gubbyment taking my money to give food stamps to freeloaders, like the freeloaders who worked alongside me in a bee-infested blueberry patch earlier this month. I and my SNAP-addled colleagues all failed Aaron Clarey’s great manosphere political shit test, although it probably stood to reason for the two women in our group.

As it happens, I heard about Clarey through:

2. Roosh, a STEM dropout who makes a living, or pretends to make a living, by writing about his sex life, or maybe his imagined sex life, crowd-sourcing the sexual attractiveness of random women by posting their photographs on Twitter, deploying sexual slurs against ideological adversaries, and defending crashing long-term at his dad’s place when he isn’t traveling the world bedding its hotties.

A couple of fine self-serious chaps, I say.

3. More proof that any attempt to describe Charles Carreon will fall short of the glory of Charles Carreon:

In a 30-minute phone interview with Ars on Wednesday, Carreon lamented that, as a result of this entire sordid affair, his professional reputation has been damaged—or as he calls it, “rapeutated.” In fact, Carreon has a colorful website at Rapeutation.com that includes an elaborate chart with a new, long, and extensive list of all the so-called “rapeutationists,” including yours truly and two more Ars staffers. If you’d like to see a picture of Carreon’s critics—including an Ars Technica writer—spewing fecal matter out of their mouths, that too can be accommodated.

Quoth the avowed Buddhist:

“It’s an insoluble problem,” he continued. “It’s is not remediable. As long as you keep punching ‘Charles Carreon’ into Google, there’s just more stories about this nonsense. How can anyone get their message through? I’ve written hundreds of works. You can’t find them. Is that helpful? No. Now it’s difficult for prospective clients to see that I’m a relatively erudite person. Since then, some Amazon reviews of my books have, in bad faith, been given one star—I don’t sell many books anymore. Now it’s highly unlikely that anyone would say that Charles Carreon is a pretty bright guy.”

In the third person, no less. Carreon’s Buddhism isn’t compelling him to let go of his desires by making a concerted effort to pay the judgment already secured against him by his rapeutationists, but realize that he’s from Arizona (because, pursuant to his poetry, you don’t mess with the man from Tucson) by way of Ashland, Oregon, a city whose religious syncretism has never been the self-effacing kind. (Don’t ask me for details. I’ll be up all night if you do.)

4. Quick! Find the most efficient way to aggregate all manosphere tropes in a single essay!

4A. Miley Cyrus as symptom and cause of third-wave feminism.

Alternate explanation: Miley Cyrus, daughter of Billy Ray “Achy Breaky Heart” Cyrus, as vector of second-generation suck.

4B. Our boy Roosh again, in his capacity as patron of the preceding Return of Kings doubleheader:

Women and homosexuals are prohibited from commenting here. They will be immediately banned.

Oh yeah, a no homo manstuff pledge. This guy is as manly as Ted Haggard. And if his demeanor is any indication, he would have us believe that kings, he being among them, are effete, condescending, endlessly intoning about stupid hobbyhorses, and hyperlecherous misogynists.

Come to think of it, it’s served the Kennedy family well enough. God save the King from his flying, driving and skiing habits, or not.

More gringos who won’t do farm work unless they’re told where there’s farm work

muricaderp Economics, Links ,

I’ve got mail:

Andrew,

We will let you know within two days whether or not we can use you.  We’ve had an overwhelming response.  Thank you for your interest.

This “overwhelming response” was to a help wanted ad, in English, for grape pickers in San Luis Obispo County. The ad was posted less than 72 hours ago.

I’m sure that by the Farm Bureau’s reckoning, no individuals authorized to work in the United States applied for this position. While I was driving to San Luis Obispo yesterday to interview for another job, I listened to a broadcast by an outfit called Family Radio on which the Executive Director of the Fresno County Farm Bureau, Ryan Jacobsen, intoned about how Fresno County’s farmers just can’t find enough native-born help to get all their field work done. Of course they can’t; they never advertise for it.

If these gigs in San Luis Obispo fall completely through, I’m of a mind to go back to Fresno, track Jacobsen down, and tell him, “Hey, I heard you say on the radio that you’re shorthanded. Are you hiring about now?” I’m mostly kidding about this, but not entirely. It’s usually Tea Party cranks who passive-aggressively apply for farm jobs, and if I were a farm manager, I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about hiring a crew of underqualified, out-of-shape ideological blowhards who enjoy wearing tricorner hats. On the other hand, I’m not a self-appointed latter-day Patrick Henry, but a humble farmhand with several seasons’ experience with wine grapes, and I dare say I’m not the only such gringo.

