“Settled Science” and the Monty Hall Problem

The so-called 97-percent consensus among climate scientists about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) isn’t evidence of anything but the fact that scientists are only human. Even if there were such a consensus, it certainly wouldn’t prove the inchoate theory of AGW, any more than the early consensus against Einstein’s special theory of relativity disproved that theory.

Actually, in the case of AGW, the so-called consensus is far from a consensus about the extent of warming, its causes, and its implications. (See, for example, this post and this one.) But it’s undeniable that a lot of climate scientists believe in a “strong” version of AGW, and in its supposedly dire consequences for humanity.

Why is that? Well, in a field as inchoate as climate science, it’s easy to let one’s prejudices drive one’s research agenda and findings, even if only subconsciously. And isn’t it more comfortable and financially rewarding to be with the crowd and where the money is than to stand athwart the conventional wisdom? (Lennart Bengtsson certainly found that to be the case.) Moreover, there was, in the temperature records of the late 20th century, a circumstantial case for AGW, which led to the development of theories and models that purport to describe a strong relationship between temperature and CO2. That the theories and models are deeply flawed and lacking in predictive value seems not to matter to the 97 percent (or whatever the number is).

In other words, a lot of climate scientists have abandoned the scientific method, which demands skepticism, in order to be on the “winning” side of the AGW issue. How did it come to be thought of as the “winning” side? Credit vocal so-called scientists who were and are (at least) guilty of making up models to fit their preconceptions, and ignoring evidence that human-generated CO2 is a minor determinant of atmospheric temperature. Credit influential non-scientists (e.g., Al Gore) and various branches of the federal government that have spread the gospel of AGW and bestowed grants on those who can furnish evidence of it. Above all, credit the media, which for the past two decades has pumped out volumes of biased, half-baked stories about AGW, in the service of the “liberal” agenda: greater control of the lives and livelihoods of Americans.

Does this mean that the scientists who are on the AGW bandwagon don’t believe in the correctness of AGW theory? I’m sure that most of them do believe in it — to some degree. They believe it at least to the same extent as a religious convert who zealously proclaims his new religion to prove (mainly to himself) his deep commitment to that religion.

What does all of this have to do with the Monty Hall problem? This:

Making progress in the sciences requires that we reach agreement about answers to questions, and then move on. Endless debate (think of global warming) is fruitless debate. In the Monty Hall case, this social process has actually worked quite well. A consensus has indeed been reached; the mathematical community at large has made up its mind and considers the matter settled. But consensus is not the same as unanimity, and dissenters should not be stifled. The fact is, when it comes to matters like Monty Hall, I’m not sufficiently skeptical. I know what answer I’m supposed to get, and I allow that to bias my thinking. It should be welcome news that a few others are willing to think for themselves and challenge the received doctrine. Even though they’re wrong. (Brian Hayes, “Monty Hall Redux” (a book review), American Scientist, September-October 2008)

The admirable part of Hayes’s statement is its candor: Hayes admits that he may have adopted the “consensus” answer because he wants to go with the crowd.

The dismaying part of Hayes’s statement is his smug admonition to accept “consensus” and move on. As it turns out the “consensus” about the Monty Hall problem isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. A lot of very bright people have solved a tricky probability puzzle, but not the Monty Hall problem. (For the details, see my post, “The Compleat Monty Hall Problem.”)

And the “consensus” about AGW is very far from being the last word, despite the claims of true believers. (See, for example, the relatively short list of recent articles, posts, and presentations given at the end of this post.)

Going with the crowd isn’t the way to do science. It’s certainly not the way to ascertain the contribution of human-generated CO2 to atmospheric warming, or to determine whether the effects of any such warming are dire or beneficial. And it’s most certainly not the way to decide whether AGW theory implies the adoption of policies that would stifle economic growth and hamper the economic betterment of millions of Americans and billions of other human beings — most of whom would love to live as well as the poorest of Americans.

Given the dismal track record of global climate models, with their evident overstatement of the effects of CO2 on temperatures, there should be a lot of doubt as to the causes of rising temperatures in the last quarter of the 20th century, and as to the implications for government action. And even if it could be shown conclusively that human activity will temperatures to resume the rising trend of the late 1900s, several important questions remain:

To what extent would the temperature rise be harmful and to what extent would it be beneficial?

To what extent would mitigation of the harmful effects negate the beneficial effects?

What would be the costs of mitigation, and who would bear those costs, both directly and indirectly (e.g., the effects of slower economic growth on the poorer citizens of thw world)?

If warming does resume gradually, as before, why should government dictate precipitous actions — and perhaps technologically dubious and economically damaging actions — instead of letting households and businesses adapt over time by taking advantage of new technologies that are unavailable today?

Those are not issues to be decided by scientists, politicians, and media outlets that have jumped on the AGW bandwagon because it represents a “consensus.” Those are issues to be decided by free, self-reliant, responsible persons acting cooperatively for their mutual benefit through the mechanism of free markets.

* * *

Recent Related Reading:
Roy Spencer, “95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must Be Wrong,” Roy Spencer, Ph.D., February 7, 2014
Roy Spencer, “Top Ten Good Skeptical Arguments,” Roy Spencer, Ph.D., May 1, 2014
Ross McKittrick, “The ‘Pause’ in Global Warming: Climate Policy Implications,” presentation to the Friends of Science, May 13, 2014 (video here)
Patrick Brennan, “Abuse from Climate Scientists Forces One of Their Own to Resign from Skeptic Group after Week: ‘Reminds Me of McCarthy’,” National Review Online, May 14, 2014
Anthony Watts, “In Climate Science, the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same,” Watts Up With That?, May 17, 2014
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, “Pseudoscientists’ Eight Climate Claims Debunked,” Watts Up With That?, May 17, 2014
John Hinderaker, “Why Global Warming Alarmism Isn’t Science,” PowerLine, May 17, 2014
Tom Sheahan, “The Specialized Meaning of Words in the “Antarctic Ice Shelf Collapse’ and Other Climate Alarm Stories,” Watts Up With That?, May 21, 2014
Anthony Watts, “Unsettled Science: New Study Challenges the Consensus on CO2 Regulation — Modeled CO2 Projections Exaggerated,” Watts Up With That?, May 22, 2014
Daniel B. Botkin, “Written Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology,” May 29, 2014

The Compleat Monty Hall Problem

Wherein your humble blogger gets to the bottom of the Monty Hall problem, sorts out the conflicting solutions, and declares that the standard solution is the right solution, but not to the Monty Hall problem as it’s usually posed.

THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM AND THE TWO “SOLUTIONS”

The Monty Hall problem, first posed as a statistical puzzle in 1975, has been notorious since 1990, when Marilyn vos Savant wrote about it in Parade. Her solution to the problem, to which I will come, touched off a controversy that has yet to die down. But her solution is now widely accepted as the correct one; I refer to it here as the standard solution.

This is from the Wikipedia entry for the Monty Hall problem:

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle (Gruber, Krauss and others), loosely based on the American television game show Let’s Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975 (Selvin 1975a), (Selvin 1975b). It became famous as a question from a reader’s letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant‘s “Ask Marilyn” column in Parade magazine in 1990 (vos Savant 1990a):

Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door No. 2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

Here’s a complete statement of the problem:

1. A contestant sees three doors. Behind one of the doors is a valuable prize, which I’ll denote as $. Undesirable or worthless items are behind the other two doors; I’ll denote those items as x.

2. The contestant doesn’t know which door conceals $ and which doors conceal x.

3. The contestant chooses a door at random.

4. The host, who knows what’s behind each of the doors, opens one of the doors not chosen by the contestant.

5. The door chosen by the host may not conceal $; it must conceal an x. That is, the host always opens a door to reveal an x.

6. The host then asks the contestant if he wishes to stay with the door he chose initially (“stay”) or switch to the other unopened door (“switch”).

7. The contestant decides whether to stay or switch.

8. The host then opens the door finally chosen by the contestant.

9. If $ is revealed, the contestant wins; if x is revealed the contestant loses.

One solution (the standard solution) is to switch doors because there’s a 2/3 probability that $ is hidden behind the unopened door that the contestant didn’t choose initially. In vos Savant’s own words:

Yes; you [the contestant] should switch. The first [initially chosen] door has a 1/3 chance of winning, but the second [other unopened] door has a 2/3 chance.

The other solution (the alternative solution) is indifference. Those who propound this solution maintain that there’s a equal chance of finding $ behind either of the doors that remain unopened after the host has opened a door.

As it turns out, the standard solution doesn’t tell a contestant what to do in a particular game. But the standard solution does point to the right strategy for someone who plays or bets on a large number of games.

The alternative solution accurately captures the unpredictability of any particular game. But indifference is only a break-even strategy for a person who plays or bets on a large number of games.

EXPLANATION OF THE STANDARD SOLUTION

The contestant may choose among three doors, and there are three possible ways of arranging the items behind the doors: S x x; x $ x; and x x $. The result is nine possible ways in which a game may unfold:

Equally likely outcomes

Events 1, 5, and 9 each have two branches. But those branches don’t count as separate events. They’re simply subsets of the same event; when the contestant chooses a door that hides $, the host must choose between the two doors that hide x, but he can’t open both of them. And his choice doesn’t affect the outcome of the event.

It’s evident that switching would pay off with a win in 2/3 of the possible events; whereas, staying with the original choice would off in only 1/3 of the possible events. The fractions 1/3 and 2/3 are usually referred to as probabilities: a 2/3 probability of winning $ by switching doors, as against a 1/3 probability of winning $ by staying with the initially chosen door.

Accordingly, proponents of the standard solution — who are now legion — advise the individual (theoretical) contestant to switch. The idea is that switching increases one’s chance (probability) of winning.

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE STANDARD SOLUTION

There are three problems with the standard solution:

1. It incorporates a subtle shift in perspective. The Monty Hall problem, as posed, asks what a contestant should do. The standard solution, on the other hand, represents the expected (long-run average) outcome of many events, that is, many plays of the game. For reasons I’ll come to, the outcome of a single game can’t be described by a probability.

2. Lists of possibilities, such as those in the diagram above, fail to reflect the randomness inherent in real events.

3. Probabilities emerge from many repetitions of the kinds of events listed above. It is meaningless to ascribe a probability to a single event. In case of the Monty Hall problem, many repetitions of the game will yield probabilities approximating those given in the standard solution, but the outcome of each repetition will be unpredictable. It is therefore meaningless to say that a contestant has a 2/3 chance of winning a game if he switches. A 2/3 chance of winning refers to the expected outcome of many repetitions, where the contestant chooses to switch every time. To put it baldly: How does a person win 2/3 of a game? He either wins or doesn’t win.

Regarding points 2 and 3, I turn to Probability, Statistics and Truth (second revised English edition, 1957), by Richard von Mises:

The rational concept of probability, which is the only basis of probability calculus, applies only to problems in which either the same event repeats itself again and again, or a great number of uniform elements are involved at the same time. Using the language of physics, we may say that in order to apply toe theory of probability we must have a practically unlimited sequence of uniform observations. (p. 11)

*     *     *

In games of dice, the individual event is a single throw of the dice from the box and the attribute is the observation of the number of points shown by the dice. In the same of “heads or tails”, each toss of the coin is an individual event, and the side of the coin which is uppermost is the attribute. (p. 11)

*     *     *

We must now introduce a new term…. This term is “the collective”, and it denotes a sequence of uniform events or processes which differ by certain observable attributes…. All the throws of dice made in the course of a game [of many throws] from a collective wherein the attribute of the single event is the number of points thrown…. The definition of probability which we shall give is concerned with ‘the probability of encountering a single attribute [e.g., winning $ rather than x ] in a given collective [a series of attempts to win $ rather than x ]. (pp. 11-12)

*     *     *

[A] collective is a mass phenomenon or a repetitive event, or, simply, a long sequence of observations for which there are sufficient reasons to believe that the relative frequency of the observed attributed would tend to a fixed limit if the observations were indefinitely continued. The limit will be called the probability of the attribute considered within the collective [emphasis in the original]. (p. 15)

*     *     *

The result of each calculation … is always … nothing else but a probability, or, using our general definition, the relative frequency of a certain event in a sufficiently long (theoretically, infinitely long) sequence of observations. The theory of probability can never lead to a definite statement concerning a single event. The only question that it can answer is: what is to be expected in the course of a very long sequence of observations? It is important to note that this statement remains valid also if the calculated probability has one of the two extreme values 1 or 0 [emphasis added]. (p. 33)

To bring the point home, here are the results of 50 runs of the Monty Hall problem, where each result represents (i) a random initial choice between Door 1, Door 2, and Door 3; (ii) a random array of $, x, and x behind the three doors; (iii) the opening of a door (other than the one initially chosen) to reveal an x; and (iv) a decision, in every case, to switch from the initially chosen door to the other unopened door:

Results of 50 games

What’s relevant here isn’t the fraction of times that $ appears, which is 3/5 — slightly less than the theoretical value of 2/3. Just look at the utter randomness of the results. The first three outcomes yield the “expected” ratio of two wins to one loss, though in the real game show the two winners and one loser would have been different persons. The same goes for any sequence, even the final — highly “improbable” (i.e., random) — string of nine straight wins (which would have accrued to nine different contestants). And who knows what would have happened in games 51, 52, etc.

