We're All Education Experts

Well, perhaps not experts at education, but if you're reading this, you're at minimum fairly experienced at learning.  If nothing else, you learned a language and how to read that language.  You've probably learned the meaning of tens of thousands of words in that language so that, all by itself, is some pretty impressive learning.

Along the way, many people assisted (or attempted to assist) that learning.  Some of them may have had positive effect, others may have had negative effect, but I'd bet that most had limited effect.  Yet nearly all of those that were "officially" involved in your education are likely to believe they were absolutely critical to your success in being able to learn a language and read.

I find it very unlikely that most educators make much of a difference at all since nearly everyone who has normal brain function learns a language and learns to read whether or not they have good teachers, bad teachers, multiple teachers, or no teachers (e.g. home-schooled).  They learn to read whether or not the school they go to is well funded or poorly funded.  They learn to read whether they dream of becoming a writer or whether they're content to play video games for the rest of their lives.

Learning is an innate human behavior.

No doubt you'll take exception with at least a little bit of what I've written above.  You've likely had a teacher or two that you thought were great.  Perhaps they were inspirational, perhaps they really did make it easier for you to learn something, or perhaps they just made learning fun.  I'm not claiming none of that is possible, only that you probably would've at least learned things like language and reading even if you never had those teachers.

I studied education and learning at one point and even have a chapter in a book about education.  What I've concluded after studying, observing, and thinking about learning for years, is that with one critically important exception, almost nothing makes much of a difference in how much a child learns.  After accounting for that exception (which is very difficult), intelligence, IQ, teachers, education funding, government policy, teaching methods, etc. all have relatively minuscule effect, at least for fundamental skills such as basic language and reading.

The things that matters, indeed the only thing that really matters from my observations, is the parents' attitude and familial attitude towards learning.

I don't just mean that Pops say, "you'll do me proud if you learn real good."  It's rather that the parents are into learning themselves.  As a result, they read to their children all the time starting at a young age.  They play counting games like counting the number of lights in a tunnel while driving.  They'll talk about the world and the universe and gravity and the planets and engines and heat and leaders and history and on and on and on.  They show curiosity and instill that curiosity in their children.

Then their children are good at learning.  Nothing else much matters.

I read an instapundit post that the French were banning homework with great bemusement this morning:

As Education Minister Vincent Peillon told Le Monde, the state needs to “support all students in their personal work, rather than abandon them to their private resources, including financial, as is too often the case today.” The problem, in other words, isn’t with homework per se. It’s that some homes are more conducive to homework than others.

But this is exactly right in an upside-down sort of way.  The children with parents who don't much care about learning have an overwhelming disadvantage in doing homework.  Of course they also have an overwhelming disadvantage in all things educational.

So ultimately, we'll have to follow Swift's Lilliput and take all children from their parents at birth in order to ensure that "No Child Gets Ahead".

My Voting Recommendation

I know you've been waiting for this monumental moment - the moment when I give my recommendation as to which candidate you should vote for to be the next president of the United States.

What's that?  You weren't waiting for this moment?  That this moment might come hadn't even crossed your mind?

Oh.

Well, in that case I won't give an explicit recommendation, just some ideas to consider.

First and foremost: RELAX!!!!!

Regardless of who wins, the economy is NOT going to suddenly rocket forward, the oceans are NOT going to stop rising, the planet will NOT begin to heal, and the problems of the world will NOT suddenly be resolved.  The president has very little real influence on any of these things as they are far bigger and more complex than anyone can understand, much less control in any sort of predictable fashion.

Second, be careful what you wish for.  For those of you who are sure that the world will end if your candidate doesn't win, what happens if he does win and the economy continues to suck and the world continues to fall apart for the next four years?  Then what?  Won't the brand of your preferred candidate's party be badly or even irreparably damaged?  I think there is some serious downside for the winning party - more so than in any other election in my lifetime.

Third, if you live in a State where the result is already known (like California that will go to Obama no matter what and Kansas that will go to Romney no matter what), why not consider a 3rd party candidate?  It's true that the 3rd party candidates are usually pretty lame but you're not really voting for the candidate, you're showing interest in alternatives to the main parties.  And sometimes the candidates are almost plausible.  For example, Gary Johnson, this election's libertarian candidate, was a State governor (New Mexico) and could almost be an okay President.

Fourth: RELAX!!!!  Oh, did I say that already?

Great Quote

"Surveying the ruins of industrial America Hanson notes elsewhere that “Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit”, raising the interesting possibility that recovering from a nuclear blast may be possible or at least a lot more likely than surviving terminally stupid political projects." --Richard Fernandez, The Past Future Tense

The new Roger Kimball book

I recently read The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia by Roger Kimball.
Anyone familiar with his work knows that he is tremendously knowledgeable and a terrific writer.  He does not disappoint.