My pseudoapologies for humblebragging.

I keep harping on the dearth of farm help wanted ads only because Farm Bureau officials and their elected representatives (apparently not my elected representatives) keep harping on the shortage of farmhands. I could have given materially the same speech that Jacobsen gave about farm labor “shortages” and immigration “reform” yesterday. There’s a certain comforting Kabuki ritualization to it, an unctuousness that is weirdly majestic in its predictability and brazen repetition of tiresome bullshit. As a Catholic, I appreciate liturgies.

What I start to wonder is whether Jacobsen and his colleagues actually, sincerely believe their own bullshit. I doubt that Dianne Feinstein does in her capacity as their lackey; I’d be surprised if any sincerity on her part outlived Harvey Milk by a decade and a half. Jacobsen gave off a very different vibe; for what the distinction is worth, he seemed not to be an indecent man, but a decent man making indecent arguments. The labor shortage has become rote learning in the San Joaquin Valley farm country by this point. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn the indoctrination, and a lot of courage to publicly repudiate it.

Some people go deep enough into the bullshit holding tank to stop noticing the fumes. They don’t notice that the fumes are making them loopy. It happened to members of the US intelligence community (sic) in the 1950′s. Recently declassified papers show high-ranking intelligence officials using the same crude redbaiting language in private correspondence that they used in public statements. They weren’t throwing red meat to the goobers and then retiring to snicker about how they had pulled a fast one on the Bircher freaks. They actually believed their own factually challenged Comintern hysteria. I have no reason to believe that Ryan Jacobsen is nuts, but I also have no reason to believe that he’s using any kind of critical thinking about the farm labor supply in his home county. That’s the kind of thing that would aggravate the neighbors, if nothing else, and I figure that, as a Farm Bureau officer, he’s politically savvy enough not to play around with anything that looks like a third rail.

Because there are never enough gringos to get the farm work done. Except when there are too many of us.

Another White Whine from apple country

muricaderp Economics, Links

Here’s an excellent example of West Coast planters whining about how it’s so terribly impossible to hire a good picking crew these days. It’s that classic outtake from the Gospels, the Parable of the Many Apples and the Few Pickers. Quoth the Wall Street Journal’s Joel Millman:

PASCO, Wash.—Washington state is enjoying the second-biggest apple crop in its history, but farmers warn they may have to leave up to one-quarter of their bounty to rot, because there aren’t enough pickers.

“I’m down 40% from the labor I need,” said Steve Nunley, manager of a 3,000-acre apple orchard for Pride Packing Co. in Wapato, Wash. Mr. Nunley said he has 200 pickers right now, but needs close to 400. He has increased pay to $24 for every 1,000-pound bin of Gala apples they pick, compared with $18 last year. Even so, he expects to have to let tons of fruit fall unpicked this season.

That works out to $48 a ton, or 2.4 cents per pound, up from a whopping 1.8 cents. For comparison, the minimum piece rate that I was paid as a blueberry picker last week was 40 cents per pound. Last Saturday, I and at least two other pickers were given a ten-cent bonus for the day because we were picking fruit of such consistently high-quality that it barely had to be sorted. Blueberries are more expensive than apples at retail, but certainly not by a factor of sixteen.

In many orchards (the exceptions being those that have been planted with dwarf trees), these single-digit piece rates are what pickers receive for maneuvering sacks weighing dozens of pounds down ladders propped up haphazardly against trees under dappled lighting. It’s inherently dangerous work. Blueberry harvests simply do not pose remotely similar risks of repetitive stress injuries, sprains, bone fractures, or death.

It stands to reason, then, that the labor pool takes dishwashing jobs if it can’t get a premium for piece rate jobs that hopefully won’t make them throw out their backs or get concussions when they fall off ladders:

In a standoff, growers say they can’t afford to raise wages further, and workers decline to work for what they’re being offered.

“We could lose 25% [of the crop]. Or it could be much worse,” said Jeff Rippon, farm manager of Chiawana Orchards in Yakima, Wash. Mr. Rippon’s 300 acres have enough apples on them to yield nearly 10 million pounds of fruit, if he had enough hands to bring them in. He said he needs about 150 full-time pickers to get the crop in, but right now has only 60.

