Half Sigma

The carrying costs of immigrants: a response to Arnold Kling

In response to my post on GDP per capita, Arnold Kling responded:

Letting in a low-skilled immigrant to mow my lawn will indeed lower average productivity in this country. But I will be better off.

Indeed, if we let in a single low-skilled immigrant just to do services for Arnold Kling, Arnold Kling will benefit, but only at the expense of other American taxpayers who have to pay his servant's carrying costs.

In a modern welfare state, letting in low skilled, low IQ, low wage immigrants, lowers the standard of living of non-immigrants because they have to pay for the immigrants’ carrying costs.

All levels of government in the United States spend approximately $16,800 per person per year ($5.1105 trillion of spending divided by 304.2 million people). A guy who mows lawns does not pay $16,800 of taxes, thus his labor is being heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer.

In fact, if the immigrant works 40 hours per week, he needs to earn more than $8.07/hour just to make as much money as the government is spending on his support. I don’t know how you can say that an immigrant is adding to the economy if the market value of his labor is less than what it costs the government to subsidize him. If a business owned a machine that produced $15,000 per year of output, but cost $16,8000 per year to maintain, the machine would be sold for scrap. Of course that assumes that the business is paying the machine’s costs. If the government were paying for the machine, then of course the business would keep it, because all businesses are glad to take corporate welfare from the government. Immigration is a form of corporate welfare.

We should also consider that immigrants become citizens and then vote in elections. If they are poor, they will vote for politicians who promise to increase government spending for poor people. It’s strange that a libertarian like Arnold Kling promotes a government immigration policy that’s guaranteed to result in a bigger welfare state.

How much money does an immigrant have to earn before the value that his labor adds to the economy plus the amount of taxes that he pays equals $16,800 per year? To be on the safe side, we should insist that an immigrant be able to earn at least twice that amount, $33,600 per year or $16.14 per hour, before he’s allowed to move here. The $33,600 per year worker still doesn't pay his share of taxes, but there's a chance that the value of his labor plus his taxes paid makes his presence worthwhile.

Hardly any illegal immigrants earn $33,600 per year, so all illegal immigrants should be deported.

Another crane collapses in New York

There was another construction crane collapse in Manhattan today.

Here’s my thought on why cranes keep collapsing in Manhattan: New York City my have the smartest white collar workers, but New York City also has the stupidest and most dishonest blue collar workers.

Of course, the results of the official investigation won't cite that as the reason for the crane collapse. It would be politically incorrect.

* * *

For some reason, some commenters thought this was an anti-immigrant post. Actually, it was an anti-Guido post.

MRIs show that status and money trigger the same brain areas

Last month, there was the report of a study, comparing social rewards with monetary rewards:

19 subjects participated in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments involving monetary and social rewards. The acquisition of one's good reputation robustly activated reward-related brain areas, notably the striatum, and these overlapped with the areas activated by monetary rewards.

And a related study revealed that “social hierarchical consequences of performance were neurally dissociable and of comparable salience to monetary reward, providing a neural basis for the high motivational value of status.”

This proves that I was right and Don Boudreaux was wrong. In that previous blog post I wrote:

It is part of our core human nature to be concerned with our position in society. As an economist, Don surely understands that money is a medium of exchange. People don’t really want money, they want the things that money can buy. After the basic necessities one needs to survive, what the remaining income is really spent on is status. A big house, an expensive car, expensive clothes, there are all signaling devices that tell the world “I have made it, my status is high, look at what I can afford to buy!”

Environmentalists in Vermont

Moron environmentalists want to shut down Vermont's nuclear power plant which supplies one-third of the state's electricity.

This once again demonstrates how environmentalists don't really care about global warming, they just use it to accomplish their real goals, a complete destruction of the modern way of life.

Leftists against transracial adoption

There’s a NY Times article about transracial adoption. A lot of people on the left are strongly opposed to it. It’s almost as if they are afraid that large-scale transracial adoption will result in something being discovered that they want kept secret.

These anti-transracial-adoption people claim that black children are somehow harmed by being brought up by white people, but there’s no evidence in the article about this. There’s an interview with a black woman who is now a writer. That sounds like a nice job. If one judges parenting quality by career outcomes, her white adoptive-parents did a better job than the typical black parents.

GDP per capita, or total GDP?