This review by Bruce Thornton gives a good overview of the book:

Roger Kimball has long been one of America’s most learned commentators on intellectual history, contemporary politics, fine art, and architecture. Longtime editor of The New Criterion and more recently publisher of Encounter Books, Kimball authored two of the best exposés of the left-wing corruption of the American university: Tenured Radicals and The Long March. The 21 essays in Kimball’s new book, The Fortunes of Permanence, cover a remarkable range of topics: relativism, multiculturalism, radical egalitarianism, the enduring importance of tradition, the delusions of socialism, “democratic despotism,” the dangers of sentimental “benevolence,” and the cultural significance of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The essays also discuss a wide variety of individual writers: those unfairly demonized, like Rudyard Kipling; those insufficiently well known, like Leszek Kołakowski, Richard Weaver, and James Burnham; and those familiar yet still worthy of explication and reconsideration, like G. K. Chesterton and Friedrich Hayek.
...
 Kimball’s survey articulates his two great themes. The first is the need to battle what he has elsewhere called “cultural amnesia”; the struggle requires recovering the great thinkers and writers of the past, “the salient figures whose works helped weave the great unfolding tapestry of our civilization” but “whose voices have been drowned out by the demotic inanities of pop culture or embalmed by the dead hand of the academy.” Second is the importance of “discrimination,” or what Kimball calls “the gritty job of intellectual and cultural trash collector,” in which one identifies and disposes of the faddish and politicized ephemera that make up most of the art and writing celebrated by the bien-pensant elite.
...
Kimball’s “anatomy of servitude,” as he calls it—his analysis of cultural, educational, and political degeneration—doesn’t end on a Spenglerian note of inevitable decline. Such determinism would contradict the celebration of human freedom that recurs throughout these essays. We can choose a different course, and we have the resources to do so.

"Intellectual and cultural trash collector" is a pretty good description of the task of debunking so much of what I now call Postmodernist dreck.  The failure to grasp the intellectual embarrassment entailed in such ideas is part of the problem.  Perhaps it is of less consequence than the power lust that promotes such nonsense. 

What follows, for your enjoyment,  are excerpts from two of the essays included in the book:

First, from   Leszek Kolakowski & the anatomy of totalitarianism :

No, Marxism has been as wrong as it is possible for a theory to be wrong. Addicted to “the self-deification of mankind,” it continually bears witness to what Kolakowski calls “the farcical aspect of human bondage.” Why then was Marxism like moral catnip—not so much among its proposed beneficiaries, the working classes, but among the educated elite? Well, beguiling simplicity was part of it. “One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people,” Kolakowski notes, “was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy.” Marxism—like Freudianism, like Darwinism, like Hegelianism—is a “one key fits all locks” philosophy.  All aspects of human experience can be referred to the operation of a single all-governing process which thereby offers the illusion of universal explanation.

Marxism also spoke powerfully to mankind’s unsatisfied utopian impulses. How imperfect a construct is capitalist society: how much conflict does it abet, how many desires does it leave unsatisfied! Can we not imagine a world beyond those tensions and conflicts in which we could realize our full human potential without competition, without scarcity, without want? Sure, we can imagine it, but there is a reason that “utopia” means “nowhere.”
...
Of course, it is not just to mankind’s spiritual cravings that Marxism appeals. It also speaks to its inherent thuggishness. This cannot be emphasized too much. These days, Stalin and Stalinism are in bad odor. We forget the romance that Western intellectuals indulged for this mass murderer.  We also tend to overlook the fact that thuggishness is an integral, not an accidental, feature of Marxism.
...
To be an anatomist of totalitarianism is also to be a connoisseur of freedom, its many beguiling counterfeits as well as its genuine aspirations.The question—the lure, the never fulfilled but inescapable promise—of freedom stands at the center of much of Kolakowski’s work.
...
Part of what makes Kolakowski’s reflections on freedom and its vicissitudes so fruitful is his understanding that human freedom is inextricably tied to a recognition of limits, which in the end involves a recognition of the sacred.This has been a leitmotif of his work from the beginning. In The Alienation of Reason (1966), he criticizes positivism as “an attempt to consolidate science as a self-sufficient activity, which exhausts all the possible ways of appropriating the world intellectually.”

In “Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone” (1991), Kolakowski argues that “mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be ex-communicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.” He shows how the tendency to believe that all human problems have a technical solution is an unfortunate inheritance from the Enlightenment—“even,” he notes, “from the best aspects of the Enlightenment: from its struggle against intolerance, self-complacency, superstitions, and uncritical worship of tradition.” There is much about human life that is not susceptible to human remedy or intervention. Our allegiance to the ideal of unlimited progress is, paradoxically, a dangerous moral limitation that is closely bound up with what Kolakowski calls the loss of the sacred. “With the disappearance of the sacred,” he writes,

which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is “in principle” an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man’s total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.

These are wise words, grippingly pertinent to an age conjuring with the immense technological novelties of cloning, genetic engineering, and other Promethean temptations. We pride ourselves today on our “openness” and commitment to liberal ideals, our empathy for other cultures, and our sophisticated understanding that our way of viewing the world is, after all, only our way of viewing the world. But Kolakowski reminds us that, without a prior commitment to substantive values—to an ideal of the good and (just as important) an acknowledgment of evil—openness threatens to degenerate into vacuousness. Given the shape of our post-Soviet, technologically infatuated world, perhaps it is that admonition, even more than his heroic demolition of Marxism, for which Leszek Kolakowski will be honored in the decades to come.

Oh, the misery unleashed by the unconstrained vision!