“Pickers pull up, they ask what you’re paying. If they like what you’re offering, they stay. If they don’t, they’re gone,” said manager Martin Estrada of Monkey Ridge Ranch, a huge apple plantation on the Snake River.

Do tell, Mrs. O’Hara. Say, how are you managing with all the Reconstruction they’re doing these days? I must say, that General Sherman is quite a character!

It’s the curse of hiring freemen. If they don’t like an underpaid job that may get them dead or crippled under a pile of apples, they may end up taking other jobs, leaving the poor crew boss to futilely painting another “se buscan trabajadores” sign on a piece of scrap plywood. Free association is such a buzzkill when it’s the help that does the free associating. Maybe there are alternatives:

The state faced similar labor shortages last year, when growers persuaded Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire to declare a labor emergency, which allowed farms to hire prisoners to bring in the harvest. For example, about a hundred convicts from a minimum-security facility fanned out among orchards in the Wenatchee Valley. But growers aren’t currently seeking to hire prisoners, who pick far fewer apples a day than immigrant laborers do.

Or maybe not. In the Old South, if I’m not mistaken, one of the polite terms for this part of the workforce was “recalcitrant slaves.” (The impolite terms were utterly evil.) Much effort and manpower was devoted to intimidating and punishing these slackers and saboteurs, often with heinous brute force. Today, the prison population in the United States is disproportionately comprised of the descendants of these slaves. Think of it: the State of Washington deploying black small-time offenders from Seattle and Tacoma into white-owned apple plantations at a fraction of minimum wage, not in 1880 or 1950, but in 2011. What’s more, this was authorized by a Democratic governor who was widely regarded as substantially left of center. It’s barely conceivable that these crews were not blacker than the overall population of Washington State. It’s no joke that we haven’t moved as far beyond slavery and Jim Crow as decent Americans would wish.

Apparently the Wall Street Journal likes to bury its ledes:

Farm operators elsewhere in the U.S. have said they face shortages of workers, sometimes because of new state immigration laws that have driven pickers from fields and groves. Some academic researchers say it is hard to quantify an actual labor shortage in U.S. agriculture, in part because there is so little evidence of a decline in production.

Philip L. Martin of the University of California, Davis, said overall U.S. production of fruits and vegetables has remained stable in recent years. Moreover, he said, farm-labor wages have remained flat or even declined. “You would think that wages would go up” if workers were in short supply, he explained.

Yeah, I would think so, too.

I’d also think that Craigslist would be plastered with help-wanted ads for fruit and vegetable pickers. I certainly wish it were. As it is, I can count the number of current ads for pickers on the Willamette Valley boards on my middle finger. It’s a job picking squash at minimum wage that I quit mid-shift on the first day because the manners of the crew bosses verged on what I would expect of Arkansas prison trusties. I expected it to be worse than the blueberry job, but not that much worse. There are worse jobs yet in agriculture, to be sure, but at heart I really do not care to be a moral relativist.

Finally, let’s have a couple of brief words from labor:

United Farm Workers organizer Jorge Antonio Valenzuela, who represents pickers in the Northwest, said “there is no shortage” at farms that pay “correctly.”

….Not far away, outside a church in Pasco, a migrant from Mexico’s Michoacán state, 47-year-old José Carranza, said he planned to skip the fruit harvest this year. Mr. Carranza believes he can do better in construction work, which is picking up.

“Growers offer $20 per bin around here,” he said. “It’s just not enough.”

What? What about the $28 per bin–$28 an hour for the hotshot pickers–that all the growers were offering several paragraphs above? And what about the one bin per hour that the hotshots are supposedly able to pick? Management said it was so.

Whom are we to believe: the growers, who told a reporter about the generous raises they were offering, or this Carranza fellow, what with his sour grapes about the pay being shit? My guess is that Carranza is getting old and worn-out from having picked too many apples in his day, so if the growers are lucky I’ll be generous and split the difference for an average rate of $24 per bin. Honestly, that’s a wildly liberal guess. And this is for a line of work that, pursued as a full-time, permanent career, shortens life expectancies by over a decade.

There is a LOT of bullshit in this business. It’s endless. This article was published last year, in 2012, but the same complaints are made year after year, about crop after crop. It’s a perennial bitchfest about how there’s no one to pick all the crops and that it is therefore of utmost importance to admit even more foreign peasants until this nonexistent labor shortage is no more, the welfare of these peasants and of the communities where they work be damned.