If a person wants to win 2/3 of the time, he must find a game show that allows him to continue playing the game until he has reached his goal. As I’ve found in my simulations, it could take as many as 10, 20, 70, or 300 games before the cumulative fraction of wins per game converges on 2/3.

That’s what it means to win 2/3 of the time. It’s not possible to win a single game 2/3 of the time, which is the “logic” of the standard solution as it’s usually presented.

WHAT ABOUT THE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION?

The alternative solution doesn’t offer a winning strategy. In this view of the Monty Hall problem, it doesn’t matter which unopened door a contestant chooses. In effect, the contestant is advised to flip a coin.

As discussed above, the outcome of any particular game is unpredictable, so a coin flip will do just as well as any other way of choosing a door. But randomly selecting an unopened door isn’t a good strategy for repeated plays of the game. Over the long run, random selection means winning about 1/2 of all games, as opposed to 2/3 for the “switch” strategy. (To see that the expected probability of winning through random selection approaches 1/2, return to the earlier diagram; there, you’ll see that $ occurs in 9/18 = 1/2 of the possible outcomes for “stay” and “switch” combined.)

Proponents of the alternative solution overlook the importance of the host’s selection of a door to open. His choice isn’t random. Therein lies the secret of the standard solution — as a long-run strategy.

WHY THE STANDARD SOLUTION WORKS IN THE LONG RUN

It’s commonly said by proponents of the standard solution that when the host opens a door, he gives away information that the contestant can use to increase his chance of winning that game. One nonsensical version of this explanation goes like this:

There’s a 2/3 probability that $ is behind one of the two doors not chosen initially by the contestant.

When the host opens a door to reveal x, that 2/3 “collapses” onto the other door that wasn’t chosen initially. (Ooh … a “collapsing” probability. How exotic. Just like Schrödinger’s cat.)

Of course, the host’s action gives away nothing in the context of a single game, the outcome of which is unpredictable. The host’s action does help in the long run, if you’re in a position to play or bet on a large number of games. Here’s how:

The contestant’s initial choice (IC) will be wrong 2/3 of the time. That is, in 2/3 of a large number of games, the $ will be behind one of the other two doors.

Because of the rules of the game, the host must open one of those other two doors (HC1 and HC2); he can’t open IC.

When IC hides an x (which happens 2/3 of the time), either HC1 and HC2 must conceal the $; the one that doesn’t conceal the $ conceals an x.

The rules require the host to open the door that conceals an x.

Therefore, about 2/3 of the time the $ will be behind HC1 or HC2, and in those cases it will always be behind the door (HC1 or HC2) that the host doesn’t open.

It follows that the contestant, by consistently switching from IC to the remaining unopened door (HC1 or HC2), will win the $ about 2/3 of the time.

The host’s action transforms the probability — the long-run frequency — of choosing the winning door from 1/2 to 2/3. But it does so if and only if the player or bettor always switches from IC to HC1 or HC2 (whichever one remains unopened).

You can visualize the steps outlined above by looking at the earlier diagram of possible outcomes.

That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.

Election 2014: Food for Thought

Will the GOP make big gains in the House and Senate this year? It seems to be the conventional wisdom that big gains will be made. But I don’t think it’s going to be quite the cakewalk that many commentators — and too many Republicans — are expecting. Consider the following graph, which I’ll translate and discuss below:

Obama's daily approval ratings_26 May 2014
Derived from Rasmussen Reports, Daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

First, what do the three lines mean?

The blue line represents the number of likely voters approving Obama’s performance divided by number of likely voters disapproving Obama’s performance. A ratio of 1.00 indicates parity — equal sentiment for and against Obama. A ratio below 1.00 means that likely voters, on balance, disapprove of Obama’s performance.

The black line represents the number of voters strongly approving divided by the number of voters strongly disapproving Obama’s performance. The post-reelection bandwagon aside, Obama has been on the wrong side of this crucial ratio since June 29, 2009.

The red line represents the intensity of disapproval. It’s the ratio of strong disapproval to overall disapproval.

In the election of 2010, when the GOP gained 64 House seats and 6 Senate seats, the trends were strongly anti-Obama. His overall approval/disapproval ratio had hovered around 0.9 for months; his strong approval/disapproval ratio had hovered around 0.6 for months; and the intensity of disapproval had been rising for months.

In 2012, when the GOP lost 8 House seats and 2 Senate seats, Obama’s stock had been on the rise for 3 months. It’s true that the strong disapproval/overall disapprove ratio was rising, but I attribute that to a smaller denominator, that is, a shrinking pool of likely voters who disapproved.

Which brings us to 2014. What’s happening now? Obama’s overall approval/disapproval ratio is higher than it was before the 2010 election, which could be a bad sign for the GOP. But — praise be — Obama’s strong approval/disapproval ratio seems to be a bit lower than it was in the runup to the 2010 election. If that ratio climbs, the GOP will have a fight on its hands, unless the “enthusiasm gap” keeps a lot of Democrats home on November 4.

So, in my view, 2014 isn’t guaranteed to be another 2010. And another 2010 is what’s needed if the GOP is to control both the House and Senate. Sure, the GOP can’t come close to a veto-proof majority in the Senate (and probably not in the House, either). But with control of the Senate, the GOP could stymie Obama’s court nominees. And with control of both houses, the GOP would face less pressure to comprise on defense spending, entitlement spending, and immigration — to name three salient issues. A weakened Obama would have less leverage in any showdown over those and other issues.

But to control Congress, the GOP has to hold the House and make big gains in the Senate. And for that to happen, the GOP must win the battle of enthusiasm; that is, it must take full advantage of disenchantment with Obama and his failed policies: the disaster that is Obamacare, the failure to deal with the looming disaster in entitlement spending, the naive reliance on diplomacy to secure national interests, and the high-handed pursuit of a radical social, economic, and environmental agenda.

“The Science Is Settled”

Thales (c. 620 – c. 530 BC): The Earth rests on water.

Aneximenes (c. 540 – c. 475 BC): Everything is made of air.

Heraclitus (c. 540 – c. 450 BC): All is fire.

Empodecles (c. 493 – c. 435 BC): There are four elements: earth, air, fire, and water.

Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BC): Atoms (basic elements of nature) come in an infinite variety of shapes and sizes.

Aristotle (384 – 322 BC): Heavy objects must fall faster than light ones. The universe is a series of crystalline spheres that carry the sun, moon, planets, and stars around Earth.

Ptolemey (90 – 168 AD): Ditto the Earth-centric universe, with a mathematical description.

Copernicus (1473 – 1543): The planets revolve around the sun in perfectly circular orbits.

Brahe (1546 – 1601): The planets revolve around the sun, but the sun and moon revolve around Earth.

Kepler (1573 – 1630): The planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, and their trajectory is governed by magnetism.

Newton (1642 – 1727): The course of the planets around the sun is determined by gravity, which is a force that acts at a distance. Light consists of corpuscles; ordinary matter is made of larger corpuscles. Space and time are absolute and uniform.

Rutherford (1871 – 1937), Bohr (1885 – 1962), and others: The atom has a center (nucleus), which consists of two elemental particles, the neutron and proton.

Einstein (1879 – 1955): The universe is neither expanding nor shrinking.

That’s just a small fraction of the mistaken and incomplete theories that have held sway in the field of physics. There are many more such mistakes and lacunae in the other natural sciences: biology, chemistry, and earth science — each of which, like physics, has many branches. And in all branches there are many unresolved questions. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics, despite its complexity, is known to be incomplete. And it is thought (by some) to be unduly complex; that is, there may be a simpler underlying structure waiting to be discovered.

Given all of this, it is grossly presumptive to claim that climate science is “settled” when the phenomena that it encompasses are so varied, complex, often poorly understood, and often given short shrift (e.g., the effects of solar radiation on the intensity of cosmic radiation reaching Earth, which affects low-level cloud formation, which affects atmospheric temperature and precipitation).

Anyone who says that climate science is “settled” is either ignorant, stupid, or a freighted with a political agenda.

The Passing of Red-Brick Schoolhouses and a Way of Life

My home town once boasted fifteen schoolhouses that were built between the end of the Civil War and 1899. All but the high school were named for presidents of the United States: Adams, Buchanan, Fillmore, Harrison, Jackson, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Pierce, Polk, Taylor, Tyler, Van Buren, and Washington. Another of their ilk came along sometime between 1904 and 1915; Lincoln was its name.

With the Adams School counting for two presidents — the second and sixth — there was a school for every president through Lincoln. Why Lincoln came late is a mystery to me. Lincoln was revered by us Northerners, and his picture was displayed proudly next to Washington’s in schools and municipal offices. We even celebrated Lincoln’s Birthday as a holiday distinct from Washington’s Birthday (a.k.a. President’s Day).

More schools — some named for presidents — followed well into the 20th century, but only the fifteen that I’ve named were built in the style of the classic red-brick schoolhouse: two stories, a center hall with imposing staircase, tall windows, steep roof, and often a tower for the bell that the janitor rang to summon neighborhood children to school. (The Lincoln, as a latecomer, was L-shaped rather than boxy, but it was otherwise a classic red-brick schoolhouse, replete with a prominent bell tower.)

I attended three of the fifteen red-brick schoolhouses. My first was Polk School, where I began kindergarten two days after the formal surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945. (For the benefit of youngsters, that ceremony marked the official end of World War II.)

Here’s the Polk in its heyday:

PolkSch

Kindergarten convened in a ground-floor room at the back of the school, facing what seemed then like a large playground, with room for a softball field. The houses at the far end of the field would have been easy targets for adult players, but it would have been a rare feat for a student to hit one over the fence that separated the playground from the houses.

In those innocent days, students got to school and back home by walking. Here’s the route that I followed as a kindergartener:

Route to Polk School

A kindergartener walking several blocks between home and school, usually alone most of the way? Unheard of today, it seems. But in those days predation was unheard of. And, as a practical matter, most families had only one car, which the working (outside-the-home) parent (then known as the father and head-of-household) used on weekdays for travel to and from his job. Moreover, the exercise of walking as much as a mile each way was considered good for growing children — and it was.

The route between my home and Polk School was 0.6 mile in length, and it crossed one busy street. Along that street were designated crossing points, at which stood Safety Patrol Boys, usually 6th-graders, who ensured that students crossed only when it was safe to do so. They didn’t stand in the street and stop oncoming traffic; they simply judged when students could safely cross, and gave them the “green light” by blowing on a whistle. In the several years of my elementary-school career, I never saw or heard of a close call, let alone an injury or a fatality.

I began at Polk School because the school closest to my home, Madison School, didn’t have kindergarten. I went Madison for 1st grade. It was a gloomy pile:

MadisonSch

Madison was shuttered after my year there, so I returned to Polk for 2nd and 3rd grades. Madison stood empty for a few years, and was razed in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Polk was shuttered sometime in the 1950s, and eventually was razed after being used for many years as a school-district warehouse.

The former site of Madison School now hosts “affordable housing”:

Madison School site

There’s a public playground where Polk School stood:

Polk School site

I spent two more years — 4th and 5th grades — in another red-brick schoolhouse: Tyler School. It’s still there, though it hasn’t been used as a school for many decades. It looked like this in 2006, when it served as a halfway house:

Tyler School_2

It now stands empty and uncared for. It looked like this in 2013:

Tyler School 2013

The only other survivor among the fifteen red-brick schoolhouses is Monroe School, the present use of which I can’t ascertain. It seems to have been cared for, however. This image is from 2013:

Monroe School 2013

Tyler and Monroe Schools are ghosts from America’s past — a past that’s now seemingly irretrievable. It was a time of innocence, when America’s wars were fought to victory; when children could safely roam (large cities excepted, as always, from prevailing mores); when marriage was between man and woman, and usually for life; when deviant behavior was discouraged, not “celebrated”; when a high-school diploma and four-year degree meant something, and were worth something; when the state wasn’t the enemy of the church; when politics didn’t intrude into science; when people resorted to government in desperation, not out of habit; and when people had real friends, not Facebook “friends.”

Social Accounting: A Tool of Social Engineering

Steven Landsburg writes about social accounting here and here. In the first-linked post, Landsburg says:

Economic theory tells us that under quite general hypotheses, the private value of an activity is in synch with its social value. If growing an orange makes you a dollar richer, that’s because growing that orange makes the world a dollar richer. And that’s good, because it encourages people to grow all and only those oranges that are (socially) worth growing.

Here’s my version of the “general hypotheses”: People engage in voluntary exchange if it benefits them. The buyers of an orange is willing to pay the grower $1 for the orange because the benefit derived from the orange is worth (at least) $1 to the buyer. At the same time, the grower is willing to sell oranges for $1 apiece because he expects (at least) to cover his costs if he sells oranges at that price. (His costs include the interest that he could have earned had he put his money into, say, an equally risky corporate bond instead of land, trees, and equipment.)

Now comes the hard part, which Landsburg skips. Does growing an orange and selling it for $1 really make the world a dollar richer? The buyer of the orange is “richer” (i.e., better off) only to the extent that the enjoyment/satisfaction/utility he derives from the orange is greater than the enjoyment/satisfaction/utility that he would have derived from an alternative use of his dollar. The alternatives include giving away the dollar, buying something other than an orange (maybe something less expensive that yields the buyer as much or more enjoyment/satisfaction/utility), and saving the dollar, that is, making it available for investment in, say, an orange grove.