The best country to live in is the one with the highest GDP per capita, and not the highest total GDP. India has a much higher total GDP than Iceland, but I’m sure that Iceland is the better place to live.

Unskilled low-IQ immigrants who come to the U.S. contribute slightly to higher total GDP, but they lower the GDP per capita.

The only benefit to a nation of having the biggest population and the highest total GDP is that you can field a more powerful military. Thus it's strange that the pacifistic left-wing is the wing that's pro-immigration.

---

In response to comments below, I agree that median income per person is a better gauge of quality of life for the typical person than mean income per person.

I do NOT agree with the guy who says Republicans are equally blameful for high immigration. Go read Daily Kos and see how insanely pro-immigration they are. There's no Republican blog that's like that. I agree that there are Republican politicians who don't give a damn about what Republican voters think if they are receiving campaign contributions from pro-immigration businesses, but that's only so long as they are not losing votes because of it. It has primarily been the forces on the left, like the Daily Kos people, who have convinced the public to be pro-immigration and vote against their own interests.

If there is going be a serious reduction of immigration, it's NOT going to come from Democrats. That I guarantee.

Capital-labor ratio: 1950s vs. 2000s

I promised that I’d write this three weeks ago, but somehow I got distracted.

Post WWII suburbanization, enabled by the automobile, was the greatest thing to ever happen to the middle class. Suddenly there was a lot more room to build houses, and houses became a lot more affordable. Suburbanization created a big capital expansion. (Yes, houses are capital, and typically the majority of capital owned by the middle and prole classes.)

After the 1950s, the following forces increased the supply of labor:

(1) women entered the work force. In 1950, women comprised only 29% of the workforce, and in 2003 that was up to 47%. (Source.) This created a huge increase in the supply of labor.

(2) The first Baby Boomers turned 18 in 1964, expanding the size of the workforce between 1964 and 1982 when the last of the Baby Boomers turned 18.

(3) Immigration increased after the 1950s. The 1930s to the 1950s was a period of very low immigration, and this increased the capital-labor ratio, benefitting the middle class.

(4) Outsourcing, enabled by technology, has made hundreds of millions of people in other countries auxiliary U.S. workers, greatly reducing the capital-labor ratio.

For all the changes that politicians have control over, you can blame Democrats for hurting the middle class by lowering the capital-labor ratio. Democrats have been the party that has pushed women into the workforce in the name of “gender rights,” and Democrats have been the party supporting massive immigration in order to alleviate liberal guilt about white privilege. Democrats have also been opposed to suburbanization. Whenever someone is complaining about the evils of the automobile or urban sprawl, it’s always a Democrat who’s doing the complaining.

Israeli journalist defends Reverend Hagee

Israeli journalist Shmuel Rosner defends Reverend Hagee:

We as Jews are supposed to judge men not by what they believe, but by what they do. For Jews, actions are what matter.

What is far more important than how Pastor Hagee explains the past Holocaust is what he is doing to prevent a second Holocaust. Pastor Hagee has done more to defend Israel and the Jewish people than anyone else I know. He has literally devoted his adult life to the effort to combat anti-Semitism and build support for the Jewish State. Despite death threats from anti-Semites, despite protest marches from neo-Nazis, and despite the shrill complaints of suspicious Jews, Pastor Hagee has persevered in his work on our behalf.

Do we really want to treat our friends like this? Do we really want to ignore years of devoted labor on our behalf because of a few controversial statements? I, for one, do not.

I have to say that I'm pretty disgusted by the treatment that Reverend Hagee has received. The fact that staunchly pro-Israel Hagee endorsed McCain is a reason for Jews to vote for McCain and not the guy whose father is a Muslim and who lived in an Islamic country when he was a kid.

Which country has the most creative videogames?

Creativity was a recent topic of discussion around here.

Today there’s a NY Times article about Shigeru Miyamoto,the “creative mastermind at Nintendo.”

Atari, despite the Japanese name, was an American company and the original home videogame company. But today the videogame market is dominated by Nintendo and Sony, both Japanese companies.

Then there is the Microsoft Xbox. Is it creative? Or merely a case of Microsoft using its massive cash reserves to muscle its way into the market with a copycat device?

When it comes to videogame consoles, Japan seems more creative these days than the United States.

(Half Sigma doesn't own a videogame console, and doesn't find videogames as fun to play as when he was a teenager. Maybe he's getting old.)