That’s one gnarly old bush that overwinters just fine.

I picked crops under the hot sun all day this Labor Day. What did you do this Labor Day? Do work!

muricaderp Economics, Politics

Actually, it depends on your definitions of “all day” and “hot sun.” I overslept my alarm by nearly an hour and a half and called it quits in time to go hiking on one of the woodlots above Corvallis, and as humid as it was, Philadelphia it ain’t. But even though my poundage for the day was off by nearly half from Saturday, the bees having been all up in my fruit, I managed to bring in about 33.25 pounds more blueberries today than did any of the useless eaters who keep plastering my Facebook feed with pictures from Orlando and Sea Isle City. One of these people is mortally embarrassed that I’ve become a poor who does stoop labor, since his friends should all be doing prestigious things that reflect well on him for associating with individuals of fine breeding. He’s always pestering his fellow yuppies to buy his life insurance products, the fine chap.

I could become an earnestly sanctimonious prick about these things, and there’d be some equity in the proposition (all too much, really), but instead, I’ll note that I’m really lucky to have found another paid job less than two months after my last paid job descended into a fugue of lumpenproletarian officiousness and treachery. This fugue started my first day on the job; fun times in wine country. My current job on the blueberry farm is the polar opposite. It’s a contender for the best job I’ve ever had, the farm manager is a contender for the best boss I’ve ever had, and I have not had to deal with any asshats. None. It’s like I was sucked through a wormhole into a Jeffersonian utopia that would make even old Tom himself think he’d been taken on a gnarly acid trip.

It’s worth briefly noting how Thomas Jefferson’s labor theories compared to his labor practices. My current employer is Jefferson’s ideal made manifest, the kind of family-run, community-oriented operation that would make Alexander Hamilton of a mind to bulldoze the joint and deed the property over to industrialists. Jefferson’s actual managerial practices, of course, involved regimentation and centralization of a sort not too different from what Alexander Hamilton advised, but in the form of a brutal system of race-based slavery, enforced with a campaign of threats and beatings that Jefferson oversaw with a zeal that privately alarmed his friends. This nightmare he bequeathed to his country as a major part of its patrimony. We still haven’t gotten completely over it. Perhaps we never will.

On the West Coast, the most prolific offshoot of this plantation sociology is something that I call Mexican Jim Crow, since I don’t think any more restrained moniker adequately conveys its iniquity. Honestly, I’m surprised and somewhat relieved that relations between Mexicans and Gringos in Western farming districts aren’t much worse than they are. The racism underpinning this arrangement isn’t official, but in some places it might as well be. I find it worrisome that there’s a greater language barrier between the planter and peasant classes on the West Coast than there usually was between planters and slaves in the Antebellum South, since Southerners spoke mutually intelligible dialects of English in most places. A couple of months ago I found myself in the midst of an unwieldy workplace donnybrook that would have either been preventable or easily nipped in the bud had everyone present spoken a common language. In extreme cases, this language barrier results in de facto impunity for workplace sexual assaults committed by field managers against line employees. It is a very bad state of affairs.

The planter class wants to keep things this way. I don’t know what the dynamics are like at the county level, but at the state level in California (and probably other states) and at the national level the planters have a stranglehold on the major farming trade groups. That’s why the Farm Bureau always has a bee in its bonnet about immigration reform. It’s amazing to see major growers go on the record in newspaper and trade journal articles about how they’re 40% short on pickers for time-critical harvests, are running months late on pruning jobs that are considered industry-standard, etc., and then see not a word from the same growers on help wanted websites or on roadsides near their farms. One of the growers who’s engaged in this monkey business has several hundred acres of blueberries half an hour north of where I’m currently staying. There’s no way the farm labor contractors in their regions are running help wanted ads to take up the slack, either. Few of them are running ads at all. Believe me, I’ve checked. The growers and contractors who do run ads usually run them on state unemployment office job boards (Washington State’s is particularly laden), probably because the only Gringos who check these sites are ones who were told to do so by their case workers or probation officers. That way, the planters end up getting a lukewarm response from slackers and dregs who didn’t want farm jobs in the first place, and once these Gringos all wash out they can tell the authorities that they really, really need their Mexicans. One farm in Washington went a step further by flying a new crew in from Thailand and firing its entire existing crew of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, many of them career employees. Unless the initial ruling was reversed on appeal, this company remains in fairly hot water with the authorities over this stunt.