It may be convenient to add the dollar values of final transactions and call the resulting number GDP (or GWP, gross world product). But adding $1 to GDP doesn’t mean that the world (or the U.S.) is $1 richer for it, even in the scenario described by Landsburg. For one thing, there’s no common denominator for enjoyment/satisfaction/utility, which are personal matters. For a second thing, the marginal gain in enjoyment/satisfaction/utility — the difference between first-best (buying an orange for $1) and second-best (e.g., saving $1) — is also a personal matter without a common denominator. (What’s more, there are many scenarios in which the addition of $1 to GDP makes the world poorer; for example: government entices workers into government service by offering above-market compensation, and then has those workers produce economy-stultifying regulations.)

As for the essential meaninglessness of GDP as a measure of anything, I borrow from an old post of mine:

Consider A and B, who discover that, together, they can have more clothing and more food if each specializes: A in the manufacture of clothing, B in the production of food. Through voluntary exchange and bargaining, they find a jointly satisfactory balance of production and consumption. A makes enough clothing to cover himself adequately, to keep some clothing on hand for emergencies, and to trade the balance to B for food. B does likewise with food. Both balance their production and consumption decisions against other considerations (e.g., the desire for leisure).

A and B’s respective decisions and actions are microeconomic; the sum of their decisions, macroeconomic. The microeconomic picture might look like this:

A produces 10 units of clothing a week, 5 of which he trades to B for 5 units of food a week, 4 of which he uses each week, and 1 of which he saves for an emergency.

B, like A, uses 4 units of clothing each week and saves 1 for an emergency.

B produces 10 units of food a week, 5 of which she trades to A for 5 units of clothing a week, 4 of which she consumes each week, and 1 of which she saves for an emergency.

A, like B, consumes 4 units of food each week and saves 1 for an emergency.

Given the microeconomic picture, it is trivial to depict the macroeconomic situation:

Gross weekly output = 10 units of clothing and 10 units of food

Weekly consumption = 8 units of clothing and 8 units of food

Weekly saving = 2 units of clothing and 2 units of food

You will note that the macroeconomic metrics add no useful information; they merely summarize the salient facts of A and B’s economic lives — though not the essential facts of their lives, which include (but are far from limited to) the degree of satisfaction that A and B derive from their consumption of food and clothing.

The customary way of getting around the aggregation problem is to sum the dollar values of microeconomic activity. But this simply masks the aggregation problem by assuming that it is possible to add the marginal valuations (i.e., prices) of disparate products and services being bought and sold at disparate moments in time by disparate individuals and firms for disparate purposes. One might as well add two bananas to two apples and call the result four bapples.

The essential problem is that A and B will derive different kinds and amounts of enjoyment from clothing and food, and that those different kinds and amounts of enjoyment cannot be summed in any meaningful way. If meaningful aggregation is impossible for A and B, how can it be possible for an economy that consists of millions of economic actors and an untold variety of goods and services? And how is it possible when technological change yields results such as this?

GDP, in other words, is nothing more than what it seems to be on the surface: an estimate of the dollar value of economic output. It is not a measure of “social welfare” because there is no such thing.

And yet, Landsburg (among many economists) seems to believe that it’s possible to measure “social welfare,” that is, to measure how much “richer” the world is because of voluntary exchange. (I wouldn’t think of accusing Landsburg or any other economist — Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong excepted — of equating government spending and “social welfare.”)

This isn’t a first for Landsburg. About four years ago he wrote this:

Suppose you live next door to Bill Gates. Bill likes to play loud music at night. You’re a light sleeper. Should he be forced to turn down the volume?

An efficiency analysis would begin, in principle (though it might not be so easy in practice) by asking how much Bill’s music is worth to him (let’s say we somehow know that the answer is $10,000) and how much your sleep is worth to you (let’s say $25). It is important to realize from the outset that no economist thinks those numbers in any way measure Bill’s subjective enjoyment of his music or your subjective annoyance. Only a crazy person would think such a thing, and I’ve never met anybody who’s that crazy in that particular way. Instead, these numbers primarily reflect the fact that Bill is a whole lot richer than you are. Nevertheless, the economist will surely declare it inefficient to take $10,000 worth of enjoyment from Bill in order to give you $25 worth of sleep. We call that a $9,975 deadweight loss.

Landsburg properly denies the commensurability of the two experiences, and then turns around and declares them commensurate. My comment, at the time:

The problem with this kind of thinking should be obvious to anyone with the sense God gave a goose. The value of Bill’s enjoyment of loud music and the value of “your” enjoyment of sleep, whatever they may be, are irrelevant because they are incommensurate. They are separate, variably subjective entities. Bill’s enjoyment (at a moment in time) is Bill’s enjoyment. “Your” enjoyment (at a moment in time) is your enjoyment. There is no way to add, subtract, divide, or multiply the value of those two separate, variably subjective things. Therefore, there is no such thing (in this context) as a deadweight loss because there is no such thing as “social welfare” — a summation of the state of individuals’ enjoyment (or utility, as some would have it).

Prices serve the useful purpose of helping individual persons and firms to move toward maximum utility and maximum profits. (I say “move toward” because the vagaries of life seldom accommodate the attainment of nirvana.) Prices do not — do not — enable the attainment of “efficiency,” that is, the maximization of “social welfare.” They cannot because there is no such thing.

Only a dedicated social engineer could believe that it’s possible to sum degrees of happiness across individuals, or claim that a public project is justified because the costs (imposed on one set of persons) exceed the benefits (enjoyed by a mostly different set of persons).

* * *

Flummoxed by Firefox 29?

SEE UPDATES AT BOTTOM OF POST

I recently — and unhappily — updated to Firefox 29, which is yet another in a long string of software-engineer-friendly “upgrades” by the boys and girls at Mozilla. Now, I have to admit that Firefox, on the whole, is a more user-friendly browser than the several others that I’ve tried: Comodo Dragon, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari — each of which has a serious-to-fatal flaw (e.g., vulnerable to malware, hard to customize, can’t open groups of tabs, can’t import bookmarks).

But being user-friendly is a relative thing, and Firefox seems bent on joining the ranks of its less-friendly peers. Firefox 29, for example, incorporates the page-reload button in the navigation bar (the place where a site’s URL appears). That’s neither a convenient nor intuitive place for the page-reload button. It’s true that one can reload a tab by right-clicking the tab and selecting “Reload Tab” from the pop-up menu. But it’s actually easier to point one’s mouse at a reload button that’s located in a fixed position that’s close to the tab strip — usually on the left.

Speaking of the tab strip, why have tabs if you can’t see them? I exaggerate, but just a bit. In the default mode of Firefox 29, tabs (other than the one that’s currently open) are almost invisible. Navigating from tab to tab involves a lot of squinting. The tabless look may be aesthetic, but it’s worse than useless.

I will say that other than the fixed position of the reload button — which is immovable, even after installing the Classic Theme Restorer add-on — Firefox 29 is more readily customizable than its predecessors. (One exception: It takes some Googling to learn how to put the tab strip back where it belongs, which is just above the page, not at the top of the screen.) But why “upgrade” Firefox to a “look” that many users will immediately try to customize to something more useful? Many (most?) Firefox users cut their teeth on earlier versions of Firefox, and they grew used to the “look” and “feel” of those earlier versions.

What’s wrong with that? Everything, apparently, if you’re a software engineer with fascistic tendencies. Consider this thread from the Firefox non-support forum:

Can I go back to Firefox 28. I have Firefox 29 now. I don’t like it.

5 replies

22 have this problem

525 views

Last reply by Moses 6 days ago

vic479h

Posted
4/29/14 6:36 AM

I want Firefox 28 back. How do I do that?

Chosen solution

Since the original question was Can I go back to Firefox 28, I don’t see how my response constitutes a hijacking. Everything else in your post is lawyer-speak.

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Moses

Top 10 Contributor

Moderator

198 solutions 1862 answers

Posted
4/29/14 6:38 AM

Hi,

Is there a particular reason you want to go back to 28? If this is about the new user interface looks then you can restore the way Firefox acted and looked with this add-on

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/classicthemerestorer/

OldRogue 0 solutions 4 answers

Posted
4/30/14 10:17 AM

Why can’t someone answer the question asked? How do you download version 28 and revert to before 29. Classic Theme Restorer goes about 10% of the way to making FF useful again. Specifically, what needs to be remove from my Profile to get it back.

Moses

Top 10 Contributor

Moderator

198 solutions 1862 answers

Posted
4/30/14 10:25 AM

Hi OldRogue,

1) We don’t link to old Firefox versions simply because of the latest version’s bug fixes/security patches, etc.
2) See #1 and We don’t HAVE to link to version 28. I’m pretty sure you’re capable of finding a little download link yourself.
3) You should create your own thread as you’re technically hijacking another person’s thread. Please create a new one at /questions/new

OldRogue 0 solutions 4 answers

Posted
4/30/14 10:59 AM

Chosen Solution

Since the original question was Can I go back to Firefox 28, I don’t see how my response constitutes a hijacking. Everything else in your post is lawyer-speak.

Modified April 30, 2014 11:00:48 AM PDT by OldRogue

Moses

Top 10 Contributor

Moderator

198 solutions 1862 answers

Posted
4/30/14 11:21 AM

I’m not going to argue with you and waste my time. I’m just going to say this:

From the Forum rules and guidelines For support requests, do not re-use existing threads started by others, even if they are seemingly on the same subject.

I’m not a Mozilla developer or employee so my “lawyer-speak” is all my words. I don’t work for Mozilla in case you haven’t noticed.

Also, to the OP, I’ve already answered their question. They can find the download link on their own. Takes maybe 2 minutes to find it…literally. But just in case someone doesn’t want to take their time and look for it, here it is:

ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/28.0/win32/en-US/

Thread closed as I’ve given the download link!

Modified April 30, 2014 11:22:34 AM PDT by Moses

He may be Moses the lawgiver — with a vengeance — but he’s not the Moses that you want in charge when you’re looking for the promised land of browserdom. What a jerk!

Moses’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, he was being legalistic and OldRogue wasn’t hijacking the thread. How “big” of Moses to finally answer the original question. If he’d done that in the first place, he wouldn’t have revealed himself as a first-class a**hole.

Anyway, there’s your answer. If Mozilla slips in a new version of Firefox while you’re not looking, install an earlier version. In fact, take your pick from all of the earlier versions at the Index of pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/. If you happen upon a page that leads you to the Index, you’ll probably see something like this: “Warning: Using old versions of Firefox poses a significant security risk.”

Yeah, well, thanks for the warning. But I keep my firewall turned on, and I have a good anti-malware program (Malwarebytes Anti-Malware), and you should, too. When a version of Firefox gets too old, it stops working properly, which is a good sign that you should upgrade to a newer version, though not the newest one.

One last, important thing. Don’t let Mozilla slip in a new version of Firefox while you’re not looking. Go to “Tools” in the menu bar of Firefox (which I display for ease of use, despite Mozilla’s attempt to hide it), select Options, select the “Update” tab, and then choose either “Check for updates, but let me choose when to install them” or “Never check for updates.” If you choose “Check for updates,” read about an update before you install it — look especially for information about the ability to customize the new version. Don’t rely on Mozilla’s pitch; look for reviews on sites that specialize in computing and internet matters (e.g., PCMag.com and C|Net). And look especially for independent reviews of the kind you can find with a search engine; the lone-wolf reviewer is more likely to be critical than the establishment press.

By the way, I tried Firefox 29 on a gamble, and lost. I then rolled back to Firefox 28, which I had already tweaked to my taste.

Happy browsing.

UPDATE (05/07/14)

A reader kindly pointed me to Pale Moon, a Mozilla-based browser that works like Firefox used to. I’m now using Pale Moon, and loving it. (If I encounter glitches, I’ll add updates to this post.)

Why would I (or anyone) want a browser that works just like Firefox, but isn’t Firefox? Well, here’s one reason: the ousting of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for having made a donation to the Proposition 8 campaign in California. (See my post, “Surrender? Hell No!” and the articles I link to at the end of the post.)

And what does that have to do with Pale Moon? This from Pale Moon’s FAQ (as of today):

Will Firefox and Pale Moon work together in the future?

Since Mozilla has obviously chosen to follow a different path at the management level, it doesn’t seem likely that Pale Moon and Firefox will ever see a unification or joining of forces….

Read between the lines.

Nor is Pale Moon a mere copy of Firefox. This is from the same FAQ entry:

[T]here have been and are growing conflicts of interests between Pale Moon and Firefox as far as the so-called UX (User eXperience) developments are concerned. This results in a different user interface approach in Pale Moon. For example, less stress is put on minimizing the size of UI elements or saving every pixel possible to benefit the content area – in this day and age of full HD monitors and laptops that seems to be very counter-intuitive. Australis is considered unacceptable, and will not be aimed for – quite the opposite.

In other words, Australis-based Firefox 29 is a step in the wrong direction if you care about users. (Right on!) And Pale Moon isn’t going in that direction. Indeed, when I say that Pale Moon works like Firefox used to, I mean that it works like Firefox 28, to which I had returned after uninstalling Firefox 29.

