Bangs and Herbert Gintis on Dirpy.Com

Have you tried it yet? Take a YouTube video and turn it into an mp3.

I’ve already done so with a lecture by behavioral economist and game theorist Herbert Gintis. Gintis has some great data on the more reliably altruistic behavior of non-western tribes (tribes, mind you), but also their dark side, as expressed by ’strong reciprocity,’ or the tendency to take revenge for perceived injustice often at great personal cost. From what I can infer, western individuals will more often act narrowly self-interested in anonymous (because anonymity is even possible?) trade experiments, but also abstain from a downward of spiral of tit-for-tat vengeance behaviors.

I’ve also been able to add poorly executed yet charming African-cum-Australian hip hop by a fella named “Bangs” to my generic mp3 player with the help of Dirpy. (He only wishes to take his lady to the movies and feed her popcorn, likely the coolest thing one can possibly do on a date in Sudan…but not Australia; then again he’s only 19.)

 

Kudos to Orin Kerr

Randy Barnett gently ribs his co-blogger for his penchant for providing open threads on a topic when others (Barnett himself, David Bernstein, Jim Lindgren and I think sometimes Eric Posner) close comments on a controversial topic. As a commenter on Barnett’s post points out, even in threads started by others Orin is more willing to engage the commenters. I’m not going to bother insisting that other bloggers do so, there are other things they can do with their time (I forgot to check back in at a thread at the Bloggingheads forum where I kicked things off, appropriately enough for this post, on the subject of censoring comments). Not so for closing comments. I don’t understand how a troll or spam filled comment section is worse than no comment section at all unless the real objection is the easier airing of criticism. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Orin’s post tend to be more thoughtful than those without comment sections.

It’s quite possible I’ve made an earlier post/s promoting this norm and even specifically referencing the Volokh Conspiracy. Another blog norm I don’t think I’ve highlighted here before is that of linking directly to pieces on the web you are referring to.

As long as I’m taking about V.C comments, a Chester A. Arthur “dualer” (don’t call us “birthers”!) gives a hilarious example of cui bono reasoning.

 

Demographic transition reconsidered

I’ve been sitting on “A Farewell to Alms” for a few days after seeing a footnoted claim that I knew I’d have to look into and most likely write a post on. The note is in chapter 14 where Clark writes “And now the rich in England have fewer children than the poor, so if children are to be counted a blessing and not a burden the advantage now lies with the poor (though in some other advanced economies there is no difference between rich and poor in this respect).¹⁹” From the accounts I had usually heard, the demographic transition was supposed to be a universal phenomenon and that would over time engulf even the currently developing world. So what is Clark citing? Nicola Dickmann, 2003. “Fertility and Family Income on the Move: An International Comparison over 20 Years.” Dickmann acknowledges that lower income families did have more children back in the 80s, but this gap seems to have narrowed in more recent years. I should note that her method was to look at data for married couples (completely ignoring single mothers) within a certain age range in the USA, Germany, Canada, U.K, Finland and Sweden. The correlation between income and family size (and statistical significance) was generally small. It was positive in the last two and negative in the rest. I wouldn’t say it completely upends conventional wisdom, but it’s definitely something to consider. Two relevant EconLog posts are The Decline of the Rabbit Strategy and Kids, Opera, and Local Status. A recent OB post somewhat relevant, Humans Are Evolving. A lot of people may not bother clicking through to read the pdf, so tomorrow I think I’ll copy some of the tables into html below. UPDATE: Transcribing all the data got to be a chore, so I’ll just put up some images. The rules for transforming the text I can copy is pretty simple so next weekend if I’m not busy I’ll try to learn python and then replace it with html.

Some unrelated notes. For anyone wondering when I’ll start twittering, don’t hold your breath. I never update my facebook status (or bother logging on most of the time) because nothing happens worth talking about. If I have something to say, I’ll blog it. Maybe if I read twitter my eyes would open up to the possibilities, but I don’t. Also, Against Politics once hosted Richard A. Garner’s “If Hobbes Is Right, Then He Is Wrong”. After the site went down, google only turned up other sites giving that bad link. After bugging Aschwin about it, he restored it. Enjoy.

 

Memo to conservative muslims in America: send your daughters to college

Don’t buy the Roissysphere’s B.S, unmarried women aged 25 to 45 are five times more likely to be virgins if they have a college degree than otherwise (yeah, yeah, correlation isn’t causation Mr. Muslim). I hope the National Survey on Family Growth is freely accessible online, but I’m too lazy to check it out till tomorrow.
UPDATE: You have to pay to get the CD-ROMs. Each year’s survey runs about 300 or so bucks.

 

The Irish and the Jews

This post’s title from an album the Irish program at my local jazz station has been promoting.

Some years back when I watched Saturday Night Live regularly, and everyone complained about how much better it was when Chris Farley/Mike Myers/Eddie Murphy/Bill Murray was on the show, one of the writers appeared on Weekend Update (no, not Tina Fey) to point out an anomaly. He was the only Jew on the comedy team, which he explained was like an NBA team with just one black dude. The list of other names sounded more like a St. Patrick’s day arrest lineup.