As far as I can tell, the much-bemoaned shortage of farm workers is mainly a shortage of two specific kinds of farm workers: at the lowest level, meek, servile, disposable, easily intimidated grunts, and, at the higher skill levels, those who can be hired by word of mouth through some foreman’s cousin’s barber’s nephew five miles past the end of the blacktop in outermost Michoacan. With Mexico’s economy improving while its birthrate plummets, even in poor rural areas, it should come as no surprise that it’s getting harder to staff farms entirely through the intimidation of illegal immigrant roustabouts and six degrees of whoever happens to currently be on staff.

As a farm worker, I heartily approve of this turn of events. Expect to hear more White Whines about it from a planter near you in coming years.

Erik Loomis has more on these topics. Does he ever. Ralph Durst and his cousin weren’t just planters; they were psychopaths.

One final social control before I go to bed: Tomorrow is the day after Labor Day, so no more white clothes for the rest of the season. You wouldn’t want to be the gauche fool who wears white into the fall. This is a fitting social convention, especially for anyone in the business of making or selling clothes in any of the many colors that are not white. On the other hand, join me in the blueberry patch and they won’t be white for long.

Relative or Absolute Gains: A Question of Conditional Cooperation

Brandon Christensen Economics , , , ,

From Mastering Space…:

The Harvard political economist Robert Reich […] asked a set of groups of students, investment bankers, professional economists, citizens of the Boston area, and senior State Department officials this question: for the United States which of the two following scenarios is preferable? (1) one in which the US economy grows by 25 per cent over the next ten years, while that of Japan grows by 75 per cent or (2) one in which the US economy grows at 10 per cent while the Japanese economy grows at 10.3 percent (132).

Before I continue, I guess it would be better to ask this question to readers as well. I’ll post the rest of my thoughts later (as well as the answer), but right now I am genuinely curious as to which option NOL’s humble readership would pick.

Your weekly multimedia derp: Fox News shills for a talentless bottomfeeding trustafarian “musician” from La Jolla by way of concern-trolling the poor taxpayer

muricaderp Economics, Links, Politics

There are stupid press-generated scandals that leave me with some residual hope that the United States is capable of self-government. Then there’s the other kind of stupid press-generated scandal, the kind convincing me that my country is utterly and irredeemably fucked as a polity and that our only really sensible course of action is to go tailgating in front of the international arrivals hall at Lindbergh Field, so that we might offer our Chinese receivers the culturally typical refreshments of beer and hot dogs when they arrive to sort out our affairs.

Oh, and barbecued fresh lobster. We’ll see shortly just how crucial the lobster is, God help us all. But first, let’s meet the principals.

For the prosecution, Brett Baier. I knew his type back when I was a Boy Scout. BSA is a great organization for those young men (I was once in your shoes) who enjoy watching sniveling, sanctimonious, pompous twits melt down in public like late-stage Nicolae Ceaucescus because some little brat with Tourette Syndrome was running around, heaven forbid, a church complex yelling at his peers to “give me back my fucking pencil!” (a stuffed animal pencil with eyes, which they had inevitably stolen), thus defiling the auxiliary facilities of God’s holy place, or because a troop went on stage during a District lock-in and glorified the use of illegal drugs by performing an a Capella rendition of the Grateful Dead’s “Casey Jones.”I witnessed both incidents, and I can easily imagine Brett Baier taking his place astride the barricades of Scouting history and yelling “STOP!” I can also imagine him whining at the rest of us to stop baiting our sister troop’s premier subnormal to jump out of a tent and serenade us with the week’s camp anthem, “Stay on the Sunny Side of Life.” The most memorable verse: “Chesterfield! Chesterfield who? Chesterfield my leg, so I slapped him! Awwwwww!”

Don’t even try to make sense of any of this. Just understand that it is exactly the sort of environment in which officious blowhards like Brett Baier flourish when they can’t secure lucrative gigs bugging all of America about wedge issues. Also realize that your boys are probably better off in a whorehouse; they’ll come across less sexual perversion, for one thing.