If you want to try Pale Moon, you can download it here. If you’re currently a Firefox user and want to import your Firefox profile to Pale Moon, select the “don’t import anything” option at the end of the installation. There’s a separate tool for importing Firefox profiles, which you can download here. I used the tool, and it worked perfectly.

Happier browsing.

UPDATE (05/08/14)

My transition from Firefox 28 to Pale Moon has been seamless, as they say. So seamless, in fact, that I’ve made Pale Moon my default browser and unpinned Firefox from my Windows task bar. At this point I can’t see a reason to return to Firefox.

My next step will be to switch from Mozilla Thunderbird to Pale Moon’s FossaMail.

UPDATE (05/12/14)

I am now using FossaMail. After some unsuccessful attempts to copy my Thunderbird profile into Fossamail, I found a migration tool that works perfectly. During the migration, you might get a message saying that a script is taking longer than expected to run. If you do, select “continue” and let it run; it won’t take much longer for the tool to finish the job.

When you’re alerted that migration is complete, FossaMail may not respond immediately. The migration seems to continue in the background. Wait a few minutes, then try to open FossaMail. If your experience is like mine, when FossaMail opens it will contain an exact duplicate of your Thunderbird folders and messages.

Bye-bye, Mozilla.

A Guide to the Pronunciation of General American English

This post, originally published as “Phonetic Spelling: A Modest Proposal,” is drastically different from the original. I am indebted to commenter Jim Hlavac for his criticisms, which are reflected in this version of the post. In the course of revising the post, I made extensive changes to the pronunciation key. As before, comments about this work in progress are welcome.

When you’re in doubt about how to pronounce a word in American English, you may consult a source that relies on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The IPA is cumbersome, to say the least. It requires one to distinguish among dozens of tiny symbols, and then decode them by going to a rather busy page full of symbols and their translations.

Standard phonetic symbols for American English — the symbols we were supposed to learn in high school — aren’t much better. For example, go to The Free Dictionary and look up phonetic → fə-nĕt′ĭk,. Not only is the schwa (ə, an “uh” sound) incorrect (in my view), but to grasp the pronunciation of the word, you must still turn to a separate pronunciation key.

A proper guide to the pronunciation of American English should enable anyone who speaks or understands General American to grasp the proper (or generally accepted) pronunciation of a word simply by looking at a phonetic spelling that consists entirely of letters (e.g., word → werd, refuel → re-few-uhl). And the relationship between the phonetic spellings and the sounds that they represent should be intuitively obvious — again, if you speak or understand General American.

I emphasize General American (GA) for two reasons. First, GA — in the guise of “television English” — is heard across the country, not just in the Midwest and areas where similar accents dominate (e.g., the Great Plains and West Coast). Second, because most Americans understand “television English” (even if many of them don’t speak it), a guide that is keyed to GA should be useful to (almost) everyone.

In the rest of this post, I propose and demonstrate the application of a pronunciation guide that is based on GA, as I understand it. The guide comprises 50 sounds, which is five more sounds than are given in a standard guide (e.g., here). I’ve added several sounds that the standard guide merges with dissimilar sounds. And I’ve merged (or dropped) a few sounds that the standard guide mistakenly or unnecessarily lists as separate sounds.

In any event, the guide that I propose consists entirely letters of the alphabet. It is therefore more accessible than guides that rely heavily on symbols.

Here is the key, which for ease of use omits syllabic emphasis:

Phonetic pronunciation key

As noted, the key omits syllabic emphasis. In the following spellings of the 100 most commonly spoken words in English, I indicate emphasis with CAPS:

Phonetic spellings of 100 most common words

And here are ten words chosen from a list of 100 elegant words:

Phonetic spelllings of 10 elegant words

The Obama Effect: Disguised Unemployment

REVISED AND UPDATED 12/02/16 — A COMPANION PIECE TO “ECONOMIC GROWTH SINCE WORLD WAR II” (REVISED AND UPDATED 05/31/16)

By the measure of real unemployment, the Great Recession is still with us. Nor is it likely to end anytime soon, given the anti-business and anti-growth policies and rhetoric of the Obama administration.

Officially, the unemployment rate stands at 4.6 percent, as of November 2016. Unofficially — but in reality — the unemployment rate stands 6.6 percentage points higher at 11.2 percent. While the official unemployment rate has dropped by 5.4 percentage points from its peak in 2009, the real unemployment rate has dropped by only 2.3 percentage points since then.

No amount of “stimulus” or “quantitative easing” will create jobs when employers and entrepreneurs are loath to take the risk of expanding and starting businesses, given Obama’s penchant for regulating against success and taxing it when it is achieved. The job-killing effects of Obamacare will only worsen the situation. And, of course, taxing “the rich” is a sure way to hamper economic growth by stifling productive effort, innovation, and investment.

How can I say that the real unemployment rate is 6.6 percentage points above the real rate? Easily. Just follow this trail of definitions, provided by the official purveyor of unemployment statistics, the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Unemployed persons (Current Population Survey)
Persons aged 16 years and older who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment sometime during the 4-week period ending with the reference week. Persons who were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been laid off need not have been looking for work to be classified as unemployed.

Unemployment rate
The unemployment rate represents the number unemployed as a percent of the labor force.

Labor force (Current Population Survey)
The labor force includes all persons classified as employed or unemployed in accordance with the definitions contained in this glossary.

Labor force participation rate
The labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population.

Civilian noninstitutional population (Current Population Survey)
Included are persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces.

In short, if you are 16 years of age and older, not confined to an institution or on active duty in the armed forces, but have not recently made specific efforts to find employment, you are not (officially) a member of the labor force. And if you are not (officially) a member of the labor force because you have given up looking for work, you are not (officially) unemployed — according to the BLS. Of course, you are really unemployed, but your unemployment is well disguised by the BLS’s contorted definition of unemployment.

What has happened is this: Since the first four months of 2000, when the labor-force participation rate peaked at 67.3 percent, it has declined to 62.7 percent:

labor-force-participation-rate
Source: See next graph.

Why the decline, which had came to a halt during G.W. Bush’s second term but resumed in late 2008? The slowdown of 2000 (coincident with the bursting of the dot-com bubble) and the shock of 9/11 can account for the decline from 2000 to 2004, as workers chose to withdraw from the labor force when faced with dimmer employment prospects. But what about the sharper decline that began near the end of Bush’s second term?

There we see not only the demoralizing effects of the Great Recession but also the lure of incentives to refrain from work, namely, extended unemployment benefits, the relaxation of welfare rules, the aggressive distribution of food stamps, and “free” healthcare” for an expanded Medicaid enrollment base and 20-somethings who live in their parents’ basements.* Need I add that both the prolongation of the Great Recession and the enticements to refrain from work are Obama’s doing? (That’s on the supply side. On the demand side, of course, there are the phony and even negative effects of “stimulus” spending, the chilling effects of regime uncertainty, which has persisted beyond the official end of the Great Recession, and the expansion of government spending.)

If the labor-force participation rate had remained at its peak of 67.3 percent, so that the disguised unemployed was no longer disguised, the official unemployment rate would have reached 13.5 percent in December 2009, as against the nominal peak of 10 percent in October 2009. Further, instead of declining to the phony rate of 4.6 percent in November 2016, the official unemployment rate would have stayed almost constant — hovering between 11 percent and 13.5 percent.

The growing disparity between the real and nominal unemployment rates is evident in this graph:

actual-vs-nominal-unemployment-rate
Derived from Series LNS12000000, Seasonally Adjusted Employment Level; Series LNS11000000, Seasonally Adjusted Civilian Labor Force Level; and Series LNS11300000, Seasonally Adjusted Civilian labor force participation rate. All are available at BLS, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey.

_________
* Contrary to some speculation, the labor-force participation rate is not declining because older workers are retiring earlier. The participation rate among workers 55 and older rose steadily from 1994 to 2014. The decline is concentrated among workers under the age of 55, and especially workers in the 16-24 age bracket. (See this table at BLS.gov.) Why? My conjecture: The Great Recession caused a shakeout of marginal (low-skill) workers, many of whom simply dropped out of the labor market. And it became easier for them to drop out because, under Obamacare, many of them became eligible for Medicaid and many others enjoy prolonged coverage (until age 26) under their parents’ health plans.

* * *

Related reading:

Randall Holcombe, “Long-Term Unemployment Benefits Expire; Long-Term Unemployment Falls,” Mises Economics Blog, September 10, 2014

Arnold Kling, “The State of the Economy,” askblog, October 12, 2014

Stephen Moore, “Why Are So Many Employers Unable to Fill Jobs?” The Daily Signal, April 6, 2015

Related posts: See the list here.

Obamanomics: A Report Card

See this post.

Wrong for the Wrong Reasons

When in search of provocative material, I often flip through the pages of The Great Quotations — a left-slanted tome compiled by the late and long-lived George Seldes. Today, I came across this:

Overthrow of the Government by force and violence is certainly a substantial enough interest for the Government to limit speech. Indeed, this is the ultimate value of any society, for if a society cannot protect its very structure from armed internal attack, it must follow that no subordinate value can be protected.

That’s from Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson’s majority opinion in Dennis v. United States (1951). Here’s an outline of the case and its aftermath, as given at Wikipedia:

In 1948, eleven Communist Party leaders were convicted of advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government and for the violation of several points of the Smith Act. The party members who had been petitioning for socialist reforms claimed that the act violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and that they served no clear and present danger to the nation….

[In the original trial] Prosecutor John McGohey did not assert that the defendants had a specific plan to violently overthrow the U.S. government, but rather alleged that the CPUSA’s philosophy generally advocated the violent overthrow of governments.^[7] To prove this, the prosecution proffered articles, pamphlets and books (such as The Communist Manifesto) written by authors such as Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin.^[8] The prosecution argued that the texts advocated violent revolution, and that by adopting the texts as their political foundation, the defendants were also personally guilty of advocating violent overthrow of the government.^[9]…

Petitioners were found guilty by the trial court and the decision was affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court granted writ of certiorari, but limited it to whether section two or three of the Smith Act violated the First Amendment and whether the same two sections violated the First and Fifth Amendments because of indefiniteness….

Handed down as a 6-2 decision by the Court on June 4, 1951, the judgment and a plurality opinion was delivered by Chief Justice of the United States Fred M. Vinson, who was joined by Justices Stanley Forman Reed, Sherman Minton, and Harold H. Burton. Separate concurring opinions were delivered by Justices Felix Frankfurter and Robert H. Jackson. Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas wrote separate dissenting opinions. Justice Tom C. Clark did not participate in this case.

The Court rule affirmed the conviction of the petitioner, a leader of the Communist Party in the United States. Dennis had been convicted of conspiring and organizing for the overthrow and destruction of the United States government by force and violence under provisions of the Smith Act. In affirming the conviction, a plurality of the Court adopted Judge Learned Hand’s formulation of the clear and probable danger test, an adaptation of the clear and present danger test:

In each case [courts] must ask whether the gravity of the “evil,” discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as necessary to avoid the danger….

[I]n 1969, Brandenburg v. Ohio held that “mere advocacy” of violence was per se protected speech. Brandenburg was a de facto overruling of Dennis, defining the bar for constitutionally unprotected speech to be incitement to “imminent lawless action”.^[20]

This is from Wikipedia‘s account of Brandenburg v. Ohio:

The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting, and is likely to incite, imminent lawless action.^[1]…

Brandenburg completely did away with Dennis‘s central holding and held that “mere advocacy” of any doctrine, including one that assumed the necessity of violence or law violation, was per se protected speech.

And this is from the final paragraph of the Court’s ruling in Brandenburg:

[W]e are here confronted with a statute which, by its own words and as applied, purports to punish mere advocacy and to forbid, on pain of criminal punishment, assembly with others merely to advocate the described type of action. 4 Such a statute falls within the condemnation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

So, in effect (though not in so many words), the Brandenburg Court found the Dennis Court to be wrong. Not wrong about the wrongness of overthrowing the government, just wrong about when the wrongness may be prosecuted. The Dennis Court was prematurely protective.

To put it another way, it’s all right to advocate wrong-doing, as long as the advocacy doesn’t lead directly to the wrong-doing.

Well, the Dennis Court may have been wrong, but not for the reason cited by the Brandenburg Court, which is also wrong. Why? Because it invites endless hair-splitting about the point at which advocacy translates to action. If the action being advocated is wrong, isn’t it also wrong — constitutional niceties aside — to advocate the action? I’m certainly not advocating thought-crime prosecution, but I am not satisfied with the Brandenburg Court’s conclusion.

If the purpose of the United States, as originally constituted, was to foster liberty, why should the government of the United States tolerate the promulgation of anti-libertarian views? Freedom of speech, after all, is just one manifestation of liberty. And that manifestation could vanish, with the rest, under an anti-libertarian regime.

Here’s the counter-argument: If government is allowed to suppress speech that promulgates the overthrow of America’s constitutional values in favor of anti-libertarian ones (e.g., communism), couldn’t the government then suppress speech that might have a tenuous connection with the idea of overthrowing America’s constitutional values? Government could, for example, suppress speech that proposes the establishment of a socialistic scheme that isn’t contemplated in the Constitution, such as Social Security. And if government could suppress speech of that kind, it could also suppress speech aimed at amending the Constitution to legalize socialistic schemes.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but the power to suppress speech is easily adapted to anti-libertarian uses. Untoward speech and thoughts about “protected groups” could be outlawed. Oops! Such speech and thoughts have been outlawed. “Hate thoughts” may be inferred as the unspoken motivation for a crime, given the personal characteristics of the (supposed) victim of the crime.