The final essay is   The Anglosphere & the future of liberty:

English, Bishop Sprat thought, is conspicuously the friend of empirical truth. It is also conspicuously the friend of liberty. Andrew Roberts, reflecting on the pedigree of certain ideas in the lexicon of freedom, notes that such key phrases as “liberty of conscience” (1580), “civil liberty” (1644, a Miltonic coinage), and “liberty of the press” (1769) were first expressed in English. Why is it that English-speaking countries produced Adam Smith and John Locke, David Hume and James Madison, but not Hegel, Marx, or Foucault? “The tongue and the philosophy are not unrelated,” the philologist Robert Claiborne writes in The Life and Times of the English Language. “Both reflect the ingrained Anglo-American distrust of unlimited authority, whether in language or in life.”
...
 I have nothing by way of an explanation for this filiation between the English language and the habit of liberty. I merely note its existence. Alan Macfarlane, in his classic Origins of English Individualism (1978), shows that the habit is far older than we have been taught to believe. According to the Marxist narrative, individualism is a “bourgeois construct” whose motor belongs to the eighteenth-century. Macfarlane shows that, on the contrary, “since at least the thirteenth century England has been a country where the individual has been more important than the group.” “Peasant” was a term the English used about others but not themselves. Why? Macfarlane locates the answer in the presence of a market economy, an “individualistic pattern of ownership,” and strong recourse to local initiative that were prominent features of English life at least since 1250. “In many respects,” he writes, “England had probably long been different from almost every other major agrarian society we know.”
...
The anatomy of servitude, which bulks large in what follows, tells a depressing story. But it is not all of the story. Even the “apocalyptic” Mark Steyn points to the way out. He is quite right that “you cannot wage a sustained ideological assault on your own civilization without profound consequence.” We’ve had the assault and we are living with the consequences. He is also right that “without serious course correction, we will see the end of the Anglo-American era, and the eclipse of the powers that built the modern world.” The hopeful part of that prediction comes in the apodosis: the course may still be corrected. As Hayek noted about his own dire diagnosis: “The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time.” There are, I believe, two main sources of hope. One lies in the past, in the depth and strength of the Anglosphere’s traditional commitment to individual freedom and local initiative against the meddlesome intrusion of any central authority. “The future is unknowable,” said Churchill, “but the past should give us hope.” The Anglosphere, James Bennett writes, “is not a fragile hothouse flower that can be easily uprooted and disappear forever.”

The second main ground for hope lies in the present and immediate future. In the United States, anyway, we have lately witnessed a new “revolt of the masses,” different from, in fact more or less the opposite of, the socialistic eruption Ortega y Gasset limned in his famous essay on the subject. A specter is haunting America, the specter of freedom. What happened on November 2 was not an instance of business as usual in the world of partisan politics. It was stage one in the rejection of that business as usual: the big-government, top-down, elitist egalitarianism practiced by both major parties in the United States. I recently spoke on a cruise sponsored by National Review at which the pollster Scott Rasmussen observed that one thing November’s election demonstrated was that Americans do not want to be governed by Democrats or by Republicans: they want to govern themselves. If he is right—there’s that little word “if” again—the Anglosphere has a lot more mileage in it. Are things bad? Is it late? Yes, and yes again. But as Lord D’Abernon memorably put it, “An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.”

 Lovers of liberty(and dignity) can hope that his optimism is not misplaced and do their part to aid in such an outcome!

More damaging than he knows

Over at National Review Online    Reihan Salam links to three articles  inspired by the “You Didn’t Build That” remark of the President:

Yuval Levin argues that the president’s Roanoke speech illustrates a broader belief that doing things together means doing things through government. The mediating institutions between the individual and the state thus get short shrift in his worldview. This difference of opinion regarding the role of civil society represents, in Yuval’s view, a fundamental divide between the left and the right:

The Left tends to believe that the great advantage of our liberal society is that it enables the application of technical knowledge that can make our lives better, and that this knowledge can overcome our biggest problems. This is the technocratic promise of progressivism. The Right tends to believe that the great advantage of our liberal society is that it has evolved to channel deep social knowledge through free institutions — knowledge that often cannot be articulated in technical terms but is the most important knowledge we have. For the Left, therefore, the mediating institutions (and at times even our constitutional forms) are obstacles to the application of liberal knowledge. For the Right, the mediating institutions (and our constitutional forms) are the embodiment of liberal knowledge.

Earlier in the article Levin provides some interesting perspective:

This remarkable window into the president’s thinking shows us not only a man chilly toward the potential of individual initiative, and not only a man deluded about the nature of his opponents and their views, but also (and perhaps most important) a man with a staggeringly thin idea of common action in American life.

The president simply equates doing things together with doing things through government. He sees the citizen and the state, and nothing in between — and thus sees every political question as a choice between radical individualism and a federal program.

But most of life is lived somewhere between those two extremes, and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society, and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom. Obama’s remarks in Virginia shed a bright light on his attitude toward that middle ground, and in that light a great deal of what his administration has done in this three and a half years suddenly grows clearer and more coherent, and even more disconcerting.
...

This attitude toward mediating institutions is by no means novel or unique to the Obama administration. It has been essential to the progressive cause for more than a century, and indeed has been an element of more radical strands of liberalism for far longer than that. As far back as 1791, Thomas Paine, in defending the French revolutionaries, complained of the distance that traditional institutions established between the citizen and the regime, which he described as an “artificial chasm [that] is filled up with a succession of barriers, or sort of turnpike gates, through which [the citizen] has to pass.”