For the defense, Jason Greenslate, aka “RattLife.” Basically, RattLife is just another two-bit bougie loser with a shitty garage band trying to impress his peers by being vulgar and badass and loudly averring, “Bitch, I’m transgressive!” Think of him as a sort of cash-flow-negative American Mick Jagger, but without the inflammatory racial shtick, because at heart, dude seems awfully milquetoast for a serious game of hardball with the big boys and girls. Nor is he the kind of badass who moves to the Southeast Side to handle accounts receivable for an honest-to-God crack den; that wouldn’t be his style of gnarly, and the consensus is that his parents paid for his Escalade, meaning that he doesn’t have to hustle for “dem shine rim.”

The class and racial aspects of RattLife’s shtick are confusing and incoherent. By numerous accounts, he’s from a moneyed family, and in most respects he and his boys have a very derivative, and very white, surfer-punk act. They’d fit in in Huntington Beach. In a sentence, they are why you hate La Jolla. On the other hand, the Cadillac Escalade, which RattLife has adopted as one of his props, has also become a vehicle synonymous with some of the coarsest black entertainers active today, the vehicle to which his business partners would probably be aspiring if he were, as I suggested, running product in Logan Heights instead of being a candy-ass north shore poseur. Basically, he’s doing a cross-cultural mix-and-match of various oversold consumer products in the hope of convincing the impressionable that he’s a trendsetter. His tastes (sic) have what some activists like to call “intersectionality,” although it’s more apt to think of them as a collage of the socially destabilizing vulgarities of two antagonistic cultures made manifest in the persona of one pathetic man.

The lynch pin for this ridiculous shtick, not surprisingly, is a promise of sex. Maybe sex in fact comes to those who adopt the RattLife, or maybe it doesn’t, but he’d certainly like his followers to think that he and his bros are certified pussy magnets. RattLife’s conception of sexuality is too shallow and derivative to merit comment, except to note that it surely has a disproportionate effect on the haplessly undersexed. One way to not end up a marginally employable loser who makes a public ass of himself in pursuit of skanks is 1) to learn and practice a trade and 2) to hire hookers when one’s amateur friends aren’t in the mood. Notice that this approach to life hasn’t stopped Germany and Switzerland from kicking America’s ass in legal harlotry and precision machining. Or maybe both of these trades are just bourgeois structures of oppression blocking the lumpenproletarian vanguard in its pursuit of Fall-of-Rome dissipation and leech socialism. That makes as much sense as anything about Jason Greenslate’s adult life.

If you’re thinking that I’m giving the guy too hard a time for being a dime-a-dozen make-believe badass, take a look at what he just did to make national news. He is no longer a local nuisance. He is no longer merely San Diego’s bro abatement problem. RattLife submitted to Brett Baier’s concern-trolling on behalf of YOUR HARD-EARNED TAX DOLLARS. He sulked and smirked through round after round of Baier’s moral puffery, bedecked in sunglasses indoors like a downmarket Bono. He gleefully led a camera crew through an upscale supermarket where he bought fresh seafood with his EBT card. He invited the camera crew to a party where he and his bros barbecued and cracked open a fresh lobster that he had bought with YOUR TAX DOLLARS. He invited the cameras into a concert where his band sang a defiant anthem about fucking stealing shit, and that kind of thing. He did it all for make benefit glorious nation of get off my lawn.

That, and for the publicity. Dare I ask, cui bono? The piece was obviously reactionary agitprop of the lowest order, but was it also product placement? I like to imagine the negotiations between RattLife and the Fox account executive sounding like one of the wiretapped Blagojevich phone calls, because that would frankly be several steps up, morally and intellectually, from the corrosive mind rot that they contrived to air.

Some good came of this fiasco as it diffused away from the original broadcast and its Bircher/Klan-grade target audience. Chateau Heartiste’s essay on RattLife was thoroughly jaded but quite thoughtful, and a couple of the comments below it put the Fox piece into a disturbing context. First, from Joe Sixpack (spelling of all excerpts is in the original):

I live in San Diego and have worked in La Jolla for the last 8 years. I’ve lived in La Jolla and train at La Jolla shores about 3x per week. While I do not know this guy, I am very familiar with the Jason Greenslate phenomenon,

Southern California is simply infested with them.

They are the flatbillers you see on your way to work, you in your car heading off for another day of bringing home the bacon. While they are the crew passing you in their lifted F350 headed out to the desert with their dirtbikes on board.