By now, you may have concluded that the problem isn’t the Constitution, it’s government. Or, more concretely, the persons and groups who are able to command the power of government. No piece of paper can protect liberty from the anti-libertarian machinations of government officials and the voting blocs to which they are beholden.

Which brings me back to the quotation at the beginning of this post, Chief Justice Vinson’s muddled rationale for the Supreme Court’s holding in Dennis v. United States:

Overthrow of the Government by force and violence is certainly a substantial enough interest for the Government to limit speech. Indeed, this is the ultimate value of any society, for if a society cannot protect its very structure from armed internal attack, it must follow that no subordinate value can be protected.

Government is not society. Nor does the United States comprise a single society, but rather multitudes of societies and interest groups: some desirous of liberty, others desirous of domination. The latter have prevailed, and have come to dominate those that desire liberty. Accordingly, “subordinate” values (e.g., free speech, property rights, and freedom of association) have not been protected by government.

Government, as it now stands, is unworthy of protection by the friends of liberty. In fact, it is (or should be) in need of protection from the friends of liberty. And may they prevail.

* * *

Libertarianism and the State

The version of libertarianism that I address here is minarchism: the belief that the state — whether necessary or inevitable — is legitimate only if its functions are limited to the defense of its citizens from foreign and domestic predators. Anarchism — an extreme form of libertarianism — is a pipe dream, for reasons I detail in several posts; e.g., here.

Under minarchism, the order that is necessary to liberty — peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior — is fostered by the institutions of civil society: family, church, club, and the like. Those institutions inculcate morality and enforce it through “social pressure.” The state (ideally) deals only with those persons who violate fundamental canons of behavior toward other persons (e.g., the last six of the Ten Commandments), and also defends the populace from foreign enemies.

Though America is a long way from minarchism, something like it was possible under the Articles of Confederation and in the early decades under the Constitution, when the central government was relatively unobtrusive and most legal constraints on human action were levied by State and local governments. In those conditions, Americans could rid themselves of unwanted social and legal strictures by leaving one State for another or venturing into the relatively ungoverned frontier territories.

Having defined libertarianism (for the purpose of this post), I will now state the surprising conclusion to which I have come: Its adherents are unwitting statists.

Obviously, you will expect — and get — an explanation of that startling statement. I’ll begin with the central tenet of mainstream libertarianism: Individual persons may not be coerced by anyone — state or society — except as their actions may cause harm to others.

That seems like a reasonable position, until you ask what “harm” means. Here’s the author of the harm principle, John Stuart Mill:

[N]either one person, nor any number of persons, is warranted in saying to another human creature of ripe years, that he shall not do with his life for his own benefit what he chooses to do with it. He is the person most interested in his own well-being: the interest which any other person, except in cases of strong personal attachment, can have in it, is trifling, compared with that which he himself has; the interest which society has in him individually (except as to his conduct to others) is fractional, and altogether indirect: while, with respect to his own feelings and circumstances, the most ordinary man or woman has means of knowledge immeasurably surpassing those that can be possessed by any one else. The interference of society to overrule his judgment and purposes in what only regards himself, must be grounded on general presumptions; which may be altogether wrong, and even if right, are as likely as not to be misapplied to individual cases, by persons no better acquainted with the circumstances of such cases than those are who look at them merely from without. In this department, therefore, of human affairs, Individuality has its proper field of action. In the conduct of human beings towards one another, it is necessary that general rules should for the most part be observed, in order that people may know what they have to expect; but in each person’s own concerns, his individual spontaneity is entitled to free exercise….

I fully admit that the mischief which a person does to himself may seriously affect, both through their sympathies and their interests, those nearly connected with him, and in a minor degree, society at large…. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; but a soldier or a policeman should be punished for being drunk on duty. Whenever, in short, there is a definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty, and placed in that of morality or law.

But with regard to the merely contingent, or, as it may be called, constructive injury which a person causes to society, by conduct which neither violates any specific duty to the public, nor occasions perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except himself; the inconvenience is one which society can afford to bear, for the sake of the greater good of human freedom…. (On Liberty, Chapter IV)

To begin at the end of the quotation, Mill arbitrarily places a higher value on freedom, as an abstract ideal, than he does on the harms that can occur in its name. This kind of mindless devotion to the abstract ideal of freedom, without regard for costs or consequences, is common among libertarians. But freedom means nothing if it can’t be described without reference to the real-world conditions of human existence. To appeal to freedom as an abstract desideratum — superior to whatever alternative is being rejected in its name — is to commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and, simultaneously, the nirvana fallacy. Freedom, as philosopher Jamie Whyte would say, is a “hooray word”: “Declare you are in favor of” freedom “and everyone will cheer his agreement, even if he disagrees with you in every particular question of what” freedom means (Bad Thoughts, p. 61).

What about the harms that Mill (and his followers unto this day) dismiss as “neither violat[ing] any specific duty … nor occasion[ing] perceptible hurt to any assignable individual except himself”? Who is fit to make the judgment as to whether a particular action constitutes a “hurt,” the members of the society whose norms have been violated or “rational” observers, like Mill? Society — properly understood — is a tightly woven fabric, individual strands of which can’t be plucked without damaging the whole. Rationalists and “reformers” tend to focus on the parts of society that they want to change, without considering the effects of change on the well-being of society. (I will come to a salient example, below.)

Friedrich Hayek sees through Mill’s rationalism:

[T]rue individualism … began its modern development with John Locke, and particularly with Bernard Mandeville and David Hume, and achieved full stature for the first time in the work of Josiah Tucker, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith and in that of their great contemporary, Edmund Burke–the man whom Smith described as the only person he ever knew who thought on economic subjects exactly as he did without any previous communication having passed between them. In the nineteenth century I find it represented most perfectly in the work of two of its greatest historians and political philosophers: Alexis de Tocqueville and Lord Acton…. [T]he classical economists of the nineteenth century, or at least the Benthamites or philosophical radicals among them, came increasingly under the influence of another kind of individualism of different origin.

This second and altogether different strand of thought, also known as individualism, is represented mainly by French and other Continental writers–a fact due, I believe, to the dominant role which Cartesian rationalism plays in its composition…. [T]his rationalistic individualism always tends to develop into the opposite of individualism, namely, socialism or collectivism. It is because only the first kind of individualism is consistent that I claim for it the name of true individualism, while the second kind must probably be regarded as a source of modern socialism as important as the properly collectivist theories….

What, then, are the essential characteristics of true individualism? The first thing that should be said is that it is primarily a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society. This fact should by itself be sufficient to refute the silliest of the common misunderstandings: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumption of) the existence of isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from men whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society. If that were true, it would indeed have nothing to contribute to our understanding of society. But its basic contention is quite a different one; it is that there is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior. This argument is directed primarily against the properly collectivist theories of society which pretend to be able directly to comprehend social wholes like society, etc., as entities sui generis which exist independently of the individuals which compose them….

Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society … are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of rules of social intercourse… That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is, of course, a commonplace….

This brings me to … the necessity, in any complex society in which the effects of anyone’s action reach far beyond his possible range of vision, of the individual submitting to the anonymous and seemingly irrational forces of society–a submission which must include not only the acceptance of rules of behavior as valid without examining what depends in the particular instance on their being observed but also a readiness to adjust himself to changes which may profoundly affect his fortunes and opportunities and the causes of which may be altogether unintelligible to him. It is against these that modern man tends to revolt unless their necessity can be shown to rest upon “reason made clear and demonstrable to every individual.”

Yet it is just here that the understandable craving for intelligibility produces illusory demands which no system can satisfy….

The unwillingness to tolerate or respect any social forces which are not recognizable as the product of intelligent design, which is so important a cause of the present desire for comprehensive economic planning, is indeed only one aspect of a more general movement…. The belief that only a synthetic system of morals, an artificial language, or even an artificial society can be justified in an age of science, as well as the increasing unwillingness to bow before any moral rules whose utility is not rationally demonstrated, or to conform with conventions whose rationale is not known, are all manifestations of the same basic view which wants all social activity to be recognizably part of a single coherent plan… They are the results of that same rationalistic “individualism” which wants to see in everything the product of conscious individual reason. They are certainly not, however, a result of true individualism and may even make the working of a free and truly individualistic system difficult or impossible….

This cult of the distinct and different individuality has, of course, deep roots in the German intellectual tradition and, through the influence of some of its greatest exponents, especially Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt, has made itself felt far beyond Germany and is clearly seen in J. S. Mill’s [On] Liberty. This sort of “individualism” not only has nothing to do with true individualism but may indeed prove a grave obstacle to the smooth working of an individualist system…. [I]f people are too “individualistic” in the false sense, if they are too unwilling voluntarily to conform to traditions and conventions, and if they refuse to recognize anything which is not consciously designed or which cannot be demonstrated as rational to every individual. It is at least understandable that the prevalence of this kind of “individualism” has often made people of good will despair of the possibility of achieving order in a free society and even made them ask for a- dictatorial government with the power to impose on society the order which it will not produce itself. (Individualism and Economic Order, Chapter I)

Consider Mill’s defense of the drunkard. Mill speaks of “punishment” as if that were the only alternative, and he sets up dereliction of duty as the only kind of act stemming from drunkenness that ought to be punished. But an habitual drunk does great damage to those around him, by failing to provide properly for his wife and children, by performing his job to less than his ability, by causing accidents that can harm others as well as himself, and so on. When there was such a thing as society — before it was constructively eradicated by the state’s usurpation and suppression of traditional functions of civil society (e.g., education, charity, religious expression) — a drunkard would have been an object of scorn and opprobrium. Whether or not a particular drunkard would have changed his ways because of scorn and opprobrium, observant fellows would have seen in his treatment an object lesson.

In any event, social justice of the true kind — the reaction of society to those who offend against its norms — serves a civilizing function that the state simply cannot duplicate. The state is a rule-bound, reactive institution, unlike the kind of living institution that is found in true society: an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another.

This brings me to the example that I promised earlier: abortion. At the time of the founding of the United States, abortion was widely prohibited under common law. Statutory prohibitions followed throughout the 19th century. Before Roe v. Wade (1973), only four States allowed abortions without restrictions; 16 States allowed abortions in cases of rape, incest, danger to the mother’s health, or fetal damage; abortion was simply not allowed in the other 30 States. The prevailing restrictions are consistent with the historical condemnation of abortion (at some stage of fetal development) by most religions. (It is irrelevant to this discussion that some faiths and denominations have, in the years since Roe v. Wade, changed their dogmas in an attempt to be “relevant.”)

In sum, the widespread proscription of abortion in the United States enjoyed broad and deep support for almost two centuries. One could reasonably call condemnation of abortion a social norm. Special pleading in favor of abortion, which led to the pro-abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade, contributed greatly to the division of America that runs along the fault lines of the culture war and the proper role of government.

Did the social engineers who foisted legalized abortion on America mean to weaken the already strained bonds of trust among Americans? Probably not, but neither is it likely that they gave the prospect of social division much thought, or if they did they probably didn’t care about it. (I have no doubt about the equally reckless and insouciant attitudes of the social engineers who put the full force of law behind reverse racism, and who are now trying to do the same for homosexual “marriage.”)

This is what happens when social norms are overturned by do-gooders. Which brings me to the do-gooders who call themselves libertarians. They claim to be against the intrusion of the state into social arrangements — except when those social arrangements don’t suit them. They are the false individualists of whom Hayek writes.

The widespread prohibition of abortion, by law, reflected a deep-seated social norm. The desire of most whites to avoid forced association with blacks reflected (and reflects) valid observations about differences in culture, behavior, and intelligence. The desire of most heterosexuals to preserve the traditional definition of marriage reflected (and still reflects) their rightful abhorrence of a perverse “lifestyle” and visceral understanding that redefining marriage will weaken it, and thus weaken its civilizing influence. But such truths matter not to a false individualist, who cannot see the forest of society for the trees of their individual whims.

And so, when a libertarian (really a pseudo-libertarian) wants to enact his particular anti-social social agenda, where does he turn? He turns to the state and implores it to intervene in social matters, without thinking of or caring about the consequences. Because the (psuedo) libertarian — like Mill — is bedazzled by “freedom” from social restraints. In that respect, it’s hard to tell a (pseudo) libertarian from a “liberal; both want to strike down social restraints that they dislike, in favor of state-imposed restraints that are to their liking.

Thus do (pseudo) libertarians (and “liberal”) shred the bonds of trust that enable a people to live in liberty, which is not the same thing as “freedom” from social restraints. As Hayek puts it:

[T]he existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people … enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background.

Or, as I have said, liberty is a state of peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior. Such a state is unattainable where the “conventions and traditions” that underlie mutual trust are demolished willy-nilly in the name of “freedom.”

* * *

Not Over the Hill

The Washington Post reports on some research about intelligence that is as irrelevant as the candle problem. Specifically:

[R]esearchers at Canada’s Simon Fraser University … have found that measurable declines in cognitive performance begin to occur at age 24. In terms of brainpower, you’re over the hill by your mid-20s.