Young New Yorkers with poor parents

There’s a NY Times article about the lives of young New Yorkers whose parents don’t pay their rent.

I think that Cassaundra Reed, the hotel concierge, is rather cute.

Reverend controversies

I don’t understand the Rev. John C. Hagee controversy. Hagee said that God wanted the Jews to move to Israel. Based on all the noise being made about it, you would have thought he had said that Allah wanted the Palestinians to move to Israel.

And I find the related Rev. Rod Parsley controversy even less understandable. He said that Islam an “anti-Christ religion.” As far as I know, that’s an accurate statement. If Muslims were pro-Christ, they wouldn’t be Muslim, they’d be Christian. Duh! I guess it’s politically incorrect to point out that people who aren’t Christian don’t believe in the divinity of Christ.

HBCU fires professor for failing students

Yesterday, “Poor Postdoc” left me a link to an article at Inside Higher Ed about Steven Aird, a former professor at Norfolk State University (which is an HBCU [historically black college/university]) who was fired because he failed 90% of his students.

I’m quite surprised by all the comments at Inside Higher Ed supporting Mr. Aird. They are obviously coming from people living in an ivory tower. Mr. Aird seems to me like a naïve schmuck. Of course a professor is going to get fired for failing 90% of students. Workers at every type of organization other than a university know that if they disobey the rules of the organization, they get fired. Duh!

Furthermore, the rule that you should pass 70% of the students makes perfect sense. The primary purpose of any organization is to perpetuate its own existence. Any organization’s stated primary purpose (such as educating students) is actually its secondary purpose. If every professor at the university failed 90% of his students, there would be no more university and everyone would lose their jobs. Anyone who’s surprised or outraged that the guy was fired has to be pretty clueless.

What we should be outraged about is that this “university” exists in the first place. Obviously, only a small handful of its students belong in college. Only 30% of its students graduate in six years (that’s six years, not four years), and surely a large percentage of those who do manage to graduate wouldn’t have been able to graduate at a school where the students were graded to white student standards.

Even if the students are not smart enough to be in college, they can at the very least attend class. Right? Apparently not. The attendance rate for Aird’s class was only 66%, and that’s apparently typical for classes at NSU.

Aird is apparently some sort of do-gooder liberal who thought that if you held black students to the same standard as white students at real colleges, they’d rise to the challenge. Apparently he was wrong about that.

In the discussions here about HBD, various commenters, have suggested that if the truth about HBD were known, this would have a harmful psychological effect on blacks because they would no longer even try. I don’t buy this at all. The situation is similar to how blacks feel about the word “nigger.” If a white person says the word “nigger,” black people act like they are all pissed off, and they might even physically attack the white person (see previous post on high violent crime rates in states where black people live). But black people routinely call each other “nigger” (or is that “niggah”?) when white people aren’t around. I think it’s the same way with HBD. Black people act all angry if a white person says that blacks aren’t smart, but then when they are at an HBCU, instead of proving whitey wrong by diligently studying, they do the opposite and they blow off class. They know that school is a white people activity and not a black people activity, so they know it's pointless to even try. HBD isn’t going to tell them something they don’t already know. HBD is more shocking to white liberals than it is to blacks.

Accelerating education: an idea too good to ever happen

I found a Randall Parker blog post from five years ago in which he recommends accelerating education. He makes some excellent points, all of which are completely ignored by current policy makers.

Among upper class parents, the trend is to deaccelerate education. They want their kids to start school later so they are bigger and more mature than the other kids—upper class parents correctly understand that the real purpose of education is to give their children a track record of success so they can get into a good career track—actually going to school to learn stuff is for the middle class. (The prole classes don't value education at all.)

And of course, on the other end of the educational timeline, graduate school is now seen as required for entry into the good career tracks, whereas in the past only a Bachelor's degree was needed.

Randall has the excellent idea of doing away with summer breaks. Without summers off, students could graduate college in three years instead of four. But is this really beneficial in the negative-sum game of life? The early-graduating student would be a year less mature when interviewing for his first job, which is detrimental to being hired into a good career track. Being a year or two older makes the graduating student look more like a mature worker and less like a kid too young for a career.

