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They asked for an honest conversation on race, right? Enter this week’s guest Charles Murray, author most recently of Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. He and guys jostle on this most sensitive of subjects, but do so with the kind of generosity you can only find on Ricochet (We let things be too chummy around here!) Rob, Peter and James also get into the G7 and a rudderless Biden on the world stage, along with Jon Stewart on Stephen Colbert’s stage. They even do their best to find some optimism, but we may need our friends at Ricochet to cheer them up in the comments!
Music from this week’s podcast: Ball of Confusion by The Temptations
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They need to get Jeff Booth on the podcast. @blueyeti
Deflation might help people increase their income from their job. But I’m talking about people with NO JOB, because there’s NOTHING FOR THEM TO DO, THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. Deflation on a 0 income doesn’t increase the value of the 0 income. It’s still worth 0.
I’ve tried explaining to you this before. It’s not like that.
Unless you can explain how deflation gets employment for people who aren’t needed because of automation and/or because they’re not smart enough, I don’t see how it helps. Or unless you’re saying that deflation also leads somehow automatically to something like Universal Basic Income or something. Just having currency increase in value doesn’t help people with no income, unless somehow they’re given some/more of it as a result. But that would have to be set up, it’s not automatic.
Just to be really clear, Jeff Booth is pretty fatalistic about solutions, but he’s not the only person with an opinion about this stuff.
There are two ways to think about this. You can find Austrian articles and videos about why it isn’t a big deal and it will actually expand jobs.
The other way to do it is the way Mike Green talks about it which is actually inflationist but it has huge other changes. It would be a lot easier for us to keep our Geo political power under this system.
Somehow I don’t think Austrian economics predicted and takes into account the lack of need for many people to have any employment, simply because of automation, increased efficiency, etc. For that matter, I doubt any other system of economics really considers such things. At least not anything based on employment, wages, income, etc.
YOU WIN
Of course, if you can provide specific counter-examples, that would be fine with me. But I’m not interested in doing days/weeks/months of “homework” maybe reading everything ever written about Austrian economics, with the expectation that I’d only find out that I was right to start with. I have other/better things to do with my time, including dealing with a 30-year-old A/C system that might be on its last legs in the middle of summer.
No, I want you in charge of everything so we avoid a total mad max meltdown.
I have taken a shot at this already. The Mike Green stuff is incredibly complicated.
The Austrian system is, you are constantly dispersing capital at all times and you aren’t displacing people with capital and machines at the rate we are now.
People want more stuff at lower prices. We have to quit the inflationist stupidity.
Well, that’s a problem because I don’t think economics determines that as much as other factors. And I suppose certainly not as much as fans of Austrian economics might believe or wish. Even with deflation I think you have fewer people working over time, because of automation etc, even if it’s economically “cheaper” than before to employ them, because automation etc is even cheaper yet. And because the increasing sophistication of automation requires more-skilled and more-intelligent people to operate it. (Does Austrian economics consider that operating a computer system requires more – and different – intelligence than operating a steam shovel or the like?) So you still have increasing numbers of people with no work required of them, because they’re simply not needed and/or they don’t have the skills/intelligence to deal with an increasingly complex world of employment, and yet they’re expected to somehow have income to pay their way.
Across all types of media, who is the greatest artist of all time? Beethoven? Da Vinci? Van Gogh? Shakespeare? Can we just develop a metric or set of tests and then rank all the artists?
My point is that intelligence is infinitely complex and measuring it and ranking it is generally a fool’s errand. You are better off rolling 3d6.
Even if something like IQ doesn’t accurately predict whether someone will/would/could specifically be a great painter, or a great sculptor, or a great composer, or a great author, or a great race-car driver, or whatever else, that doesn’t make it worthless.
I don’t so much think IQ is meaningless, as I think it is dangerous. Given how insistent Murray is on IQ, he might as well advocate tattooing our number on our arm, just as Linus Pauling advocating branding everyone with Sickle Trait so carriers wouldn’t marry (it was dubbed Pauling’s “Yellow Star” program). I view IQ testing as dehumanizing. Sort of in the same category as calling Human Beings “human capital.” (I am not a Marxist, so I don’t like calling Human Beings “labor” either, although we do work). And, yes, I am a fee market devotee. But that’s a Utopian notion that will never exist as long as we have (necessary but evil–and more evil by the day as larger by the day) governments. We’ve been doing trade negotiations ever since WWII and don’t yet have free trade–to the contrary.