Listening to the Greg Cochran interview I recently linked, the point he made about the Irish getting mixed up with everyone else on earth set some gears in motion that hadn’t clicked before. Brad Delong & Paul Krugman have been complaining about the decline of the Chicago School recently, and even Chicago-educated quasi-monetarist Scott Sumner agrees. The modern Chicago school is represented by the likes of John Cochrane, Kevin Murphy and Casey Mulligan (at least they aren’t Ed Prescott, whose surname is more Anglo) together with the odd Huizingas and Zingales. Hmm. The old Chicago school (alright, not the Old Chicago school of Knight & Viner) was represented by the likes of George Stigler, Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and Julian Simon. Brian Doherty noted how so many of the founders of the modern libertarian movement were Jewish in Radicals for Capitalism, and Half Sigma just made the same point recently. I brought up a similar point at his blog in defense of Austrian economics when he tried to associate it with anti-semitism, and he replied that the people I listed were either dead or very old.

Is there any point to my rambling? SNL, as well as the Chicago and Austrian schools have all seen better days, and in those days seemed more Jewish than they are now. Might we theorize that the ethnic composition of an intellectual enterprise shifting from Jewish to Irish is akin to rats leaving a sinking ship?

For those wondering about Armenians, Armen Alchian of the Chicagoite colony at UCLA is matched today by Lee Ohanian (damn, just an apostrophe away from Irish!). While Alchian worked with Harold Demsetz, Ohanian writes with Harold Cole, another Anglo surname. Daron Acemoglu was born in Turkey but is ethnically Armenian and teaches at the Salt Pole university MIT. Economists in America are increasingly foreign, which may make my hypothesis less and less relevant as time goes on. Among those extra-ethnic economists is Narayana Kocherlakota, who might suggest that I have no idea what I’m talking about.

 

Playing against type

The internet is turning us into impatient & whimsical consumers of bite-sized information. Even reactionary bloggers exploit the form. In an odd coincidence, around the same time two exemplars of the form deviated away from it toward extended essays summarizing ideas they have usually put forward in snappy mockery. They are Deogolwulf at The Joy of Curmudgeonry with How to Commit Genocide and Ilkka Kokkarinen at The Fourth Checkraise with In Praise of Learning. I could be rude and say “Don’t quit your day non-job” (I guess I just did), but I’d like to give kudos for putting them together.

 

Interview with Greg Cochran about The 10,000 Year Explosion

Why hadn’t I heard of this until I checked out his Wikipedia page recently? It’s with Marshall Poe of New Books in History.

At the very end Greg mentions what he’s working on now (“then” more accurately, as it was recorded in March): a paper on cystic fibrosis.

 

With Friends Like This, Obama Needs No Enemies

According to Slavoj Zizek, the guy with the Stalin poster on his wall, Obama is like Lenin:

I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it. Do whatever is possible. This is why I support Obama. I think the battle he is fighting now over healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The core of the campaign against Obama is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is that freedom of choice is certainly something beautiful, but that it only works against a background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. My position isn’t that we should sit down and wait for some big revolution to come. We have to engage wherever we can. If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of blow can be struck against the ideology of freedom of choice, it will have been a victory worth fighting for.

Not great for Obama’s public relations.

He impugns capitalism for its envy problem. But in Zizek’s world he’d be a prominent public philosopher, and that makes me positively green (on the outside…) with envy.

 

Invisible Review, Invisible Racism

Elizabeth Wright at Taki’s criticizes the Southern Poverty Law Center for putting Carol Swain, well-known black academic and author, soft lefty and contributor to the Huffington Post, on its “hit list.” Why? Because she gave a favorable review to documentary filmmaker Craig Bodeker’s A Conversation About Race.

Intrigued, I looked for said review. Here it is, in its entirety:

This outstanding film provides an opening salvo for the long-awaited national debate on race.  Meticulously done, it offers an opportunity for people of all races to engage in cross-racial dialogue. I highly recommend this film for social science courses dealing with race, class and ethnicity.

That’s it? A more substantive review from a woman of her stature (and race) would have done more for cross-racial dialogue than the film itself, I suspect.

Yet she still came under fire from the SPLC. In the words of the SPLC’s Mark Potok, she is, intentionally or not, an “apologist for white supremacists.” This even though she’s written two books on the subject of white nationalism and its threat to integration. I wouldn’t be surprised if the SPLC were more paranoid than half its hit list.

Though I haven’t seen Bodeker’s film, the impression I get from the excerpts and a review by Wright herself, is that it undermines the idea of a racist society. Though racism is believed to be insidious and omnipresent, almost nobody interviewed in the film can give a clear of example of it in their own life. 

Consider me unconvinced. According to Harvey Silverglate, I’m affected by the proliferation of law to the point that I commit ”three felonies a day,” or thereabouts. And though I may be poised to believe it, because I’m already a convinced libertarian, I can scarcely give any examples of it because I’m ignorant of the way this whole legal apparatus works. I suspect that a left-wing academic could describe how racism operates, even if, apparently, few of its victims can.