Conservative voices have defended these mediating layers precisely for creating such barriers, which can guard the citizen from direct exposure to the searing power of the state. Alexis de Tocqueville celebrated America’s bewildering array of associations, institutions, and corporations of civil society for their ability to offer individual citizens some protection from the domineering sway of political majorities.

Edmund Burke, Paine’s great nemesis, argued that such mediating structures also express in their very forms the actual shape of our society — evolved over time out of affectionate sentiments, practical needs, and common aspirations. “We begin our public affections in our families,” Burke wrote. “We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting-places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something which it could fill.” To sweep them away and leave only the citizen and the state would rob society of its sources of warmth, loyalty, and affinity, and of the most effective means of enacting significant social improvements.

The second article mentioned here expresses conservative sentiments as follows:

Conservatives do have solutions. Our answer is not “no government”; our answer is a government that is more natural. Choice and diversity, if entrusted to people, require — and create — economic freedom. Conservatives need to learn the language of the environmental and civil-rights movements, not only because it is more marketable, but also because it more accurately reflects the organic liberty and self-government we cherish.

Our theme, our brand, our identity? How about this: Republicans are the not the party of a decaying, old, static, industrial-age, top-down government in Washington. We are the communications-age party of genuinely democratic, dynamic government — of, for, and by real people. We want to get money and power out of Washington and into the hands of the people — not because we want no government, but because we believe people who live in liberty create the best government when they are trusted to govern themselves. Ours is a purpose-driven populism, determined to change Washington, because if we do that, Americans can achieve anything in the world.

Fellow conservatives, let’s learn to say it: We need more government, lots of it, but we need the kind that actually works: Bottom-up self-government by a mature people. And we need that government in our hands — because it is not natural, efficient, or beneficial to leave something so powerful in the hands of anyone else.

Slapping down multicultural nonsense and relativism will be an essential part of restoring the ability for self-government.

The most poignant assessment of the remarks are here as provided by Virginia Postrel:

Although his supporters pooh-pooh the controversy, claiming the statement has been taken out of context and that he was referring only to public infrastructure, the full video isn’t reassuring. Whatever the meaning of “that” was, the president on the whole was clearly trying to take business owners down a peg. He was dissing their accomplishments. As my Bloomberg View colleague Josh Barro has written, “You don’t have to make over $250,000 a year to be annoyed when the president mocks people for taking credit for their achievements.”
...
 “Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s buying power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations.

 That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient. Hence the book’s subtitle: “Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World.”

 Something bigger was at work. McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.
...
 There had always been enough capital. What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What made us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imagination, alertness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfulness -- not individual accumulation restlessly stirring, or mere duty to a calling, which are ancient and routine and uncreative.”
...
McCloskey’s book is not only a useful survey of how scholars answer the biggest question in economics: What causes growth? It is also a timely reminder that prosperity depends on more than effort or resources or infrastructure or good laws. Attitudes matter, too. You don’t build a wealthy society by deriding bourgeois enterprise -- or the people who take pride in it.  

By trampling on bourgeois liberty and dignity, rhetorically and otherwise, the President has done more damage than he knows.  He has also revealed something important to anyone paying attention.

Making Guns Is Not Rocket Science

The aurora shooting has re-inflamed the gun-rights versus gun-control debate.  There's one part of the gun-control advocates' position that I've never understood.

Let's say that somehow, via legislation and enforcement, every single existing civilian gun was removed from the face of the earth, and all military and police weapons were perfectly safeguarded.

What on earth would stop people such as criminals from building their own guns?

Guns were invented hundreds of years ago.  Many very lethal versions are extremely low technology items.  They were specifically designed to be easily built with minimal equipment.

I just did a google search with the terms "build your own gun" and got 126,000,000 hits.  That's a lot of hits.

An example link shows detailed plans on how to build an AK-47 style machine gun (and/or fully automatic handgun) in 24 hours or less using parts available at Home Depot and the like and tools you have at home.  Sure, you might only get a few thousand rounds off with such a weapon before it falls apart, but for a criminal or rampaging psychopath, it will probably do just fine.

Willing to engage machine shops and get parts built according to CAD drawings freely available on the Internet?  Well, then it might take several days to get your gun built, but it will be as accurate and reliable as a professionally manufactured weapon, because, well, it is professionally manufactured - you're only doing the final assembly.  Use several machine shops for the different parts and nobody will have any idea what you're building.

There's just no way to rid the earth of guns without also ridding the earth of metal.  Criminals will always have unfettered access to them.

This makes the concept of gun-control to be so utterly pointless as to be absurd.

Update: Via Instapundit, forget the machine shops, just use a 3D printer to print the gun.

Internal Alien

Two hikers in the woods encounter a grizzly bear.  The first hiker starts putting on his running shoes.  The second hiker says, "Don't be silly, you can't outrun a grizzly bear."  The first hiker replies, "I don't have to outrun the grizzly, I only have to outrun YOU!"

I used to tell that joke moderately often.

My wife and I were riding our mountain bikes on a country road a few years back.  The ride had been scenic and uneventful when suddenly, this enormous and ferocious looking dog with red eyes, huge teeth dripping saliva, and malice emanating from head to tail came charging at us.  My wife is perfect in many ways, but being a fast bike rider is not one of them.  It was clear that there was no way she could go fast enough to get away from the dog.  She said the first thing to come to her mind was the above joke about the bear and knew that I could easily ride faster than her.

