Articulation on socionomics

For centuries, historians have grappled with the idea that there is an engine that drives the inexorable flow of history. Many believe there is one but is too complicated for the human mind to grasp. Others doubt that one even exists. But regardless of your opinion on the matter, the undeniable fact remains that there is a relationship between the overall social mood and events, and how these two influence the trajectory of history.

Conventional wisdom states that the social mood is determined by external events: that happy, cheerful music makes people more optimistic, and epidemics cause people to become fearful. But the intriguing new science of Socionomics dictates that the conventional wisdom has the casual relationship backwards: that it is the social mood that dictates events. Moreover, the relationship between mass human emotion and various trends such as fashion, music, epidemics, is far stronger than anyone anticipated. Consider this graph, for example:

Music buffs will notice that optimistic, upbeat music was popular during Bull markets (periods when the stock market goes up) and rough, angry, pessimistic music was popular during Bear markets ( periods when the stock market goes down). When the Stock market reached its peak in 2000, Britney Spears, Nsync and the Backstreet boys had number.1 albums. Unsurprisingly, the Stock market crash that followed the Tech boom made social conditions ripe for the emergence of rough, bearish bands like Linkin Park, Poppa Roach, and Limb Bizkit. And the latter two bands suffered a decline once the stock market rose in 2003-2007. In that period, positive social mood spawned the appearance and popularity of happy, upbeat bands. By 2004 hip hop outsold both pop and rock. Every no.1 song on Billboard singles that year went to either a hip hop or an R&B artist, marking the first time this has happened in nearly 50 years. Soon afterwards, Walt Disney launched the groups Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus. Popular music maintained a positive tone in 2006 with hits like Justin Timberlake’s “Sexback”, Rihanna’s “SOS” Fergie’s “London Bridge” and Chamillionaire’s “Ridin.”

But music is not the only thing affected by social mood; fashion is as well. It is a well-documented trend that short skirts accompany bull markets, while skirts that fall closer to the floor are in style during bear markets. Here is a graphic illustration:

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that with this correlative knowledge at hand, fashion designers and Music groups can predict what the next trendline will be, and use it to their advantage.

But such correlations are not solely confined to the fashion and music industries. Comics, too, shift in character according to changes in the social mood:

Bull market characters tend to be happy, carefree, heroic, frivolous and not sexually objectionable. Bear Market characters tend to be more sexually scandalous, mean, and somber.

Lets start at the beginning. The roaring 20’s, which witnessed a sky high bull market and tremendously optimistic mood, gave birth to Mickey Mouse. Mickey’s personality was carefree and prank-playing, representing the fun people have during bull markets. However, during the depths of the depression in 1932, social pressure caused Disney to change the character of its mouse. The frivolity was gone, and seriousness and menace fill the void. Instead of Mickey pulling pranks, he was now dealing with nightmares about Pluto being abducted, a doctor conducting a cruel experiment, and being chased by a saw blade. But once the pessimism of the Great Depression subsided, Mickey’s original personality made its dramatic comeback.

Interestingly, the concept of Natural Selection, usually applied to biological organisms, can be applied here. Felix, unable to change to the bearish environment, faded into obscurity during the depression. There have been many attempts to revive the figure, in 1936, 1958, 1991 and 1995, all in bull market times, but only to be swept away by the bear.

So proven is this overall correlation that it can be seen over almost a century:

Another way tastes of the social air blossom comic characters is their level of cuteness and grotesquness. Bull market characters are round and cute while bear market characters are sharp and grotesque. As the example of Woody Woodpecker shows:

As it happens, the social mood affects much more than these three things. It affects car muscleness, the health of the economy, unrest, riots, scandals and almost everything. Even Epidemics are affected by the social mood, more so than the other way around. Many people think that mass epidemics imbed fear, but it would actually be more accurate to say it is fear that causes epidemics.

Now that we have devoted so much attention to how mass human emotion affects external events, what drives the social mood? Are there patterns to the way social mood ebbs and flows? If we can answer that question, then we could finally solve the problem of history’s hidden engine. But that is a topic for another article.

None of this is original material, as it is the work of many socionomic and Elliot Wave theorists. Robert Prechtor is the foremost figure among them.

On the GOP debate

Full disclosure: I didn't watch the entire thing. I started ten minutes late and had to take a call in the middle of it. And towards the end, I couldn't refrain from going to the computer to read a bit, but I listened half-attentively in the background. So, if I happen to misrepresent what happened in the debate, that's why. In which, I can only hope the informed reader would not hesitate to correct any error I may have made.

The poll on the bottom showed that around 90% of the poll-voters were for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and yet only 20-30% thought Ron Paul did well in the debate[UPDATE: apparently Ron Paul did very well in the polls, as the Fox News Poll on who won the debate had him as the landslide winner. Either I didn't read the poll that flashed on the screen right, or those things are totally unreliable] despite the fact that his anti-war stance is almost unique to him among the candidates. Oh well, it's not exactly surprising to learn that most people are cognitively inconsistent.