They are the giggling sorostitutes, valet parking their new white BMW curbside, their wardrobe costing in the thousands, lined up to pay a doorman $50 for a handstamp and the honor of stepping into a nightclub where men will buy them $15 drinks.

They are the unemployed hipsters, adorned in $200 scarves, $1000 manpurses and $3000 Macbooks sitting at coffeeshops 8 hours a day “looking for work” before meeting up with their friends (who’ve they’ve known since kindergarten, as they all still live at home) at a tapas bar.

Such people are legion in Southern California, where the cost of living is like kryponite save for the trustfunders, the Boomerang Kids and the STEM H1N1s. Occasionally a 1st generation wealth builders will be spotted in the wild, dodging high taxes and burdensome regulations while slowly trolling Home Depot parking lots for illegals who will work for cash only.

Jason Greenslate and his ilk drive nice cars, yet live at home and/or are funded entirely by wealthy relatives. Word is that Jason’s parents made their fortune in the gym industry, although I cannot verify that.

Their social network is often of similar caliber, and there is no shame whatsoever in living at home. Often parents (who are BFFs with their kids) allow them total freedom to bring girls over, smoke and drink at home as they’d “rather have them do that stuff at home than some random party”.

The entire culture down here has turned upside down. It is truly La-La Land. Where hypergamy is just a way of life and hard-working Betas are seen as boring, predictable and useless (except to fund the pensions of the plethora of government retirees and keep the EBT cards of guys like Jason fully funded).

Hot chicks down here? Yes. But only those that can afford to live here. Which means, to a large degree, Daddy’s girls, trophy wives, married/kept women and entitled college princesses.

Game in Man Diego must be rock solid and well-calibrated.

You have been warned.

He adds a follow-up:

In laying out my long diatribe, I forgot to reiterate the point which is the commonality between the Southern California Flatbiller, the Sorostitute and the Hipster, as well as Trustifarians like Mr. Jason Greenslate and his fellow brahs.

In short, none of them can so much as wipe their own asses if Mommmy and Daddy don’t buy them toilet paper.

Try as I may, try as I might, I struggle to think of anything less Alpha than that. That 24/7 gnawing, deep-seated knowlege that you are a full-grown man still drawing an allowance from your parents.

(Prob is, most girls today simply do not care what the source of the cashflow is, whether that be dealin’, pimpin’ scammin’ or trustfundin’. Ironically, the man who puts in 80 hours a week working is seen as boring and “works too much”).

A SHTF financial and sexual market correction would go a long way toward waking people from their current hypnotic trance.

Next, from Prof:

I’ve seen more middle-class versions of this. I strongly suspect that he’s got affluent if not rich parents, and they bought the car and probably send a check each month. His exit strategy is inheritance — that’s why he’s got great self-confidence, *nothing he does now matters*.

Chateau Heartiste being a manosphere establishment, the article also elicited comments like this one, from Carlos Danger:

I bet he gets hot as hell poon. He’s a rich surfer bum. Good looking, very fit, and easy going and fun. Chicks dig this stuff as long as pregnancy isn’t involved. There were guys I knew in college who came from rich families and got welfare because they could. They also pulled quality poon.

These comments were mixed in with conspiratorial racist speculation that Fox News ran this story to deflect attention from the disproportionate number of black recipients who use food stamps to support their profligate breeding habits and comments about Jewish control of the media. And that’s exactly the problem with stories like this. They bring all the Storm Front nutters to the yard. The producers who run that sort of inflammatory tripe full well know it, but they run it anyway because it’s lucrative. There is no civic core to preserve in these cases; there is only the early precursors to communal violence, a horde of ignorami being spoon-fed baldfaced agitprop and happily swallowing it. Jason Greenslate is a self-dealing cretin, and Brett Baier is also a self-dealing cretin; the rest of us are victims of their joint attack on the commonweal. I hope I’m wrong, but people who take that kind of cherry-picked, inflammatory rubbish at face value seem beyond hope as worthwhile contributors to civic life.

We might as well go curbside and get the grills going before our technocratic overlords land from Beijing. Y’all bring the beer and weenies, Jason will bring the lobster, brah, and I’ll bring some of the bong-quality vacuum-packed halibut that my uncle’s buddy brings down from Alaska every fall.

Actually, never mind that; he gets that stuff for work-trade on the free market. What a buzzkill.