My experience was quite odd and I've never experienced anything like it before or since.  Something farther down my brain stem, something instinctive and primal, took complete control of my body.  My conscious self was suddenly along for the ride, not only having no control, but not even having any input.  I heard my voice yell, "Go! Go!" to my wife and watched myself position my bike directly between her and the dog in what was clearly a protective maneuver.  I was quite surprised and remember thinking, "I wonder what my body is going to do next?" as the dog closed in.

Fortunately, my wife under these particular circumstances is actually quite a fast bicyclist.  She accelerated her bicycle through the speed of sound nearly instantaneously and the resulting sonic boom left broken windows in three counties.  Her superhuman effort left me in the dust, but fortunately I was able to go fast enough to get out of the dog's range as well.

I don't tell the bear joke very often anymore.  That experience made it too close to home.

My wife thought I was pretty chivalrous.  I haven't bothered to mention that it wasn't "me" that was chivalrous, at least not the "me" that's writing this post or the "me" that she usually interacts with.  It was some internal alien that was chivalrous, a "Mr. Hyde"-like creature who is apparently encoded in my genes to emerge when my wife and perhaps other loved ones are in imminent danger.  We live pretty safe lives and that was the most danger in which I've ever seen any of my loved ones, so the alien has always been dormant except this one time.

One thing I read about the Aurora shooting that brought tears to my eyes was the following:

In final acts of valor, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn and Alex Teves used their bodies to shield their girlfriends as accused madman James Holmes turned the Aurora cineplex into a shooting gallery.

Out of the 12 people who died, (at least) three did so for altruistic reasons.  Amazing!

I've always wondered if I would have the courage to do something like that.  If the emergent alien comes through, for sure.  If not, who knows?

Whether their actions were conscious or instinctual, they were heroes either way.

I Laughed and I Cried

Here is a review I wrote on amazon.com for the book "The Gardens of Democracy" by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer:

I found this book to be contradictory, incoherent, and wildly naive. An example of the contradictory nature of this book is linked to the title and depicted in the book cover's illustration. The authors switch back and forth between a garden metaphor and an ecosystem metaphor as convenient to make their points. The problem is that a garden and an ecosystem are nearly exact opposites. An ecosystem is robust, resilient, and self sustaining while a garden is what you get after you annihilate an ecosystem and plant a limited number of flora. The garden is fragile and not self-sustaining and needs constant tending. Given that parts of the book are argued using the metaphor of the garden as depicted on the front cover (notice the neat and regular rows of crops) and other parts of the book are argued using the metaphor of the ecosystem, it's not surprising to me that it seems contradictory and incoherent. 

I laughed out loud several times when encountering incredibly simplistic and blatant use of strawman arguments. For example, the authors write, "Libertarianism ... rests ... on the falshood that humans are reliably and inherently rational, calculating, and selfish." Libertarianism rests on no such assumption. After setting up and beating down numerous such strawmen, the authors look across the resulting field of straw and claim that since none of the strawmen are left standing, their arguments must be right. 

I cried (not literally) when I then noticed the overwhelmingly positive reception this book has gotten. The positive reception is not only from amateur reviewers such as the ones here at Amazon, but also from well known thinkers and writers such as Francis Fukuyama. As a result, I fully expect that anyone reading this negative review will treat it with suspicion and/or skepticism. That's perfectly fair and I only ask that when you read the book you do so with your eyes open and your critical thinking skills fully engaged.

The good news is that I stumbled onto the book at scribd while looking for reviews so at least I didn't waste any money buying the book.  The book is just yet another call for a large, activist government that "tends" the citizenship, economic, and social "gardens" (or ecosystems, depending on what page you're on) of society.

Crispy Crispy Benjamin Franklin

My daughter played the song "Chemo Limo" by Regina Spektor for me the other day.  I don't particularly like that artist and that song is terribly depressing.  It's about a mother dying from cancer, fighting it with chemo, but the chemo is making her intensely miserable and she's wondering if she should just blow the "Crispy Crispy Benjamin Franklins" (money for chemo) on a Limo instead, and "go out in style".  It's an interesting tradeoff: live well briefly then die or drag it out as long as possible.

What would you do?

But it got me thinking.  Imagine that you're quite old with not so many years left in the best of circumstances. Imagine Medicare didn't exist and you have no other insurance.  But you have $200,000 that you had saved over your lifetime to support retirement.  Your doctor tells you that you have cancer.  You learn that it will cost about $200,000 to fight it in which case you can expect to live a few years or you can let the disease take its course and then you'll die in a couple of months.  Assume that you have children.  In the first case you'll leave nothing for your children, but if you let the disease take its course, your children will inherit $200,000.  Your children aren't starving but they're not particularly well off either and could definitely use the money.

What would you do?

Now assume that you don't have $200,000, but you do have Medicare and/or other sufficient health coverage to get the $200,000 worth of treatment.  Your children will be no better or worse off regardless of whether or not you choose to fight the cancer.

What would you do?

If the government (i.e. everybody else) is going to pay for, why not fight it?  It doesn't cost you or your children anything.  But now let's say the government says, "Yes, we'll pay $200,000 over 5 years for your treatment if you want.  But if you choose not to take the treatment and let the disease run its course, we'll make you comfortable and we'll give you $100,000 to bequeath to your heirs when you die.  So if you refuse treatment, your children, grandchildren, etc. will be substantially better off.