Tim Pawlenty's character proved to be of an even more slimy substance than I thought. His repeated attempts to smack Bachmann and Paul because of their failed leadership in the Congress is hilarious. You are 1 person out of 435 unthinking old geezers. Leading them to vote against something they inevitably would vote for is no more an indication of poor leadership than a fitness trainer stuck with chronically unmotivated and morbidly obese people who won't go to the gym who fails to get them to lose a significant amount of weight.

Against every grain in my system to avoid reiterating what the Fox News commentators said, Newt Gingrich did very well. He appeared more professional, intelligent and more well-read than most of the other candidates - which he is. I still don't think he has a chance, but I wouldn't be surprised if is numbers hike by a few points.

Who is this Huntsman guy? He was good orator, but of literally no substance. He's running for President with no articulated economic plan? I could have easily constructed one in the amount of time he used to insist that "[he] loves [his] country, [he] is willing to do anything to serve [his] country." Is it just me, or are patriotic cliches really annoying?

I don't understand how Romney can possibly be the frontrunner even though nobody likes him. Even the media doesn't like him. The percentage of the viewers that approved of Romneys performance was around 25 %. Around the lowest among his competitors. My only guess as to why this is the case is that most people really hate him while around a quarter vote for him because he's the guy everybody knows about, not to mention his hair and looks.

, I was genuinely surprised that the Federal Reserve and the need to audit it came up, even if the discussion barely scratched the surface. Could this be a sign that your humble narrator is well ahead of the highly-motivated, unmatched caliber that serves as the cloth of our political elite? Bloody shame the mainstream media and its elect didn't exert its force when it counted. But then again, I only heard Paul, Gingrich, and possibly Sanatorium (I can't remember exactly) utter these words of sanity. No Romney, no Cain, no Pawlenty.

For some reason watching the debate, I half- consciously imagined Rick Perry chilling backstage. He seemed like one of those Alpha Males who gets talked about without even having to do anything.

Overall, I thought the debate was pretty good. They are certainly better than the abysmal lot that the 2008 primaries were consisted of. And if the principles of small and limited government are the chorus of our times, then they have sung our song in tune. Whether they will materialize their rhetoric or not, we'll have to see.

How to improve your lifestyle - Primal Style

People sometimes express amazement about my interest in the theoretical and abstract. Among my collegues, my understanding of economics and philosophy is unmatched. Other areas where I have dug my head in are health, fitness, dating, politics, religion, sociology, and, of course, mathematics.

Many think my intense interests are nerdy, and perhaps they are. But they don’t stem so much from a desire to burry myself from the social world as they do from an inveterate ambition to improve myself in all aspects of my life. Knowledge is Power, says the great Francis Bancon. I may add that the corollary to that pithy aphorism would be that ignorance is impotence.

And yet, while there are a great many dorks out there who know all about quantum mechanics and how many transistors there are on the latest Intel processor that are nonetheless inept in the game of life, it is true that these seemingly irrelevant and nerdy endeavors can make material improvements upon your everyday life. And not just enrichen your mental life, although it certainly does that.

To give an example, there is a way that your can vastly improve your life and health by knowing what pre-history humans did during the Paleolithic era. The whole idea is to do what the human body was designed and adapted to do. Its called Going Primal.

Going Primal (or paleo) will necessitate that you will ditch many civilized inventions that were designed to help you but really actually hurt you by being contrary to the way your body was designed. So, I’ll give you a bullet point list to inform you what you have to do to go primal.

• Ditch the shoes. When I was younger, I used to wonder how the Native Indians were able to run around barefoot without managing to get the joint problems that I was getting with my coushened, arch-support Nikes. The reason is because running barefoot is what your body is designed to do. Without that padding, you are forced to run with proper form. And that is to run on your toes. Take a stroll in your neighborhood and watch all the various runners – from the fat wobbling whale to even the most advanced runners – you will find that they all –literally all – will land on the heels and transition to their toes. Such heelstricking is cringeworthy to anyone who has gone primal. And its really not that hard to figure out why you shouldn’t heelstrike. Try running on your heels barefoot. You can’t; it hurts like crazy because it is a direct pound on the ground with no physiological absorption. The pressure goes straight into your heels and through you knees and hips and back. Moreover, the severity of this pounding can be illustrated by the way that you can actually tell if the person is heelstriking without even looking at their feet, because you can see the thump, thump, thump, throughout their entire body. In contrast, running on your toes allows your foot to act as a spring, eliminating the pound by having your arch, Achilles tendon and calf absorb the pressure as you heel comes down. You can still run on your toes with shoes on, but you will not strengthen your feet muscles like you would if you ran with minimalist shoes or barefoot. It may be of interest to note that the absurd phenomenon of people who are not even 5”10 but wear size 12+ shoes is the result of shoes flattening their arches by weakening the muscles in the feet. A shoe is like a cast on the foot, or, as someone else as said, a footcoffin.
• Adapt the paleo diet, which consists primarily of meat, fruits, vegetables, and nuts. That’s what the human body evolved to eat before the agricultural revolution introduced wheat and grains to his diet. But, as loads of empirical evidence demonstrates, grains make you fat. Skip the processed foods, they’re even worse for you than you probably think. They not only make you gain weight by spiking insulin levels, but are detrimental to the brain and can mess with your concentration levels. Blame the explosion of ADD victims to processed foods.
• Try not sleeping with a pillow. For most of human history we have not slept with pillows. Once you get used to it, it is surprisingly comfortable. You don’t have to roll around as much either. One caution, your shoulders may get sore, so your mileage may vary on if you want to do this one.
• Instead of sitting in chairs, sit Indian style on the floor with your legs crossed. Asians do this all the time and they don’t get the back problems that westerners do.