Top nine states

According to the 2000 Census, the following nine states have less than 1% black population:

Idaho
Maine
Montana
New Hampshire
North Dakota
South Dakota
Utah
Vermont
Wyoming

According to a list of crime rates by state, the following nine states have the fewest robberies per 100,000 inhabitants:

Idaho
Iowa
Maine
Montana
New Hampshire
North Dakota
South Dakota
Vermont
Wyoming

Hmmm, anyone notice any similarity between the two lists?

Allegro Tanzania Kanyovu coffee

Wow, this is really good stuff! Who said that nothing good ever came out of Africa?

I bought it at Whole Foods. It was almost worth waiting in the ridiculously long lines.

David Leonhardt is a big moron

I finally figured this guy out. He’s a commie liberal posing as an economist. He’s obviously trying to make himself the next Paul Krugman.

In today’s idiotic column, he supposedly demonstrates that “education” creates “economic prosperity.”

Boy, am I sick and tired of economists touting the imaginary benefit of “education.” A reader of the blog forwarded to me, a few weeks ago, a link to a paper demonstrating that education actually hurts economic outcomes. David Leonhardt ought to right about that.

According to David Leonhardt, more women have college degrees today than in the 1960s, and women make more relative to men than in the 1960s, thus according to the David Leonhardt correlation-automatically-proves-causation elementary-school reasoning, we now have proof that education creates economic prosperity.

What’s really going on is that women, by getting college degrees, are signaling their desire to have careers. Before the 1960s, women didn’t want careers.

Since the 1960s, male-oriented jobs such as engineering, computer programming, and factory work, have been relentlessly outsourced to foreign countries. In contrast, female-oriented jobs such as nursing, social work, and elementary and secondary school teaching, cannot be outsourced. Outsourcing has thus hurt the average male salary more than the average female salary. This creates the illusion that women are catching up because of something that women are doing differently.

David Leonhardt includes the following statistical lie in his column:

And it’s not as if women’s gains have come at the expense of men. By becoming more educated — and able to do more productive, higher-wage jobs — women have increased the size of the economic pie.

This is not true. I have shown before that median income for young men is declining. By including older people in the statistics, Leonhardt is distorting the true story. Today, young men are screwed in comparison to young men from the past.

Columns like Leonhardt have the left-wing agenda of promoting more government spending on education.

What is creativity?

There has been some conjecture in the comments about whether whites are more creative than Asians. I believe that creativity is like logical thinking in that high intelligence is a prerequisite, but there is also a personality factor involved. For example, I previously noted that when women and men have the same intelligence, men are more likely to think logically than women. I believe that there are a lot of smart people in the world who are capable of thinking logically but they generally prefer to think illogically with their emotions.

There are also many people with the intelligence necessary to think creatively, but because of their personality they prefer not to. The creative personality is more prevalent in whites than it is in Asians, although it’s not clear to me to whether the difference is cultural or genetic. It’s probably a combination of both.

In order to be creative, you need think in a way that’s unique. If you are simply copying someone else then you’re not being creative. I am reminded of Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational in which he compares the restaurant ordering habits of Americans and Chinese living in Hong Kong. In an American restaurant, everyone at the table will tend to order a different dish. From my personal experience, I feel uncomfortable ordering the same thing that someone else at the table already ordered. It just seems wrong. But in Hong Kong, restaurant goers behave in exactly the opposite manner. Everyone at the table will order the exact same thing. Can someone who lives in a culture where you can’t even make your own decision about what to eat at a restaurant think as creatively as an American? Probably not.

Perhaps creativity is related to the Big Five personality factor of Openness to Experience. A little bit of poking around the web has led me to conclude that whites have higher Openness than Asians. A study of Malaysian students showed that they had lower scores in Openness (as well as Extraversion) compared to American students. (Source.) A study of entry-level blue collar workers in the Midwest showed that whites had higher scores in Openness (as well as Agreeableness, Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Conscientiousness) compared to Asians. (Source.)

Albert Einstein writes about God and religion:

From Albert Einstein letter, January 1954, translated from German by Joan Stambaugh:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

A response to Razib

Razib (from the blog Gene Expression) writes:

I presented the results because I thought they were interesting. but I believe people need to be genetic realists here and not overplay their hand and get too caught up in such correlations before the data are followed up. I'm not going to present my technical reasons for caution, just reminding you guys to remember what happened with ASPM. I've been blogging on these topics for five years, and would offer that people just follow the literature and read up on the field.