What would you do?

The federal government estimates that 70 percent of health-care expenditures are spent on the elderly, 80 percent of that in the last month of life -- and often for aggressive, life-sustaining care that is futile.  What if we gave the option to those that are dying (but mentally competent to make such decisions) to forego treatment and instead give half the saved healthcare money to their children?  There are many benefits for society.  Many tens of billions of dollars per year would be saved, yet the children would be better off, doctors would have more time for other patients, hospital beds would be less overbooked, and healthcare facilities would, in general, have more capacity for other patients.  All it requires is that some people would say yes to foregoing end-of-life treatment.

What would you do?

Answer to: Let's Play Guess the Year and Party

For my recent post that highlighted a Senate debate espousing protectionism against foreign trade, the date of the debate was February 13, 1936 and the Senators were both Democrats.

A larger segment is available at Roger Pielke's blog and starts out by complaining about China.  Apparently China was a villain even back then.

Some things never change!

Might Makes Right: Obamacare

I wasn't at all surprised by the SCOTUS decision regarding the individual mandate.  After all, it's really just semantics to say that an individual mandate to buy something or else pay a fine is any different than a tax with a deduction for buying something, the latter of which has been done over and over with no constitutional debate.

Whereas I don't personally think that Chief Justice Robert's writing in the majority decision showed particularly lucid reasoning, I think the gist was reasonable.  The individual mandate is not allowed by the Commerce Clause, but rather under the taxing clauses.

This is yet another example of taxation being in direct conflict with freedom and has been exacerbated by the 16th amendment: "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration." Without the 16th amendment, these sorts of tax versus tax credit bits of legislation would be a lot harder.

Any behavior can be thus enforced through taxation.  For example, Congress could legislate that everybody pay 100% of their income in taxes with deductions for various behaviors such as buying health insurance, eating broccoli, working for progressive causes, etc.  If you don't do enough of the "right" behaviors, you starve.

I'm not saying that Congress is about to do anything as extreme as that.

What I am saying is the constitution really is just a piece of paper that has virtually no protective or really even useful value.

Ultimately, Might Makes Right.

Update: According to Randy Barnett, who actually probably knows what he's talking about, I'm wrong - the level of taxation allowed in cases like this cannot amount to coercion, only incentive.

Drat! Foiled Again!

I think that focus, tenacity, and perseverance are the three most human qualities most correlated with success. While I think that these are mostly innate qualities, I think they can be nurtured and significantly strengthened.

I got my electric guitar out of the attic for my older daughter who takes guitar classes at school. They do classical guitar the first half of the year and electric the second half.

My guitar has been calling to me. I don't mean that I've been having hallucinations, it's just that I feel a strong attraction to it.

When my younger daughter was 9, she and I were listening to "Johnny Winter And... Live" and we started talking about the music. She really dislikes his voice, especially when he hits the high notes using a sort of gargling falsetto scream. I told her I rather like that style of singing but could understand why she didn't like it.

I then went on to say the he was (is) a truly great guitarist. I wanted to then continue by turning that statement into a lecture about focus and tenacity so I pointed out that one of the reasons he's great is that he basically plays guitar or listens to music every waking second. I do believe that's one of life's most important lessons: success is more due to focus, tenacity, and perseverance than any other quality.

However, I was thwarted in delivering the rest of the lesson because the conversation went something like this:

Daughter: But you're a great guitarist and you don't play guitar all the time.

Me: No. I'm an okay guitar player[1], Johnny Winter is a great guitarist[2].

Daughter: Well, I think you're a great guitarist, daddy!

So she melted me then and there, rendering me incapable of continuing the lesson, even though my first thought was, "I'd better get her ears checked."

Unfortunately, the flip side of the focus, tenacity, and perseverance coin is obsession. Obsession is unhealthy in and of itself, but also seems to be closely related to drug addiction and alcohol dependence. That certainly was true for Johnny Winters and who knows how many other dead or ruined rock guitarists.

It's a fine balance between being obsessed enough to achieve success (how ever one wishes to define it) and staying healthy and reasonably balanced. I think it might be mostly genetic though.

Notes:
[1] I feel that there are three levels of guitar virtuosity: guitar owner, guitar player, and guitarist. I'm somewhere in the guitar player range - on a good day.
[2] Great guitarists seem to have three qualities: (1) obsession, (2) huge hands, and (3) steel belted fingertips (mine blister quite easily).

War on Drugs is Getting Old

We've had the "War on Drugs" for nearly half a century and everybody's losing.  "Fast and Furious", the latest scandal, is just another drug-related operation gone awry.

The first problem is that it's not really a war on drugs:

The war, after all, cannot really be a war on drugs, since drugs cannot be arrested, prosecuted, or punished.  The war is against persons who use drugs.  As such, the war is a civil war, fought against the 28 million Americans who use illegal drugs annually. -Douglas Husak, Rutgers University.

It would be a devastating civil war if the 28 million drug users shot bullets instead of drugs, but fortunately, the vast majority have refrained from violent resistance against their oppressors.

Yet it's still devastating in numerous ways.  The first, as pointed out by Doug Bandow at Forbes, is financial:

Perhaps the most obvious cost of enforcing the drug laws is financial.  Government must create an expansive and expensive enforcement apparatus, including financial and military aid to other governments.  At the same time, the U.S. authorities must forgo any tax revenue from a licit drug market.  According to Harvard’s Jeffrey A. Miron and doctoral candidate Katherine Waldock, in the U.S. alone “legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition” and “yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion annually.”