 

When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my non-aggression axiom

I’ve been making some comments on various sites in reaction to the recent debate on Reason between the likes of Kerry Howley and Todd Seavey on whether libertarians should care about things other than government. I insist that you should not care about anything other than government, abandoning your family and basic nutrition to wither away in front of the local DMV, shaking your fist to the last. The sites I have rambled at are Wilkinson’s, IOZ and Modeled Behavior.

I’ll note that I do promote norms, but those have nothing to do with libertarianism.

 

A commissar a day keeps the doctor away

Since the fall of the Berlin wall, few have defended actually existing communism and those few have been ripe for satire. Some claim that “true” communism has never existed and what happened instead was a form of state capitalism, some say Stalin ruined the good thing Trotsky had going, and some leftists admit that Marx as all wrong and the right path for socialism is anarchism. I should admit that many of my fellow libertarians (particularly the anti-vulgar ones) take the no-true approach, while I prefer to admit the imperfections but emphasize actually existing capitalism contrasted with actually existing socialism. I’m satisfied with the “foot vote”, but the unrepentant commies have some arguments that objective evidence of well-being supports their system.

I bring this up thanks to (Chip) Smith’s recent response to (Michael) Smith’s review of (Bradley) Smith’s autobiography as a Holocaust denier. My impression is that Holocaust deniers tend to come in varieties that would be considered right-wing, either racial/ethnic nationalists or anti-interventionist libertarians. Even the somewhat hippy-dippy anti-anti-communist Denierbud repeatedly cites Kevin MacDonald, a white nationalist who excoriates the Soviet Union and its communist apologists as Jewish plotters against white gentiles. Michael Smith is different. He strikes me as generally goofy (my guess is his site is mostly dedicated to 9/11 conspiracy theories) and thinks both Hitler and the communist dictators have been libeled (I should note that Denierbud also thinks we were sold a bill of goods on Saddam and Idi Amin). He doesn’t just think they weren’t as bad as advertised, he thinks their system was better for human flourishing than capitalism. He cites the respected (oddly) Amartya Sen on changes in mortality in China, and compares it to India. Neoliberals agree: the Gapminder folks touting the changes in China note that they concentrated on health under Mao, but shifted to wealth under Deng.

How can we explain that? Possibly the data are just bad, but then I wouldn’t have anything more to write about in this post. I noted that Robert Lindsay defended communism on health grounds previously, he believes the difference is that capitalism gives people what they want and what they want is not what they should have. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (of the notorious hotbed of pinkos known as the Hoover Institute) explained the high literacy/education rates and good health in communist regimes by saying that they acted in a self-interested and rational manner, like Mencius Moldbug’s utopia under Fnargl. Just like a farmer wants his chattel to be healthy, a slaveowner or communist dictator wants his subjects to be healthy enough to produce lots of labor. I’d been reading some of Greg Clark’s “A Farewell to Alms” recently and had another idea. Maybe the mass deaths were the reason for good health. Clark notes that life expectancy (and income) shot up in England after the Black Death. A lower population in an agricultural economy where the fixed supply of land is the main constraint on production means a higher marginal product for labor. China under Mao notoriously had a “one-child” policy which kept population down. Lindsay is right then that the “foot vote” indicates people desire things other than what communist health nuts give them, and the Chinese in particular might have wanted more fertility. So one’s opinion on communism may depend on how they view the repugnant conclusion.

 

“The 10,000 Year Explosion” is a good book

Among the more readable books I’ve read in a while. Interesting ideas told engagingly, with a bit of a sense of humor that doesn’t distract from the science. When you finish one chapter you’ll want to go on to the next, then you’ll want another one, and before you know it you’ll have gobbled it up. This isn’t just a popularization of stuff smart people should already be expected to understand. I myself habitually fall back into thinking about a great Evolutionary Adaptive Period which must swamp any puny changes since then, Cochran & Harpending show that’s mistaken and the consequences are important. Everyone should read it, recommend it to your friends and family.

On a completely unrelated note, the blogger at Calculated Exuberance wants to build a larger readership and requested a link. I’m happy to oblige and state that I think that’s a clever blog title.

 

Signs of the apocalypse

A number of foreboding signs have appeared heralding the final day of judgment. One that nobody has yet expressed shock over is Paul Krugman linking to Mish Shedlock with approval. Not even Mish’s fellow outside-the-academy Austrian Bob Murphy. In a less shocking development, I prodded Chip Smith into expanding from mere Holocaust revisionism to expressing skepticism about the Armenian genocide and the utility of the idea of genocide more generally.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, I’d like to say that “Therapy By Other Means” is an excellent post title, as well as a cutting indictment of our foreign policy.

 

Near/far violence

I mentioned to Robin Hanson that his near/far dichotomy is reflected in Randall Collins’ “Violence: A Microsociological Theory”, which he had recently discussed. Here are relevant bits from chapter 2.

 

How do programmers vote?

Half Sigma speculated that computer programmers vote Republican. I was skeptical and so were other commenters. Fortunately, the GSS has occupation codes for them. According to this page, after 1980 (variable OCC80) they had code 229. In appendix F from this page we see in the 70s they have one of the earliest codes, 003 for OCC.