Razib is one of the few people who comment here who is quite knowledgeable on genetics, more so than I am. So his comment merits a reply, as it brings up some interesting points.

I believe that Razib’s main point is that currently only a small percentage of genes associated with important brain functions have been identified. Not enough is known at this point in time to estimate a person’s IQ based on his gene sequence (hundreds, maybe thousands of genes are involved), and since we can’t do that, we can’t use gene information to determine how the races differ in average levels of intelligence.

But the way I see it, we don’t need a gene-based IQ test in order to know that intelligence is an hereditary trait, or that the races differ in average level of intelligence. All this is proven in the research that is documented in the book The g Factor, and in additional research conducted since that book was published. (If you are too lazy to find the book in a library and can’t afford the ridiculous price tag at Amazon.com, then you can read this free paper, Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability.)

The problem with this research, for liberals, is that it disproves liberal left-wing religious beliefs about the equality of man, in much the same way that Darwin’s original theory of evolution disproved a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. Left-wing liberals are in the ironic position of supporting the teaching of evolution in schools yet at the same time adamantly denying the natural consequences of the theory with respect to genetic differences between humans. Because the liberal left-wing controls the media and academia, they are able to keep this research suppressed, and brand anyone who mentions it with the scarlet letter of racism.

Prior to gene sequencing technology, left-wing liberals could cling to the belief that despite the mountain of evidence, there are no genes responsible for intelligence or other significant differences in the human brain, and that the races, although physically different, have exactly the same brains.

The genetic research to-date, although limited, proves the beliefs in the above paragraph to be false. Genes associated with brain functioning, including intelligence (or at least the ability to do well on IQ tests), have been discovered. And when you look up these genes in the HapMap project, we see that they differ in frequency between the races.

The link in Razib’s quote is about the Bruce Lahn genes. The Bruce Lahn genes have something to do with brain function, and they first appeared in humans after whites and Asians split off from blacks. Yes, research shows that these genes aren’t related to head size, mental ability, or “altruism,” but Bruce Lahn’s research does prove that the brain evolved differently for sub-Saharan Africans and the rest of humanity.

Thus the reason why I find this genetic research blog-worthy is because it shoots down the most common arguments of HBD-deniers. The HBD-deniers will say that “there is more variation within races than between races,” but we see that for genes that effect brain function, there is significant variation between the races. As every year goes by, the arguments of the HBD-deniers get weaker.

Another gene (IL1RAPL1) correllated with race and IQ

Via Gene Expression, I came across new research on a gene, IL1RAPL1, that’s correlated with intelligencer. I am unable to read the original paper because I’m not blogging from an organization that has a subscription to the journal it's published in, but the blogger at Anthropology.net has a a very good summary of the research.

The Anthropology.net blogger says that people with two C alleles of the rs12847959 SNP have higher IQs than people with only one allele.

If we look at the HapMap report for rs12847959 we discover that the C allele is least common in the African sample and most common in the two Asian samples, with the Caucasian sample in the middle. This is just as J. Philippe Rushton would have predicted. This is further proof that there are genetic differences between the races that cause the races to have different average intelligence.

The Anthropology.net blogger also points out that all of the scientists involved in the research are Chinese. Study of the genetic underpinnings of intelligence are not taboo among Chinese as they are among white. Unlike whites, Chinese don’t feel any guilt about being Chinese, and are probably proud to demonstrate that their race has superior intelligence.

In California, two men can marry each other

The California Supreme Court is obviously extremely left-wing. It ruled that gay marriages are the law in California, despite the fact that a California statute says otherwise.

I’m not an expert on the California constitution (although I suppose I am somewhat of an expert on constitutional law in general ), but I find it hard to believe that the drafters of the California constitution intended it to mean that two men are allowed to marry each other.

Girls getting injured playing sports

There’s a NY Times article about how girls are getting injured at an alarming rate playing sports.

Girl soccer players get injured at the same rate as boy football players. This is not because soccer is as violent a sport as football, but because girls’ bodies are weaker than boys’ bodies and get injured more easily. When boys play the same sport as girls, the girls get injured five times as often as boys.

The cult of athletics doesn’t make much sense even when it’s just applied to boys. Children these days are expected to give their complete devotion to some sport, until they graduate college at the age of 22, at which time they never play that sport again, but they may live with sports injuries for the rest of their lives. Does the system really make any sense?