For the length of the War on Drugs, that works out to nearly $5 trillion in the United States alone.  That's about 1/3 the total debt that could have been eliminated. As a nation, we've got to cut spending and revenues from taxes on drugs would help as well.  We simply cannot afford this nonsense any longer.

An additional cost is the huge rate of incarceration of people for drug use (also from the Forbes article):

The Drug War has turned America into a prison state.  There were 13.7 million arrests in 2009, more than 10% of which, 1.7 million, were for drug offenses.  Nearly half of the latter were for marijuana.  In comparison, just 590,000 people were arrested for violent crimes.  Overall, 80% of drug arrests are for possession.  More than half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug offenses.  About 20% of state prisoners are incarcerated for drug crimes.

We need these people to be in the economy, producing, as opposed to being in jail, languishing.

Lastly, it's very clear to me that the "War on Drugs" is not coming anywhere close to its goals and may not be having any positive effect at all.

Various mixtures of these strategies and tactics have been implemented around the world over the last 50 years, but there is no evidence that any national government has been able to achieve anything like the objective of a controlled and diminished drug market, let alone a drug free world.

So the "War on Drugs" isn't helping, it's ruining people's lives by putting them in jail, and it's breaking the bank.  The last three presidents have all used drugs and tens of millions of Americans have tried illegal drugs.

It's time to take a radically different approach and declare peace: legalize and tax drugs.

Let's Play Guess the Year and Party

The following is an excerpt from the congressional record of a Senate floor debate.  Can you guess the year?  Or at least the decade?  Or at least the century?  How about the political party of the two Senators (hint: they're both from the same party)?

SENATOR 1. Another untoward situation that confronts the American producer is that machinery which we have perfected in this country, the best machinery in the world, is now available in every part of the world, and the people of other nations can use our machinery and produce as great a volume as we can at very much cheaper wages. 

SENATOR 2. Because they pay to their laborers engaged in the manufacture of [various items] about one-tenth of what is paid the American laborer. 

SENATOR 1. Exactly. . . 

SENATOR 2. . . . The great trouble that we are to meet, the great trouble that we shall be forced to face in this country sooner or later-and the time is almost here now-is how are we, under heaven, to be able to continue to maintain the high standards of living that we have maintained for the laboring men of this country?

It's amazing how the debate never changes!

King Putt

Obama has played 101 rounds of golf since becoming President.  While nowhere near the record for a president (both Wilson and Eisenhower played golf at more than double Obama's rate), it's still a fairway amount of time for the President to spend golfing.

When asked why he played so much golf, Obama replied, "I'm trying to appeal to the Tee Party."

Chaos and Trade

I'm not a very strong advocate for unfettered free trade.

The main reason is that more is not always better.  While people trading with each other enables efficiencies of specialization, economies of scale, etc., and there's little doubt that 10 people trading with each other are  better off than if each did everything for himself, and 100 is better than 10, and 1,000 is better than 100, it seems that increasing the size of a free trade area beyond a certain point is going to have minimal additional benefits.


There are lots of examples of this: eating more is good up to a point, then you get fat; increasing pressure when pumping fluid in a pipe increases flow until the flow becomes turbulent - then additional pressure has little effect other than possibly rupturing the pipe; entities get too big to fail (see Wall Street, GM, etc.); etc.  In general, complex systems with chaotic interactions can't be scaled without limitation.

An economy is such a system.

Would going from a free trade area of 500,000,000 (roughly the size of NAFTA) to 7,000,000,000 really enable significantly more wealth creation?  I doubt it (though I admit that there is no empirical evidence that supports my doubt).

As a result, I support across the board tariffs on all goods and services coming into NAFTA.  I think that NAFTA is a pretty ideal free trade area with first and third world countries with more than adequate resources.  If having free trade worldwide is in fact better, it won't be all that much better. The tariffs serve as "baffles" to help reduce chaotic interactions that could increase the risk of catastrophic failure.  Lastly, revenues for the government have to come from somewhere and tariffs are no worse of a source than anything else.

Intelligence: Of Ants and Men

According to the dictionary, "intelligence" means "capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity".  Since it's a "capacity" sort of thing, there is therefore a range of intelligence, with some having more capacity than others.

Sometimes that range is compared to a threshold, usually arbitrary, above which the person or thing is considered intelligent.  For example, we might say, "she's intelligent but he's dumb as a rock", which just means that she exceeds some arbitrary level of intelligence, but he doesn't.  This assumes that a rock has zero or very limited intelligence (which may be a bad assumption given that silicon can be considered a type of rock).

When we consider the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligent life, we also compare it to a threshold.  We'd rather expect that the life, to be considered intelligent, can communicate, builds stuff, and probably lives in fairly large groups.  Of course, an ant colony qualifies as an intelligent life form by that description, and I've often wondered if aliens visited the planet, if at first blush, they could tell the difference between the intelligence of ants and the intelligence of humans.  We both scurry about, build stuff, communicate, have some understanding of the world, and act on that understanding to extract resources from the world to raise our young.