The researchers measured this by studying the performance of thousands of players of Starcraft 2, a strategy video game….

Even worse news for those of us who are cognitively over-the-hill: the researchers find “no evidence that this decline can be attenuated by expertise.” Yes, we get wiser as we get older. But wisdom doesn’t substitute for speed. At best, older players can only hope to compensate “by employing simpler strategies and using the game’s interface more efficiently than younger players,” the authors say.

So there you have it: scientific evidence that we cognitively peak at age 24. At that point, you should probably abandon any pretense of optimism and accept that your life, henceforth, will be a steady descent into mediocrity, punctuated only by the bitter memories of the once seemingly-endless potential that you so foolishly squandered in your youth. Considering that the average American lives to be 80, you’ll have well over 50 years to do so! (Christopher Ingraham, “Your Brain Is Over the Hill by Age 24,” April 16, 2014)

Happily, Starcraft 2 is far from a representation of the real world. Take science, for example. I went to Wikipedia and obtained the list of all Nobel laureates in physics. It’s a long list, so I sampled it — taking the winners for the first five years (1901-1905), the middle five years (1955-1959) and the most recent five years (2009-2013). Here’s a list of the winners for those 15 years, and the approximate age of each winner at the time he or she did the work for which the prize was awarded:

1901 Wilhelm Röntgen (50)

1902 Hendrik Lorentz; (43) and Pieter Zeeman (31)

1903 Henri Becquerel, (44), Pierre Curie (37), and Marie Curie (29)

1904 Lord Rayleigh (52)

1955 Willis Lamb (34) and Polykarp Kusch (40)

1956 John Bardeen (39), Walter Houser Brattain (45), and William Shockley (37)

1957 Chen Ning Yang (27) and Tsung-Dao Lee (23)

1958 Pavel Cherenkov (30), Ilya Frank (26), and Igor Tamm (39)

1959 Emilio G. Segrè (50) and Owen Chamberlain (35)

2009 Charles K. Kao (33), Willard S. Boyle (45), and George E. Smith (39)

2010 Andre Geim (46) and Konstantin Novoselov (34)

2011 Saul Perlmutter (39), Adam G. Riess (29), and Brian Schmidt (31)

2012 Serge Haroche (40-50) and David J. Wineland (40-50)

2013 François Englert (32) and Peter W. Higgs (35)

There’s exactly one person within a year of age 24 (Tsung-Dao Lee, 23), and a few others who were still in their (late) 20s. Most of the winners were in their 30s and 40s when they accomplished their prize-worthy scientific feats. And there are at least as many winners who were in their 50s as winners who were in their 20s.

Let’s turn to so-called physical pursuits, which often combine brainpower (anticipation, tactical improvisation, hand-eye coordination) and pure physical skill (strength and speed). Baseball exemplifies such a pursuit. Do ballplayers go sharply downhill after the age of 24? Hardly. On average, they’re just entering their best years at age 24, and they perform at peak level for several years.

I’ll use two charts to illustrate the point about ballplayers. The first depicts normalized batting average vs. age for 86 of the leading hitters in the history of the American League*:

Greatest hitters_BA by age_86 hitters

Because of the complexity of the spreadsheet from which the numbers are taken, I was unable to derive a curve depicting mean batting average vs. age. But the density of the plot lines suggests that the peak age for batting average begins at 24 and extends into the early 30s. Further, with relatively few exceptions, batting performance doesn’t decline sharply until the late 30s.

Among a more select group of players, and by a different measure of performance, the peak years occur at ages 24-28, with a slow decline after 28**:

Offensive average by age_25 leading hitters

The two graphs suggest to me that ballplayers readily compensate for physical decline (such as it is) by applying the knowledge they acquire in the course of playing the game. Such knowledge would include “reading” pitchers to make better guesses about the pitch that’s coming, knowing where to hit a ball in a certain ballpark against certain fielders, judging the right moment to attempt a stolen base against a certain pitcher-catcher combination, hitting to the opposite field on occasion instead of trying to pull the ball every time, and so on.

I strongly suspect that what is true in baseball is true in many walks of life: Wisdom — knowledge culled from experience — compensates for pure brainpower, and continues to do so for a long time. The Framers of the Constitution, who weren’t perfect but who were astute observers of the human condition, knew as much. That’s why they set 35 as the minimum age for election to the presidency. (Subsequent history — notably, the presidencies of TR, JFK, Clinton, and Obama — tells us that the Framers should have made it 50.)

I do grow weary of pseudo-scientific crap like the research reported in the Post. But it does give me something to write about. And most of the pseudo-science is harmless, unlike the statistical lies on which global-warming hysteria is based.

__________
* The numbers are drawn from the analysis described in detail here and here, which is based on statistics derived through the Play Index at Baseball-Reference.com. The bright red line represents Ty Cobb’s career, which deserves special mention because of Cobb’s unparalleled dominance as a hitter-for-average over a 24-year career, and especially for ages 22-32. I should add that Cobb’s dominance has been cemented by Ichiro Suzuki’s sub-par performance in the three seasons since I posted this, wherein I proclaimed Cobb the American League’s best all-time hitter for average, taking age into account. (There’s no reason to think that the National League has ever hosted Cobb’s equal.)

** This is an index, where 100 represents parity with the league average. I chose the 25 players represented here from a list of career leaders in OPS+ (on-base percentage plus slugging average, normalized for league averages and park factors). Because of significant changes in rules and equipment in the late 1800s and early years of the 1900s (see here, here, and here), players whose careers began before 1907 were eliminated, excepting Cobb, who didn’t become a regular player until 1906. Also eliminated were Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire, whose drug-fueled records don’t merit recognition, and Joey Votto, who has completed only eight seasons. Offensive Average (OA) avoids the double-counting inherent in OPS+, which also (illogically) sums two fractions with different denominators. OA measures a player’s total offensive contribution (TOC) per plate appearance (PA) in a season, normalized by the league average for that season. TOC = singles + doubles x 2 + triples x 3 + home runs x 4 + stolen bases – times caught stealing + walks – times grounded into a double play + sacrifice hits + sacrifice flies. In the graph, Cobb seems to disappear into the (elite) crowd after age 24, but that’s an artifact of Cobb’s preferred approach to the game — slapping hits and getting on base — not his ability to hit the long ball, for which extra credit is given in computing OA. (See this, for example.)

Unsurprising News

John Taylor writes that “New Research Bolsters Policy Link from Uncertainty to Economy“:

Last week a joint Princeton-Stanford conference held in Princeton focused on policy uncertainty and showcased new findings on connections between policy uncertainty and political polarization and on patterns in different states, countries and time periods.

Danny Shoag, for example, presented new work “Uncertainty and the Geography of the Great Recession,” co-authored with Stan Veuger, showing that policy uncertainty across the United States has been highly and robustly correlated with state unemployment rates. As the authors explain, their “paper serves to counter such claims” as those made by Atif Mian and Amir Sufi that “an increase in business uncertainty at the aggregate level does not explain the stark cross-sectional patterns in employment losses” which had cast doubt on the role of policy uncertainty. Scott Baker, Nick Bloom and Steve Davis had written extensively on this at the national level and also presented new work at the conference.

I’ve written about Baker, Bloom, and Davis’s work here.

Ross Douthat comments about “Diversity and Dishonesty“:

Earlier this year, a column by a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y. L. Korn briefly achieved escape velocity from the Ivy League bubble, thanks to its daring view of how universities should approach academic freedom.

Korn proposed that such freedom was dated and destructive, and that a doctrine of “academic justice” should prevail instead. No more, she wrote, should Harvard permit its faculty to engage in “research promoting or justifying oppression” or produce work tainted by “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.” Instead, academic culture should conform to left-wing ideas of the good, beautiful and true, and decline as a matter of principle “to put up with research that counters our goals.”

Which reminds me of the story behind Robert Putnam’s “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” which I recount here. In short, Putnam withheld publication of his paper because it refutes the leftist mantra “diversity is good.”

Finally, we are told by David Z. Hambrick and Christopher Chabris that “Yes, IQ Really Matters“:

The SAT does predict success in college—not perfectly, but relatively well, especially given that it takes just a few hours to administer. And, unlike a “complex portrait” of a student’s life, it can be scored in an objective way…. In a study published in Psychological Science, University of Minnesota researchers Paul Sackett, Nathan Kuncel, and their colleagues investigated the relationship between SAT scores and college grades in a very large sample: nearly 150,000 students from 110 colleges and universities. SAT scores predicted first-year college GPA about as well as high school grades did, and the best prediction was achieved by considering both factors. Botstein, Boylan, and Kolbert are either unaware of this directly relevant, easily accessible, and widely disseminated empirical evidence, or they have decided to ignore it and base their claims on intuition and anecdote—or perhaps on their beliefs about the way the world should be rather than the way it is.

Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, it’s not just first-year college GPA that SAT scores predict. In a four-year study that started with nearly 3,000 college students, a team of Michigan State University researchers led by Neal Schmitt found that test score (SAT or ACT—whichever the student took) correlated strongly with cumulative GPA at the end of the fourth year. If the students were ranked on both their test scores and cumulative GPAs, those who had test scores in the top half (above the 50^th percentile, or median) would have had a roughly two-thirds chance of having a cumulative GPA in the top half. By contrast, students with bottom-half SAT scores would be only one-third likely to make it to the top half in GPA….

[I]t is clear that [socioeconomic status] is not what accounts for the fact that SAT scores predict success in college. In the University of Minnesota study, the correlation between high school SAT and college GPA was virtually unchanged after the researchers statistically controlled for the influence of SES. If SAT scores were just a proxy for privilege, then putting SES into the mix should have removed, or at least dramatically decreased, the association between the SAT and college performance….

What this all means is that the SAT measures something—some stable characteristic of high school students other than their parents’ income—that translates into success in college. And what could that characteristic be? General intelligence….

IQ predicts many different measures of success. Exhibit A is evidence from research on job performance by the University of Iowa industrial psychologist Frank Schmidt and his late colleague John Hunter. Synthesizing evidence from nearly a century of empirical studies, Schmidt and Hunter established that general mental ability—the psychological trait that IQ scores reflect—is the single best predictor of job training success, and that it accounts for differences in job performance even in workers with more than a decade of experience. It’s more predictive than interests, personality, reference checks, and interview performance. Smart people don’t just make better mathematicians, as Brooks observed—they make better managers, clerks, salespeople, service workers, vehicle operators, and soldiers.

IQ predicts other things that matter, too, like income, employment, health, and even longevity. In a 2001 study published in the British Medical Journal, Scottish researchers Lawrence Whalley and Ian Deary identified more than 2,000 people who had taken part in the Scottish Mental Survey of 1932, a nationwide assessment of IQ. Remarkably, people with high IQs at age 11 were more considerably more likely to survive to old age than were people with lower IQs. For example, a person with an IQ of 100 (the average for the general population) was 21 percent more likely to live to age 76 than a person with an IQ of 85. And the relationship between IQ and longevity remains statistically significant even after taking SES into account. Perhaps IQ reflects the mental resources—the reasoning and problem-solving skills—that people can bring to bear on maintaining their health and making wise decisions throughout life. This explanation is supported by evidence that higher-IQ individuals engage in more positive health behaviors, such as deciding to quit smoking….

[T]he bottom line is that there are large, measurable differences among people in intellectual ability, and these differences have consequences for people’s lives. Ignoring these facts will only distract us from discovering and implementing wise policies.

Given everything that social scientists have learned about IQ and its broad predictive validity, it is reasonable to make it a factor in decisions such as whom to hire for a particular job or admit to a particular college or university. In fact, disregarding IQ—by admitting students to colleges or hiring people for jobs in which they are very likely to fail—is harmful both to individuals and to society. For example, in occupations where safety is paramount, employers could be incentivized to incorporate measures of cognitive ability into the recruitment process. Above all, the policies of public and private organizations should be based on evidence rather than ideology or wishful thinking.

As I say at the end of this post, “life just isn’t fair, so get over it.”

Governmental Perversity

People are sometimes by harmed natural events such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Though such events may be exogenous to human activity,they are somewhat predictable, in that people can know (or learn) where and (sometimes) approximately when such events are likely to occur. That knowledge, in turn, allows people to cope with natural events in three ways:

Move away from or avoid areas prone to natural disasters, at least during times of heightened risk.

Taking physical measures to reduce the damage caused by natural events.

Buying insurance to help defray the costs resulting a natural disaster.

Moral hazard enters the picture when government intervenes to encourage people to live in high-risk areas by insuring risks that private insurers will not insure (e.g., floods), by underwriting certain physical measures (e.g., the installation of bulkheads and pumping systems), and by reimbursing losses sustained by persons who insist on living in high-risk areas — as if to do so were a God-given right. Through such actions, government encourages unremunerative risk-taking, and transfers most of the resulting losses to those citizens who choose not to put themselves in harm’s way.

Now, egregious as it is, the moral hazard created by government with respect to natural disasters is nothing compared with the moral hazard created by government with respect to financial disasters. The recent financial crisis-cum-deep recession is but the latest in a long string of government-caused and government-aided economic messes.

