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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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It sounds like he at least wrote that before the greatest explosions of automation and other technology.
I suppose one could still argue that more people are needed to get at more minerals and ores, etc, but if those people aren’t capable of using the machinery that others can use to do it faster/more efficiently, then they must be condemned to do so using pick-axes and shovels.
Not really an issue since I can’t afford to go out to eat in the first place. But that’s part of my point: Nobody HAS TO go out to eat, in order to not starve. So restaurants etc are a luxury that can be supported by a (mostly-)prosperous people and economy and so provide work for people who would otherwise have nothing to do that MUST be done in order to support life.
Still not getting the big picture? This is about humans, not just 21st C skilled tech workers:
“What remains is to scrutinize the purport of the alleged Ricardo effect.
“Ricardo is the author of the proposition that a rise in wages will encourage capitalists to substitute machinery for labor and vice versa.
Hence, conclude the union apologists, a policy of raising wage rates, irrespective of what they would have been on the unhampered labor market, is always beneficial. It generates technological improvement and raises the productivity of labor. Higher wages always pay for themselves. In forcing the reluctant employers to raise wage rates, the unions become the pioneers of progress and prosperity.
“Many economists approve of the Ricardian proposition although few of them are consistent enough to endorse the inference the union apologists draw from it. The Ricardo effect is by and large a stock-in-trade of popular economics. Nonetheless, the theorem involved is one of the worst economic fallacies.”
(continues below)
(Continued from above)
“The confusion starts with the misinterpretation of the statement that machinery is “substituted” for labor. What happens is that labor is rendered more efficient by the aid of machinery. The same input of labor leads to a greater quantity or a better quality of products. The employment of machinery itself does not directly result in a reduction of the number of hands employed in the production of the article A concerned. What brings about this secondary effect is the fact that—other things being equal—an increase in the available supply of A lowers the marginal utility of a unit of A as against that of the units of other articles and that therefore labor is withdrawn from the production of A and employed in the turning out of other articles. The technological improvement in the production of A makes it possible to realize certain projects which could not be executed before because the workers required were employed for the production of A for which consumers’ demand was more urgent. The reduction of the number of workers in the A industry is caused by the increased demand of these other branches to which the opportunity to expand is offered. Incidentally, this insight explodes all talk about “technological unemployment.”
“Tools and machinery are primarily not labor-saving devices, but means to increase output per unit of input. They appear as labor-saving devices if looked upon exclusively from the point of view of the individual branch of business concerned. Seen from the point of view of the consumers and the whole of society, they appear as instruments that raise the productivity of human effort. They increase supply and make it possible to consume more material goods and to enjoy more leisure. Which goods will be consumed in greater quantity and to what extent people will prefer to enjoy more leisure depends on people’s value judgments.”
—Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
What @jro said.
Inflationism is for morons. lol
Yes, I understand all of that, but it overlooks or ignores my point that many people AREN’T CAPABLE OF OPERATING that labor-saving (or whatever) machinery, or computers, etc.
And nobody really NEEDS THEM to dig ditches, or whatever, just using a shovel. Because one competent person with a backhoe can do the work of several incompetent people with shovels.
Before the backhoe, even competent people had to use a shovel. That’s no longer the case.
What’s left now, for the people who aren’t capable of managing, repairing, or even operating the higher-skilled equipment? I suspect that might include… oh, let’s say, up to 25% of the population.
Do they dig ditches and find minerals etc, just with pick-axes and shovels, because it’s still more ditches being dug and minerals being found, etc, than if they weren’t doing it? Even if the actual production is miniscule compared to that done by machinery? And von Mises seems to be arguing that we need all the minerals and ores and stuff we can get, no matter how inefficiently.
Do they work in restaurants washing dishes and stuff, rather than using automatic dishwasher machines, so that they’ll have “a job,” even if it’s something that isn’t really NECESSARY because – as I mentioned before – nobody HAS TO go out to eat, in order to not starve.
Maybe as often seems to be the case these days, they become school teachers? I suppose it might not be so bad if they only taught other people on the same level. Not much damage can be done there.
Peterson says its about 10%.