One can argue that ants don't actually "understand" anything.  They're just little machines and their behavior is completely emergent due to their simple "programming" interacting with the world.  That's true, but the same thing can be said of humans.  We're just bigger machines and our behavior is completely emergent due to our somewhat more complicated "programming" interacting with the world.  I believe that's also very likely to be true.

Let's look at it incrementally.  Humans certainly have "capacity for understanding".  How about other primates?  I'd say certainly.  Cats?  I'd still say certainly, but they're less intelligent than primates.  Mice?  Well, they certainly seems to understand that it's a bad idea to hang out around cats, but they're less intelligent still.  Ants?  I'd say an ant understands its world in a primitive way, but here we get to that arbitrary threshold thing where some will agree with me and some won't.  Roundworms?  I think most would say no.  Rocks? No.

By the above sequence, the level of intelligence according to an observer is clearly very closely related to number of neurons.  A roundworm has 302 neurons, an ant has about 250,000 neurons, a mouse has 75 million neurons, a cat has a cool billion neurons, a chimpanzee has two billion neurons, and a human has 85 billion neurons.

A neuron is a neuron is a neuron, regardless of species.  The more neurons, the more intelligent.  Intelligence is an emergent phenomenon from the activity of those neurons.  There really is no objective threshold that demarcates intelligence from non-intelligence or understanding from non-understanding (for example, you can't say any species with more than 97,423,014 neurons is intelligent, those with less aren't).

Intelligence for biological entities is all simply a matter of degree based on the number of neurons.

Unfair Advantage

I'm finding it humerous that someone with a nearly unspellable name (Snigdha Nandipati) won this year's national spelling bee.  After learning to spell her own name, I'm guessing that learning to spell words like "guetapens" (the winning word), "stochastically", "rhonchus", "luteovirescent",  "saccharolytic", and "arrondissement" was probably a piece of cake. (Also amusing is the fact that as I type these words, spell-check doesn't like a single one of them - perhaps I'm mistyping them so don't study from this list!).

Ms. Nadipati goes to my daughters' small and somewhat nerdy school, so she's quite a hero there.  She "studies 10-12 hours on weekends and six hours on weekdays."  Wow!  And I thought my younger daughter, who studies about half that, was way, way overboard on the whole studying thing!

Low Profile Warming

In a recent speech at a conference on global warming sponsored by the Heartland Institute, climate skeptic Vaclav Klaus say he thinks that climate alarmists are changing their approach (emphasis added by Klaus):

Let me, therefore, start by thanking you for keeping the global warming issue alive. This is an important achievement in a moment when it has already become half-forgotten. It has not happened accidently, it was and is planned. It is a part of a carefully prepared tactic of global warming alarmists how to – once and for all – win their case. In the past two decades, they tried to do the opposite. They wanted to be as loud as possible to arouse our fears, now – when the whole issue becomes more and more suspicious – it is in their interest to stop any public discussion. This is the reason why they try to pretend that “the science is settled”, that the debate is over. We should not let them do it. [...]


The undeniable fact is that almost from one day to the next the global warming debate ceased to be fashionable. It disappeared from the headlines. It may weaken the position of the global warming fundamentalists but it makes it more difficult for us, the “deniers” or “skeptics”, as they call us, to motivate people to think about this issue and to openly and politically express their views about the irrational, human freedom curtailing, human prosperity undermining measures and policies introduced by the political establishments in most of the countries of the world in the last two decades, not to speak about the measures prepared for the future. We have to keep repeating that our planet is determined not only by anthropogenic influences but dominantly by long term exogenous and endogenous natural processes and that most of them are beyond any human control.

The alarmism has subsided, they want to make it “low profile”.

The general idea is that the alarmists have already succeeded in indoctrinating a whole generation of children and have already gotten many crazy regulations in place so now it is time to work the back channels: the politicians and the courts.

Might Makes Right: God

The construct of God in many religions is the single most blatant appeal to Might Makes Right.  After all, it's not "god, kinda wimpy who'd sorta prefer things be done a certain way, but hey, if not don't sweat it", but rather "God Almighty Who Commands Us and Judges Us with Tremendously Horrible Consequence Should We Disobey (that burning in hell for all of eternity sort of thing)!".  Things are good and right because God who's infinitely powerful says so and when we question Him we are told that He works in mysterious ways beyond our comprehension.

While I'm not personally religious, it's clear to me that various manifestations of gods exist in the minds of believers. There are, for example, more than one billion Roman Catholics in the world, the vast majority of which believe in their God and put some level of effort into following His Word.  So their God, even if He is completely fictitious and intangible, really is amazingly powerful and mighty in that He substantially affects the feelings, thoughts, behaviors and actions of a huge number of people, both individually and collectively.

Since humans seem to have evolved a proclivity to believe in god(s), my guess is that belief was directly helpful in the survival of the fittest competition.  The primary mechanism by which it made believers more fit is that it provided an organizing principle and social cohesion that not only transcended individuals, but whole tribes, the leaders of those tribes, and even whole generations (in other words, god, being immortal, transcends time).

Whether or not god exists in reality (natural or supernatural) in this context is immaterial.  The difference between a real god who once created the universe but is now taking a more hands off and judging approach versus one who exists solely in the minds of believers has the identical tangible effect here on earth.

God's might is used to enforce god's word (either interpreted or made up) which acts as an organizing principal and creator of social cohesion which then creates real power.

In other words, Might Makes Right Makes Might.