Feminazi’s with penis envy have now forced this same athletic regimen on girls. Boys at least get some negative-sum advantage in the game of life. For example, I previously blogged about how playing lacrosse leads to good jobs on Wall Street. Also, willingness to suffer injury probably demonstrates some sort of useful alpha-male characteristic. But there don’t seem to be any similar advantages for women.

Demography of eastern Long Island

Some comments to my previous post expressed doubts that there were hardly any white people in the Hamptons. I was referring to the "South Fork" of Long Island between eastern Southampton and Montauk. Unfortunately, there's no Census PUMA code for just that area. PUMA code 4304 is for all of eastern Suffolk County, which includes both "forks" as well as land west of the forks.

Frequency Distribution
Cells contain: -Column percent -N of cases		Distribution
race	1: White	88.5 108,366
	2: Black/Negro	5.4 6,566
	3: American Indian or Alaska Native	.5 603
	4: Chinese	.3 310
	5: Japanese	.1 104
	6: Other Asian or Pacific Islander	.7 901
	7: Other race, nec	2.7 3,255
	8: Two major races	1.8 2,257
	9: Three or more major races	.0 57
	COL TOTAL	100.0 122,419

Eastern Long Island is a pretty white place. I suspect that most of the black people living in the prestigious South Fork are someone's live-in help. Furthermore, most of the rich white people who own homes there don't show up on the Census because they are mostly second homes and not primary residences.

You'll just have to believe me when I say that, when you walk around the main shopping area of Sag Harbor or East Hampton, you don't see a single black person.

The Census "FactFinder" for East Hampton shows that it's officially 3.6% black, but you really don't see them. Remember that the Census also shows that 52.7% of the housing units in East Hampton are vacant so their owners don't show up on the Census at all.

The chart also backs up my point about their not being any Asians in the Hamptons. New York State is 5.5% Asian, but eastern Long Island is only 1.1% Asian.

Democrats: the party of the rich

There’s an article in today’s NY Times about a shop in the Hamptons that sells $3 plastic cups with either Obama, Clinton, or McCain on it. So far the tally of cups sold is: “Barack Obama, 637; Hillary Rodham Clinton, 329; John McCain, 89”

The Hamptons are where rich New Yorkers summer. Clearly the Democratic Party is the party of the rich. For some reason, the Republican Party wrongly has the reputation as the party of the rich, yet actual rich people overwhelmingly support Democrats. The Republican Party is the party of the middle class.

* * *

The Hamptons has to be the whitest place in a hundred mile radius of New York City. You rarely see a minority in the Hamptons, except for nannies. Although Asians have money, they don’t go to the Hamptons. Asians don’t get it.

Anyway, this demonstrates the hypocrisy of the limousine liberals who insulate themselves from the blacks while at the same time they overwhelmingly support a black guy for president.

The funny thing about blogging

The funny thing about blogging is that I tend to do it when I'm procrastinating. When there's nothing that I'm trying to avoid doing, suddenly there's less interest in blogging.

I'm sorry I haven't posted anything for a few days.

We are not "losing" a "war" in Iraq

I'm sick and tired of hearing people say that we are "losing" the "war" in Iraq.

If fifty years ago, you told someone that our troops went into a country, took the place over in a few weeks, and now run the place, they would have responded, "wow, you guys won a really big victory!"

But someone has managed to redefine the term "win" so it means that you have to transform a nation into a peaceful Democracy while taking zero casualties and not being allowed to attack and kill enemy guerillas unless you have a clear shot at them without any women, children, or Mosques in the way.

Obviously the political left is responsible for this redefinition, and the political left is so powerful that they managed to sucker a lot of people in the Bush administration into believing this nonsense.

Yes, the Bush administration is thought of as hardcore conservative, but actually Bush has been brainwashed into believing in liberal left-wing hate-America nonsense. He has bought into the idea that you can't just win a war by taking over a country; he has bought into the nonsense that America is inherently evil and that the only way to cleanse the evilness of a military victory is by subsequently taking a lot of casualties and showing that we are the good guys by bringing peaceful Democracy while, all the time, respecting the most absurd and evil religion on the planet.

The real story is that:

(1) We won the war in Iraq in a few weeks.

(2) It's impossible to bring peaceful Democracy to religious fanatics with lower genetic intelligence than the average caucasian American.