From a quick search, that would seem to be an IQ below 81. Frankly I think it takes more than that to operate a backhoe, etc.
25% is an IQ of about 90.
Kay. Peterson worries about those with and I.Q. of 83 or below.
Two questions:
For reasons of space, I left out this sentence from the Biologos article:
Since either a 48-pair set or a 46-pair set is preferable for ease of cell division, this population will either eventually get rid of the fusion variant (the most likely outcome), or by chance will switch over completely to the “new” form, with everyone bearing 46 chromosome pairs.
In other words, the biologically disfavored 47-chromosome variant will, in a few generations, be eliminated in favor of 48 or, more rarely, 46. For paleontologists to find a 47-chromosome cell preserved for several million years is almost impossible.
To the best of my knowledge, all viable chromosomal fusions are at the ends, and that is the kind of fusion that the article describes as “not especially rare in mammals”.
Loury is such a grown up about this stuff.
When I looked it up, I discovered that chromosome 2 is very prominent in the debate between creationists and anti-creationists. I have little interest in this. Creationism doesn’t seem to me to be a very useful approach to natural systems, but anti-creationists are nasty stupid people.
That pretty much sums up my view on the matter.
Do you mean people who hate G-d so much they disbelieve in him?
I listened again, and he did not drop an f-bomb. Maybe next time!
The Catholic Church is anti-creationist, or at least it was back when I spent 12 years in parochial schools. The Church’s attitude towards evolution was, “Sure, why not? Who are we to dictate to God what methods (gravity, nuclear physics, chemistry, etc.) He uses to achieve His effects.”
We need a definition of anti-creationism.
Wow!
I think you are describing Robertsonian translocations in which the long arms of acrocentric chromosomes fuse at the centromere rather than at the telomeres. These translocations are very different from the head to head fusion of telomere ends of chromosomes. This event in evolutionary history, which is far from well characterized, not well understood, and very complex, may be a unique event in evolution. To date it defies coherent analysis, not least because the fusion site seems to not be susceptible to PCR. There is speculation that it indeed may have occurred in a small polygamous cohort of individuals at a specific moment in time.
Only mystery is why it doesn’t happen more often:
Chromosomes normally end with “telomeres,” consisting of long stretches with several hundred repeating copies of the base-pair sequence TTAGGG, which is paired with its complementary sequence AATCCC. At the actual point of fusion, which has been identified at base-pair position 113,602,928 in human chromosome 2, one finds this sequence:
… TTAGGGG – TTAGGG – TTAG – Fusion – CTAA – CCCTAA – CCCTAA …
Note that the sequence switches from the base-pair TTAGGG pattern to the complementary pattern CCCTAA right at the point of fusion. It is hard to imagine a more dramatic confirmation of the evolutionary hypothesis.
https://mathscholar.org/2018/05/chromosomes-dna-and-human-evolution/
At least a part of the answer would be to figure out what Consciousness is. Everyone wants to talk about Intelligence, which is encompassed in the notion of Consciousness. Those who test IQ and analyze data have no idea what Consciousness is. Dennett tells us it is an illusion. Can Charles Murray tell us what Consciousness is, and where it comes from? If he can, he’s keeping it a secret. Human level Consciousness is common to us all. It is a unifying aspect of being human. Studying the “racial” differences of Intelligence is divisive and harmful to society. Emphazing our common humanity and consciousness not so much.
Why is there no interest in an IQ of morality? That would seem of far greater import to our society. Thanks to the “Enlightenment” you can hide behind statistics that tell us nothing of why mass murderers obtain such political power as to annihilate tens of millions of human beings.
You can read about my explanation of Consciousness and its implication in http://Noesis, the book
@taras
Your link to math scholar.com provides a beautiful description of the evolutionary event that produced Human Cs 2. Thanks for the link. I would hazard a label for this event as a “singularity” (of which there are many examples) of remarkable things that can’t be fully explained. There were other events feeding in to this event, but this event leaps out from the complexities with striking definition and clarity. What this event had to do with the development of human level consciousness is hard to fathom but mesmerizing to contemplate.
You plug for your book more than I plug for sex robots.
Yes.