In the recent case, the Federal Reserve and pseudo-private arms of the federal government (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) loosened the money supply and encouraged lenders to grant loans to marginal borrowers. Financial institutions were further encouraged to take undue risks by having seen, in times past, that there were bailouts at the end of the tunnel. Not all troubled firms were bailed out during the recent financial crisis, but enough of them were to ensure that the hope of being bailed out still shines brightly. Nor were bailouts limited to financial institutions; troubled companies like General Motors, which should have been put out of their misery, were given new life, at a high cost to taxpayers.

And so, thanks to government, people and businesses continue to take undue risks at the expense of their fellow citizens. Meanwhile — through taxes and regulations — government continues to discourage privately financed risk-taking (entrepreneurship) that is essential to economic growth.

Perversity, thy name is government.

* * *

Surrender? Hell No!

About six weeks ago, Ross Douthat — the truly conservative columnist at The New York Times (as opposed to David Brooks) — conceded surrender in the battle over same-sex “marriage”:

It now seems certain that before too many years elapse, the Supreme Court will be forced to acknowledge the logic of its own jurisprudence on same-sex marriage and redefine marriage to include gay couples in all 50 states.

Once this happens, the national debate essentially will be finished, but the country will remain divided, with a substantial minority of Americans, most of them religious, still committed to the older view of marriage.

So what then? One possibility is that this division will recede into the cultural background, with marriage joining the long list of topics on which Americans disagree without making a political issue out of it.

In this scenario, religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage. And where conflicts arise — in a case where, say, a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding — gay rights supporters would heed the advice of gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan, and let the dissenters opt out “in the name of their freedom — and ours.”

But there’s another possibility, in which the oft-invoked analogy between opposition to gay marriage and support for segregation in the 1960s South is pushed to its logical public-policy conclusion. In this scenario, the unwilling photographer or caterer would be treated like the proprietor of a segregated lunch counter, and face fines or lose his business — which is the intent of recent legal actions against a wedding photographer in New Mexico, a florist in Washington State, and a baker in Colorado….

… We are not really having an argument about same-sex marriage anymore, and … we’re not having a negotiation. Instead, all that’s left is the timing of the final victory — and for the defeated to find out what settlement the victors will impose. (“The Terms of Our Surrender,” March 2, 2014)

Well, it didn’t take long to learn the terms of surrender. (Not that it wasn’t obvious, given the cases of the florist in Washington and the baker in Colorado.) There is a strident branch of gay activism — backed by the usual “liberal” and “libertarian” suspects — that will brook nothing less than the surrender of fundamental rights: freedom of association, freedom of contract, and freedom of speech. The cases in Washington and Colorado are evidence of efforts to deny freedom of association and freedom of contract. Then came the full-blown attack on freedom of speech, with the ouster of Brandon Eich from his job as CEO of Mozilla because six years ago he donated $1,000 to California’s Prop 8 ballot initiative reaffirming traditional marriage. (See the links at the bottom of this post for more about the Eich affair and its implications.)

What else would you expect, given the precedent of the “civil rights” movement? In the name of “civil rights,” Americans have long been forced to associate with and hire persons whose main qualification is the color of their skin. As for speech, no CEO of any consequence would dare say anything in public (or private) about the difficulty of finding qualified black employees, despite the demonstrably lower intelligence of blacks and their above-average proclivity for criminal behavior. The typical CEO will instead tell his minions to make the workplace look like the “face of America,” regardless of the impossibility of doing so without ripping off taxpayers, shareholders, and customers.

Why? Because honesty about the reasons for failing to meet racial quotas would cause the wrath of the Civil Rights Division and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to be visited upon the CEO’s corporation. And you can be sure that the worthies in those thought-crime agencies are polishing their truncheons in anticipation of the day when the failure to meet a government-imposed gay quota becomes a crime. Brendan Eich’s fate at the hands of private actors is but a hint of the things that will come at the hands of state actors.

Anyone who lived through the ~~“civil rights”~~ forced equality movement with open eyes could see where the “gay rights” movement would lead, long before its victory became evident to Ross Douthat. I certainly did. See, for example, “In Defense of Marriage” (May 26, 2011), “The Myth That Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Causes No Harm” (October 14, 2011), and the posts and readings linked therein. This is from “In Defense of Marriage”:

The recognition of homosexual “marriage” by the state — though innocuous to many, and an article of faith among most libertarians and liberals — is another step down the slippery slope of societal disintegration. The disintegration began in earnest in the 1930s, when Americans began to place their trust in chimerical, one-size-fits-all “solutions” offered by power-hungry, economically illiterate politicians and their “intellectual” enablers and apologists. In this instance, the state will recognize homosexual “marriage,” then bestow equal benefits on homosexual “partners,” and then require private entities (businesses, churches, etc.) to grant equal benefits to homosexual “partnerships.” Individuals and businesses who demur will be brought to heel through the use of affirmative action and hate-crime legislation to penalize those who dare to speak against homosexual “marriage,” the privileges that flow from it, and the economic damage wrought by those privileges.

It should be evident to anyone who has watched American politics that even-handedness is not a matter of observing constitutional limits on government’s reach, regardless of who asks for an exception; it is, rather, a matter of expanding the privileges bestowed by government so that no one is excluded. It follows that the recognition and punitive enforcement of same-sex “marriage” would be followed by the recognition and bestowal of benefits on other arrangements, including transient “partnerships” of convenience. And that surely will weaken heterosexual marriage, which is the axis around which the family revolves. The state will be saying, in effect, “Anything goes. Do your thing. The courts, the welfare system, and the taxpayer — above all — will pick up the pieces.” And so it will go.

The day is coming — and it’s not far off — when it will be illegal to refuse to associate with, do business with, or hire anyone for any reason that Congress, the executive, or the courts deem unacceptable. This will have two predictable effects. It will further dampen entrepreneurial enthusiasm, which has already taken big hits, thanks to the expansion of the regulatory-welfare state. And it will further divide Americans from each other (see Michael Jonas, “The Downside of Diversity,” boston.com, August 5, 2007).

The U.S. Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding, I will never recognize same-sex “marriage” as a valid institution. I refuse to cede an inch in the culture war.

* * *

Related reading:
Seth Mandel, “Brendan Eich, the Culture Wars, and the Ground Shifting beneath Our Feet,” Commentary, April 4, 2014
Jonathan S. Tobin, “Mozilla Has Rights, Just Like Hobby Lobby,” Commentary, April 7, 2014
Scott Johnson, “Roots of Totalitarian Liberalism,” Powerline Blog, April 7, 2014
Jordan Lorence, “Supreme Court Turns Down Elane Photography,” National Review Online, Bench Memos, April 7, 2014
Mollie Hemingway, “The Rise of the Same-Sex Marriage Dissidents,” The Federalist, April 8, 2014
Patrick J. Buchanan, “The New Blacklist,” Taki’s Magazine, April 8, 2014
Ed Morrisey, “Eich, Intolerance, and the Growing Demand for Absolutism,” Hot Air, April 8, 2014
Nicholas James Pell, “The Care Bears vs. McCarthy,” Taki’s Magazine, April 8, 2014
Stella Morabito, “Bait and Switch: How Same-Sex Marriage Ends Family Autonomy,” The Federalist, April 9, 2014
Robert Oscar Lopez, “Stop Crying over Mozilla and Start Fighting Back!,” American Thinker, April 14, 2014
Bill Zeiser, “We Are All Charles Murray,” The American Spectator, April 25, 2014

Other related posts at this blog: Take your pick of the many listed here, here, and here.

Checking Out

UPDATED 06/25/14

The demise of Mickey Rooney at the age of 93 reminded me that several years ago I began to track some celebrities who had attained the age of 90. The rather quirky list of notables, which doesn’t include Rooney, now looks like this:

Luise Rainer 104, ~~George Beverly Shea 104~~, ~~Charles Lane 102~~, ~~George Kennan 101~~, ~~Gloria Stuart 100~~, ~~Eddie Albert 99~~, Irwin Corey 99, ~~Michael DeBakey 99~~, ~~Mitch Miller 99~~, ~~Max Schmeling 99~~, ~~Risë Stevens 99~~, ~~John Wooden 99~~, ~~Tony Martin 98~~, ~~Dale Messick 98~~, ~~Eli Wallach 98~~, Herman Wouk 98, Olivia de Havilland 97, Zsa Zsa Gabor 97, ~~John Kenneth Galbraith 97~~, ~~Ernest Gallo 97~~, ~~Estée Lauder 97~~, ~~Art Linkletter 97~~, ~~Al Lopez 97~~, Vera Lynn 97, ~~Karl Malden 97~~, ~~John Mills 97~~, ~~Kitty Carlisle 96~~, ~~,Jack LaLanne 96~~, ~~Kevin McCarthy 96~~, ~~Harry Morgan 96,~~ ~~Fay Wray 96~~, ~~Jane Wyatt 96~~, ~~Joseph Barbera 95~~, ~~Ernest Borgnine 95~~, ~~Henri Cartier-Bresson 95~~, Monte Irvin 95, ~~Herbert Lom 95~~, ~~Peter Rodino, Jr 95~~, ~~Sargent Shriver 95~~, ~~Patty Andrews 94~~, ~~Sammy Baugh 94~~, ~~Constance Cummings 94~~, ~~Lady Bird Johnson 94~~, ~~Robert Mondavi 94~~, ~~Byron Nelson 94~~, ~~Les Paul 94~~, Billy Graham 93, ~~Ruth Hussey 93~~, ~~Frankie Laine 93~~, ~~Robert McNamara 93~~, ~~Artie Shaw 93,~~ ~~Richard Widmark 93~~, ~~Oleg Cassini 92~~, ~~Ralph Edwards 92~~, ~~Bob Feller 92~~, ~~Ernie Harwell 92~~, ~~Lena Horne 92~~, ~~Julia Child 91~~, ~~Archibald Cox 91~~, ~~Geraldine Fitzgerald 91~~, ~~Frances Langford 91~~, ~~John Profumo 91~~, ~~William Westmoreland 91~~, ~~Jane Wyman 90~~.

By my reckoning, of the dozens (or hundreds) of actors who starred in Hollywood films before World War II, only two survive:

Luise Rainer won Oscars for best actress for her leading roles in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and The Good Earth (1937).

Olivia de Havilland attained star billing in 1935, at the age of 19, for her role in Captain Blood. Other pre-war films in which she starred include The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939).

I should note that de Havilland’s younger sister and life-long rival, Joan Fontaine, died on December 15, 2013, at the age of 96. The de Havilland sisters came by their longevity the easy way; they inherited it. Their father lived to the age of 95; their mother, to the age of 88.

More Lessons from Baseball

Regular readers of this blog will know that I sometimes draw on the game of baseball and its statistics to make points about various subjects — longevity, probability, politics, management, and cosmology, for example. (See the links at the bottom of this post.)

Today’s sermon is about the proper relationship between owners and management. I will address two sets of graphs giving the won-lost (W-L) records of the “old 16” major-league franchises. The “old 16” refers to the 8 franchises in the National League (NL) and the 8 franchises in American League (AL) in 1901, the first year of the AL’s existence as a major league. Focusing on the “old 16” affords the long view that’s essential in thinking about success in an endeavor, whether it is baseball, business, or empire-building.

The first graph in each set gives the centered 11-year average W-L record for each of the old teams in each league, and for the league’s expansion teams taken as a group. The 11-year averages are based on annual W-L records for 1901-2013. The subsequent graphs in each set give, for each team and group of expansion teams, 11-year averages and annual W-L records. Franchise moves from one city to another are indicated by vertical black lines. The titles of each graph indicates the city or cities in which the team has been located and the team’s nickname or nicknames.

Here are the two sets of graphs:

W-L records of old-8 NL franchises

W-L records of old-8 AL franchises

What strikes me about the first graph in each set is the convergence of W-L records around 1990. My conjecture: The advent of free agency in the 1970s must have enabled convergence. Stability probably helped, too. The AL had been stable since 1977, when it expanded to 14 teams; the NL had been stable since 1969, when it expanded to 12 teams. As the expansion teams matured, some of them became more successful, at the expense of the older teams. This explanation is consistent with the divergence after 1993, with the next round of expansion (there was another in 1998). To be sure, all of this conjecture warrants further analysis. (Here’s an analysis from several years ago that I still like.)

Let’s now dispose of franchise shifts as an explanation for a better record. I observe the following:

The Braves were probably on the upswing when they moved from Boston to Milwaukee in 1953. They were on the downswing at the time of their second move, from Milwaukee to Atlanta in 1966. It took many years and the acquisition of astute front office and a good farm system to turn the Braves around.

The Dodgers’ move to LA in 1958 didn’t help the team, just the owners’ bank accounts. Ditto the Giants’ move to San Francisco in 1958.

Turning to the AL, the St. Louis Browns became the latter-day Baltimore Orioles in 1954. That move was accompanied by a change in ownership. The team’s later successes seem to have been triggered by the hiring of Paul Richards and Lee McPhail to guide the team and build its farm system. The Orioles thence became a good-to-great from the mid-1960 to early 1980s, with a resurgence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The team’s subsequent decline seems due to the meddlesome Peter Angelos, who became CEO in 1993.