Little House of Horrors on the Prairie

muricaderp Economics, History, Links

For once, I relay a sick tale that might be about Dennis Rader but in fact is not. Rather, it is about:

a picture of the costs and risks of isolation that never made it into the book series: A baby brother who died at 9 months. A miserable year working and living in an Iowa tavern. A pair of innkeepers who murdered guests and buried them out back. Another pioneer couple who boarded with them during the Long Winter whose attitudes were far more whining than stoic.

Oh beautiful, for specious skies, for amber waves of historical revisionism, for purple prose, volume upon volume of it, above the goober-planted plain. I think I’ll continue to let other people read the Little House on the Prairie series and report back. I never had high expectations for it, but neither did I have any idea that it was so widely regarded, in extreme cases even by publishers, as hackneyed, propagandistic dreck. The back story, though, is quite the maudlin treasury of Randian tropes. Rule of thumb; if it’s derogatory and it’s been said about libertarians, it was probably both lived and said by Laura Ingalls Wilder, her daughter, and her daughter’s lawyer. Read it and smirk.

How persistent are cultural traits? A case study of anti-Semitism in Germany

Brandon Christensen Economics, History , , , ,

Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we find local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black Death killed at least a third of Europe’s population during 1348–50. We use plague-era pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. They reliably predict violence against Jews in the 1920s, votes for the Nazi Party, deportations after 1933, attacks on synagogues, and letters to Der Sturmer. We also identify areas where persistence was lower: cities with high levels of trade or immigration. Finally, we show that our results are not driven by political extremism or by different attitudes toward violence.

That is the abstract from a paper by Nico Voigtlander (of UCLA’s business school) and Hans-Joachim Voth. Check it out.

US Allies in Egypt: Economically Adept or Not?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics ,

It also isn’t clear that the secular crowd is economically more adept than the Muslim faithful. Socialism has been a hard-to-kick drug for Egypt’s legions of nominally college-educated youth, who came of age expecting government jobs. Capitalism has probably got firmer roots among devout Muslims, where Islamic law teaches a certain respect for private property.

This comes from Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Wall Street Journal. This is something that hawks in Washington (and Santa Cruz) have yet to confront. Interventionists – advocates of robust government programs in foreign affairs – want democracy in the Middle East, though they have yet to define democracy for those of us who are skeptics of overseas intervention.

What we do know is that there are two major currents of thought about governance in the Middle East today: national socialism and Islamism. The national socialists get their education from the universities. The Islamists from religious schools. None are friendly towards democracy.

Here is the upside though: democracy is not the end all be all. Liberty is. In fact, democracy is a byproduct of liberty. By liberty I mean, of course, a regime that protects individual rights (including private property), adheres to a system of checks and balances, and is generally favorable towards free trade. By trying to form alliances with various national socialist or Islamist regimes over the past three or four decades, the United States has continually shot itself in the foot. This is because Washington has made the simple mistake of confusing democracy for freedom.

If hawks are really concerned with helping other people (and it is not clear that they are), then it would be wise on their part to slow down and actually start looking at the factions of the Middle East and what they advocate. One thing has become crystal clear over the past 25 years, though, and that is that virtually no political faction in the Middle East – from Rabat to Tel Aviv to Tehran – is friendly to liberalism. This does not bode well for anybody.

Bombing these regions, and supporting dictators in these regions – in the name of liberalism to boot – only makes this hostility that much worse.

Feds File Charges Against SAC Capital

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Law , , ,

Thanks to Dr Gibson for alerting me to this. He’s also got a piece on insider trading that was first published in the Freeman in December of 2010. We’ve been able to reproduce it here at NOL. He writes:

Insider trading is restricted but not entirely forbidden. Just what constitutes the “bad” kind of insider trading? This is generally understood to be trading on information originating within a company that could have a material effect on the share price had it been publicly known. The law applies not only to insiders—employees and directors—but also to any outsiders to whom inside information is disclosed […]

We see that insider-trading regulations are subjective and arbitrary, rivaling antitrust laws in this respect. It is no wonder that Congress never defined insider trading and that the SEC resisted defining it for many years; the courts have had to make up the rules as cases arose. Every so often someone like Martha Stewart is thrown to the lions, drawing cheers from the jealous and spreading fear to successful and therefore high-profile managers.

Dr Gibson’s suggestions for alternatives to government regulation are, by themselves, worth the price of admission.

Update: this piece, also by Dr Gibson, explaining what hedge funds are is well worth your time, too.