On Human evolution: Can you explain to me how it happened that humans have 23 sets of chromosomes, while Great Apes have 24? In detail please. And tell me exactly what the likelihood is of that process occurring and resulting in a viable individual–and not only one, but two, of opposite sex, in the same location, at the same time, who happened to procreate. I’ll be very interested in your answer.
I also claim that a “scientific world view” (which is now all but officially an atheist world view), is woefully incomplete, and even dishonest. The scientists are not to be trusted with the implications of their own formulations. See my book, available on Ricochet: Noesis, the bookNoesis, the book
No one has suggested that I.Q. tests are perfect. But there are decades of studies that says it’s a big deal and can be measured in the ball-park if not with exact precision.
I won’t read your book until you’ve read stuff about I.Q.
I did not claim that the IQ was useless. I claim it is not a good measure of intelligence and there is no good measure of intelligence. Henry’s claim was it was possible through some set of tests to quantify and rank order intelligence. My counter was that intelligence was too complex to be measured and ordered, much like artistic ability in different media cannot be compared objectively.
If you want to claim that certain tests measure certain aptitudes that is great. But that is very, very fair from a measure of general intelligence.
Well, let’s see….
Galileo’s telescope couldn’t see all the stars in the sky; that didn’t make his telescope useless.
Modern telescopes are much better, but they still can’t see all the stars in the sky; that doesn’t make THEM useless either.
Actually, I think the data suggest that it actually is a pretty good measure of what we might call “general intelligence.” That was the point of my comment.
There’s a cliché that very bright people often tend toward a kind of idiot savant condition, in which they’re very good at one perhaps narrow area — mathematics, say, or logic, or some spatial skill — but correspondingly weak in other cognitive areas. While it’s true that such people do exist, the reality regarding intelligence appears to be that people with high IQs tend to be good at most things requiring thought, analysis, filtering, and logic. They just generally think better, communicate better, solve problems faster, and are more flexible in their cognitive function.
I suspect that people who are gifted with unusually strong and agile physiques are similar, inclined to be more capable than most at most of the physical things they undertake. That would seem to make sense, though I’ve never seen data on it. But I’ve seen data regarding cognitive function, and the data do suggest that IQ is, in fact, a fair measure of general intelligence.
There has always been and there will always be a never ending supply of things that need to be done. The problem is finding the person who is capable and willing to do the job the way you want it done for a price you are willing to pay.
This should be obvious to anyone (with an IQ above a certain minimum, of course) who listens to the ad for Kitty Poo Club and ponders their business model for a few minutes.
I’m guessing Kitty Poo Club doesn’t have a lot of low-intelligence people standing around pouring bags of litter into disposable pans…
This isn’t right. Opportunities are going to expand and the effective return on everybody’s labor is going to go up.
I’ll try to figure out if I can dig up some of those videos or articles.
I will say this. This has to be dealt with head on one way or another everybody is going to get socialism good and hard. Inflationism cannot work when you have declining birth rates, more and more globalized trade including letting illegals in, and increasing automation. Republicans need to quit being so dense about this.
I just deny that EVERYONE has useful labor, even in a deflationary time, when jobs are becoming more and more sophisticated, technical, and difficult for low-skill/low-intelligence people to perform.
Also the work week can shrink with the same amount of output.
You have to quit looking at this through inflationist goggles, which is almost impossible for anybody in western civilization. We have been doing this since Woodrow Wilson.
You have a limited view compared to the Austrians.
Economists, whether Austrian or otherwise, don’t seem very good at predicting/forecasting non-economic things. Such as how increasingly-automated and -technical employment is beyond the ability of many people who end up with nothing to do, no need for their labor, and nothing to be paid for. Not even paid with deflationary money.
I don’t know if you’re keeping up with current events, but nobody in power listens to Austrian economists. Public policy has to change with respect to what I’m talking about.
Oh I’m sure it would help, some, but not for long-term.
Oh.
This is honest and is useful context for much of what you say here. Do you think IQ is more dangerous than CRT? That’s really the choice we are presented with at this moment.