The Athletics, like the Braves, moved twice. First, in 1955 from Philadelphia to Kansas City, and again in 1968 from Kansas City to Oakland. The first move had no effect until Charles O. Finley took over the team. His ownership carried over to Oakland. Finley may have been the exceptional owner whose personal involvement in the team’s operations helped to make it successful. But the team’s post-Finely record (1981-present) under less-involved owners suggests otherwise. The team’s pre-Kansas City record reflects Connie Mack’s tight-fisted ways. Mack — owner-manager of the A’s from 1901 until 1950 — was evidently a good judge of talent and a skilled field manager, but as an owner he had a penchant for breaking up great teams to rid himself of high-priced talent — with disastrous consequences for the A’s W-L record from the latter 1910s to late 1920s, and from the early 1930s to the end of Mack’s reign.

The Washington Senators were already resurgent under owner Calvin Griffith when the franchise was moved to Minnesota for the 1961 season. The Twins simply won more consistently than they had under the tight-fisted ownership of Clark Griffith, Calvin’s father.

Bottom line: There’s no magic in a move. A team’s success depends on the willingness of owners to spend bucks and to hire good management — and then to get out of the way. (Yes, George Steinbrenner bankrolled a lot of pennant-winning teams during his ownership years, from 1973 to 2010, but the Yankees’ record improved as “The Boss” became a less-intrusive owner from the mid-1990s until his death.)

There are many other stories behind the graphs — just begging to be told, but I’ll leave it at that.

Except to say this: The “owners” of America aren’t “the people,” romantic political pronouncements to the contrary notwithstanding. As government has become more deeply entrenched in the personal and business affairs of Americans, there has emerged a ruling class which effectively “owns” America. It is composed of professional politicians and bureaucrats, who find ample aid and comfort in the arms of left-wing academicians and the media. The “owners’ grip on power is sustained by the votes of the constituencies to which they pander.

Yes, the constituencies include “crony capitalists,” who benefit from regulatory barriers to competition and tax breaks. Though it must be said that they produce things, and would probably do well without the benefits they reap from professional politicians and bureaucrats. Far more powerful are the non-producers, who are granted favors based on their color, gender, age, etc., in return for the tens of millions of votes that they cast to keep the “owners” in power.

Far too many Americans are whiners who grovel at the feet of their “owners,” begging for handouts. Far too few Americans are self-managed winners.

* * *

Related posts:

Can You Throw a Curveball?

Baseball and the Constants of the Universe

The Illogical Left, via Leiter

A Theory of Everything, Occam’s Razor, and Baseball

PC Madness

Baseball Managers: A Recyclable Commodity?

Can Money Buy Excellence in Baseball?

It’s the Little Things That Count

Economists As Moral Relativists

Post-Season Play, Atheism, and the Worrying Classes

What’s in a Name?

Freedom of Will and Political Action

Fooled by Non-Randomness

Randomness Is Over-Rated

What Are “Natural Rights”?

More about Taxing the Rich

Luck and Baseball, One More Time

Conducting, Baseball, and Longevity

More about Luck and Baseball

Pseudoscience, “Moneyball,” and Luck

The Value of Experience

The 80-20 Rule, Illustrated

Baseball Statistics and the Consumer Price Index

Do Managers Make a Difference?

The Hall of Fame and Morality

The Limits of Science (II)

The material of the universe — be it called matter or energy — has three essential properties: essence, emanation, and effect. Essence — what things really “are” — is the most elusive of the properties, and probably unknowable. Emanations are the perceptible aspects of things, such as their detectible motions and electromagnetic properties. Effects are what things “do” to other things, as in the effect that a stream of photons has on paper when the photons are focused through a magnifying glass. (You’ve lived a bland life if you’ve never started a fire that way.)

Science deals in emanations and effects. It seems that these can be described without knowing what matter-energy “really” consists of. But can they?

Take a baseball. Assume, for the sake of argument, that it can’t be opened and separated into constituent parts, which are many. (See the video at this page for details.) Taking the baseball as a fundamental particle, its attributes (seemingly) can be described without knowing what’s inside it. Those attributes include the distance that it will travel when hit by a bat, when the ball and bat (of a certain weight) meet at certain velocities and at certain angles, given the direction and speed of rotation of the ball when it meets the bat, ambient temperature and relative humidity, and so on.

And yet, the baseball can’t be treated as if it were a fundamental particle. The distance that it will travel, everything else being the same, depends on the material at its core, the size of the core, the tightness of the windings of yarn around the core, the types of yarn used in the windings, the tightness of the cover, the flatness of the stitches that hold the cover in place, and probably several other things.

This suggests to me that the emanations and effects of an object depend on its essence — at least in the everyday world of macroscopic objects. If that’s so, why shouldn’t it be the same for the world of objects called sub-atomic particles?

Which leads to some tough questions: Is it really the case that all of the particles now considered elementary are really indivisible? Are there other elementary particles yet to be discovered or hypothesized, and will some of those be constituents of particles now thought to be elementary? And even if all of the truly elementary particles are discovered, won’t scientists still be in the dark as to what those particles really “are”?

The progress of science should be judged by how much scientists know about the universe and its constituents. By that measure — and despite what may seem to be a rapid pace of discovery — it is fair to say that science has a long way to go — probably forever.

Scientists, who tend to be atheists, like to refer to the God of the gaps, a “theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God’s existence.” The smug assumption implicit in the use of the phrase by atheists is that science will close the gaps, and that there will be no room left for God.

It seems to me that the shoe is really on the other foot. Atheistic scientists assume that the gaps in their knowledge are relatively small ones, and that science will fill them. How wrong they are.

* * *

The Criminality and Psychopathy of Statism

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

H.L. Mencken

* * *

From Bryan Caplan, writing at EconLog:

If a private individual did what governments do, almost everyone would call him a criminal. If I took your money without your consent, I’d be a thief. If I forced you to work for me, I’d be slaver. If I killed you, I’d be a murderer – even if you “provoked” me by resisting my demands for your money and labor. Note further: We’d still make these judgments even if I was acting if “for your own good” or “to help the poor.” (scare quotes optional!) But somehow when government does it, we change the names and our moral evaluation….

If you put aside all the propaganda, states are gangs of glorified criminals.

I often disagree with Caplan (usually about immigration and defense), but not this time. For example, I have argued that

taxation for the purpose of redistribution is slavery (see number 2 in the second set of definitions). It amounts to the subjection of one person (the taxpayer) to other persons: deadbeats, do-gooders, and demagogues. If “slavery” is too strong a word, “theft” will do quite well.

I hasten to add that most of the state’s minions don’t think of themselves as criminals. That’s because (a) they don’t think deeply, they just do what they’re paid and told to do (Befehl ist Befehl), and (b) they’ve been brain-washed into believing that the state (as long as it’s their state) can do no wrong. (Well, it can do no wrong today, though its past wrongs are sometimes seen as such through the lens of hindsight.)

If the “criminal” label applies to anyone, it applies to the politicians whose wishes are their minions’ commands. Criminality is a manifestation of psychopathy: a common trait among leftist politicians and the pundits and academicians whose facile rationalizations for statism give aid and comfort to leftist causes. Here is a small sample of John J. Ray’s monograph-length analysis of psychopathy and leftism:

[A]lthough all sorts of different people can be Leftist in one way or another, there would seem to remain a core Leftist type — seen at its clearest among Leftist academics and intellectuals. Although such people form only a small fraction of the total population, their influence and their grasp on the levers of power in the media, in the bureaucracy, in the universities and, at times, in politics, make what they think, say and do very important indeed. And it is my contention that this type is eerily reminiscent of a well-known psychiatric category: The psychopath. So the ULTIMATE explanation for all the core characteristics of Leftism that have been described so far lies in many Leftists being sub-clinical psychopaths.

The characteristics of the clinical psychopath can be summed up as follows: He is not obviously “mad”; he is often highly intelligent; he is unmoved by brutality (except to enjoy perpetrating it); he has no moral or ethical anchors or standards; he is deeply (but discreetly) in love with himself (narcissism) so secretly despises others and thinks they are fit only to be dominated and exploited by him and those like him; he is a great manipulator who loves getting others to do his bidding by deception or otherwise; he is the master of the lie and the false pretence but sees no reason to be consistent from occasion to occasion; he will say anything to gain momentary praise or admiration; his only really strongly felt emotions seem to be hate and contempt and he is particularly enraged by those who have what he wants and will be totally unscrupulous in trying to seize what others have for himself. But above all, the psychopath does not seem to be able to tell right from wrong and, as a result, does sometimes commit or connive at murders and other heinous crimes with what seems to be a clear conscience.

That seems to me to constitute, by and large, a fairly comprehensive description of your average Left-wing intellectual…

Obama … exemplifies psychopathic “flexibility” about what he supports. He says whatever will please his audience of the moment, regardless of taking quite different stands on other occasions. ‘At the 2014 National Prayer Breakfast he warned that “freedom of religion is under threat… around the world.” He neglected to mention, however, that organizations like Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby are suing his administration because they object to contraceptives mandated under ObamaCare in violation of their religious views. Even more astoundingly, Obama claimed, “We… believe in the inherent dignity of every human being,” and “the killing of the innocent is never fulfilling God’s will; in fact, it’s the ultimate betrayal of God’s will.” Remember, this is a man who supports abortion under any and all circumstances, even in its most appalling partial-birth form, and who once told Planned Parenthood “God bless you.” The seemingly total lack of self-awareness is beyond shocking but is classical psychopathy….

American “liberals” … often say that not all Leftists are as nasty as Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong Il and all the other lovely “socialists” who have gained unrestricted power. Some American “liberals” even say … that they hate such “totalitarians” or “authoritarians”. So if “liberals” hate Communists, how come they were apologizing for the Soviets and praising them and trying to protect them almost up to the day that the Soviet Union imploded? Even to this day, to have been a Communist in the past is treated most indulgently in “liberal” intellectual circles — as no more than excessive idealism or as having been “a liberal in a hurry”. And what American “liberal” has ever said a bad word about Castro?… U.S. “liberalism” is just an attempt to achieve the old Communist goal of enforced “equality” in a gradual, step-by-step way. They are just “slowed down” Communists and like the Communists, their real motive for seeking equality is not “compassion” but hatred of other people’s success….

Another absolutely characteristic feature of psychopaths is their readiness to lie and lie shamelessly. And to this day I have never quite managed to get used to the way many Leftists seem to be completely uninterested in the truth. And this is another way in which the Leftists of today differ not at all from the Leftists of the Cold War era….

A more subtle form of dishonesty is the great absurdity of the policies that Leftists have often advocated. Policies such as rent-control and nationalization of industry have a superficial attraction that guaranteed that they would be widely tried but who could honestly advocate them once it is apparent how badly they work? Certainly not a person who had the welfare of the people at heart. Such policies have only ever delivered poverty and housing shortages. Why have Leftists advocated such nostrums for so long?…

[T]he famous Leftist call for abolition of wealth and income differentials would surely lead one to expect that Leftists would reject materialistic ambition in their own lives. But it is not so. Although Leftists seem to decry the scramble for private material possessions (conservatism is smeared as “the politics of greed”), they themselves on the personal level seem to be just as keen for the scramble as anyone else. There has been a lot of research reported in the literature of academic psychology on the subject of achievement motivation but the various measures of materialistic achievement motivation have been shown to have negligible correlation with Leftism — where a high negative correlation might on theory have been expected (Ray, 1981b; Ray & Najman, 1988). In other words, in their own lives Leftists are just about as apt as Rightists to seek personal material gain. Once again the Leftist emerges as being hypocritical and as not honest about his/her real motives and values….

Much that I have said in this monograph (e.g. here, here and here) points out the good fit to reality provided by the explanation that Leftists are strongly motivated by hatred and contempt for others — with “compassion” being merely a necessary cloak for their real motivations. Leftists want power and acclaim for themselves and when they see any power and success in others they hate it and want to tear it down. But is that consistent with Leftists being psychopathic? Are not psychopaths supposed to be devoid of normal human emotions? They are not. They certainly have large emotional deficits and a great lack of empathy but one emotion that thrives in them is hate….

Now … we have come to the point of suggesting that the emotional shallowness that a large but weak ego implies may in fact be just one symptom of a much broader and more serious emotional and intellectual deficit — psychopathy. Psychopaths are after all renowned for their emotional shallowness — to the point where they can at times seem entirely devoid of emotion. Additionally, we have seen that Leftists not only have the moral imbecility of the psychopath but in fact proudly proclaim it — in their “postmodernist” doctrine (See here) that everything is relative and nothing is better or worthier than anything else (except when it suits Leftists, of course). We have also seen that the other major characteristics of the psychopath — indifference to brutality and reliance on lies — are present in spades among Leftists. And most of all, the sense of superiority to others and the masked contempt for others are at once very psychopathic and very Leftist….

In summary, then, Leftism at its deepest level would seem to be a form of sub-clinical psychopathy — not normally severe enough to get the person into much trouble but severe enough to cause lots of trouble for others.

[See also this follow-up by Ray.]

Ray’s analysis comports with what I’ve seen of left-wing politicians, pundits, and academicians over the past fifty years. They love to hate, and they love to project their hate-feelings onto their political opponents. And they’re very good at convincing themselves and others that they “care” — care about the poor, about people of color, about income inequality, about the environment, and about anything and everything that seems worth caring about. But what they really care about is massaging their own egos by forcing others to do their bidding.

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Can I go back to Firefox 28. I have Firefox 29 now. I don’t like it.

Chosen solution

Chosen Solution

Will Firefox and Pale Moon work together in the future?

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