(3) We could reduce our casualties substantially if we made the enemy guerrillas truly fear the consequences of attacking us, both for themselves as well as their families. But then, I don't see the point of keeping our troops there if doing so will just to cost us money without bringing us anything in return except for avoiding the false perception that we "lost."

Measuring capital

This is the second in my series of posts on the capital/labor ratio.

Capital (like labor) is a somewhat abstract concept that can’t be precisely measured. It’s tempting to try to measure capital by looking at fair market values of things that might be considered capital, but that can lead to all sorts of false results.

Take for example Homeowner Bob. Bob bought his house for $200,000 in 1995. Today, the house has a fair market value of $400,000. Based on market value, it might seem that Bob has twice as much capital today as he had 13 years ago. But that’s nonsense, it’s the same house, and in fact there’s less capital in the house than there was 13 years ago because the house now has 13 years of wear and tear.

The reason why housing prices have gone up so much is because of government regulations (such as zoning) which prevent as many houses from being built as the market would otherwise demand. These government regulations, by restricting the creation of housing capital, have the effect of lowering the capital/labor ratio. And as I stated in my first post, a low capital/labor ratio leads to wealth and income inequality.

Because it’s the liberal Democrats who promote policies that restrict the supply of houses (see, for example, my endorsement of John Faso for governor of New York), this demonstrates my previous point about how liberal Democrats have caused the increase in inequality. If people would elect conservative Republicans who promote a laissez-faire approach to homebuilding (an opportunity that New Yorkers rejected when they rejected John Faso and instead elected the Elliot Spitzer), inequality would be reduced.

Flies, like humans, inherit their mental traits

This NY Times article about flies demonstrates what I’ve written about before with respect to humans.

First, scientists bred flies that were better at learning. This proves that, in flies, the ability to learn is a genetically inherited trait. Why do people have such a hard time accepting that the same is true in humans?

Then the scientists mixed up the smart flies with regular flies, in an environment with a limited supply of food. It turns out that the smart flies didn’t survive as well as the regular dumb flies. It’s not clear, exactly, why the smart flies didn’t fare so well, but it would seem that as the flies got smarter, various other traits changed as well.

According to the article, “Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning.” Yep, I suspect the same thing about human. It’s also interesting to note that, in the modern welfare state, the equilibrium has change. No matter how dumb you are, you can still have children and the welfare state will ensure they grow up to have more children. The welfare state will cause a big dumbing down of humans over the course of future generations.

The capital/labor ratio and inequality

I believe that the capital/labor ratio is one of the primary drivers of wage and wealth equality or inequality.

When the capital/labor ratio is high, that means there’s a relative shortage of labor, so people who own capital have to pay higher wages in order get the labor necessary to make their capital profitable.

When the capital/labor ratio is low, this means there’s a surplus of labor, so wages are depressed, and the worker is often unable to earn enough money to get ahead. When the capital/labor ratio is low, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The 1950s is often hailed as the golden age of America’s middle class. Strong unions are often cited as a reason for this, but that’s actually a reversal of the cause and effect. In the 1950s, there was a perfect storm of a high capital-labor ratio, and unions and high wages were both the results of the high bargaining power that workers have when there’s a high capital-labor ratio.

There are two political axes in the United States. The conservative-Republican axis doesn’t care that much about wage and wealth inequality. The liberal-Democratic axis claims to care about inequality, but this axis is too stupid to understand economics and, very ironically, it’s the very policies supported by the liberal-Democratic axis that has caused the increase in inequality by lowering the capital/labor ratio.

UPDATE

This is not merely an anti-immigration post; many other factors have conspired to lower the capital/labor ratio. I will write about them in the near future.

White peope imagine that they have black friends

I like this quote from a WSJ article:

Obama, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a Duke sociologist, asked his white students how many had a black friend on campus. All the white students raised their hands.

He then asked the black students how many of them had a white friend on campus. None of them raised their hands.

What does this mean? That the guy who wrote the Stuff White People Like blog was right. White people like having black friends. Or more accurately, white people like to imagine that they have black friends, because it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling that they’re racially enlightened, and not racist like rednecks.

(Unlike the typical white liberal, Half Sigma had a black friend when he was in high school. Half Sigma hung out with him a lot and played chess with him. I guess Half Sigma is more racially enlightened and less redneck than the typical white liberal.)