There are many other ways that you can integrate the Primal Way into your lifestyle. This is just a brief sketch to get you started.

Realizing the obvious

Earlier this morning, I was in the church bathroom, doing what everyone else does in there. Once I finished my business and proceeded to the sink, I made eye contact with an older man. Reflexively, he gave me a "hey." To be polite, I smiled and asked "hey, whats going on?" He gave a quick chuckle and uttered " I don't know, but if I did I would be rich." I laughed because he gave a reference to something totally irrelevant and yet I knew precisely what he was talking about.

The financial markets, you think?

Everybody knows something drastic is going on. The stock market plummeted deeper last week than any other week since October 2008. People can smell a faint, but ominous odor in the air.
One may not be able to detect the particulars of that odor, or when its toxic levels will drive them to shelter. But the stench of 2008 is back - not that the economy has made any material improvements since then. Whether the upcoming months will proceed in Fall-2008 fashion is unknown at this point. But what is known with almost axiomatic certainty is that the economy will look a whole lot worse before it gets better, the inevitable debt-deleveraging process guarantees that.

See, what has become increasingly obvious to the causal observer has been predicted by numerous professional and amateur economists of the contrarian blogosphere and other nonmainstream outlets that care more about truth and preparing people for the future than muddling their "animal spirits" or "consumer confidence."

But in the meantime, get ready for the downswing.

On the debt ceiling

There should be no surprise that Congress decided to raise the debt ceiling. The drone soldiers that pass for politicians have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not there to do what must be done, but to continue the charade of central planning and a government propped up economy. Even the TEA Party freshmen, all their conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, are not willing to grab their nuts and make some legitimate spending cuts.

But the purpose of this article is not to rehash what has been obvious for quite some time now, but to examine the implications of the new debt ceiling deal that was announced on August 1, the day before the ceiling would be breached, in the a straightforward, simple and honest way that has seem to elude the mainstream media in examining this issue.

To find out what lies in the deal, we turn to the Wall Street Journal: “The agreement, struck late Sunday, raises the debt cap by up to 2.4 trillion in three steps. It cuts 917 billion in spending over 10 years and creates a congressional committee to close the deficit by an additional 1.5 trillion.

Now then, this is really nothing new as it is very similar to the various deals proposed months ago. However, notice the trickery woven into the narrative. When I first read that they would cut 1 trillion over ten years, I merely assumed they would cut somewhere around 100 billion every year for ten years. But since I am both reasonably good at math and economics, after a few minutes reflection I concluded that this is simply not the case. Note that they said they will cut SPENDING by a trillion, not reduce reduce the ANNUAL BUDGET by a trillion. If you think about it, all that would have to be done to “cut” 1 trillion of spending over ten years would be to lower the budget by 100 billion, and then keep it flat for the next nine years, and so in total you would have spent 1 trillion less than you would have in the ten years. But putting it in the actual numbers makes it seem far worse.

Annually, government spending is a little over 3 trillion. Without any changes in the budget, the government will spend approximately a total of 30 trillion in 10 years. So, a trillion dollar cut would reduce it to 29 trillion. 29 instead of 30, what a tremendous deal! And the majority of so-called tea party conservatives voted for this?

But moreover, the cuts are actually smaller than it appears. Because the Government assumes a growing economy and thus more revenues, it makes planned projections about how much it will spend in the following years. So if it spends 3 trillion this year, it plans on spending closer to 3.1 trillion next year, and 3.2 the year after. ( These are raw estimates; I’m to too lazy at the moment to dig up the actual figures, but they should suffice to demonstrate the point) As it happens, simply not spending as much as the planned increase is considered a “cut.” So if the government keeps its expenditures flat the next year instead raising it to the expected increase, it would be considered a 100 billion dollar cut. In light of these unscrupulous accounting methods, the government can actually increase spending while saying it is cutting it!

Of course, we don’t even know that they will make these meager cuts. The price of procrastination is future delegation. In the bill, spending cuts were pushed over to a committee that doesn’t even exist yet. And most of the cuts will be initiated after 2013, with a different congress. Don’t let anyone fool you, this congress has no authority over the next one. By kicking the can down the road, our current congressmen have merely relied on the votes of the future ones.

It was pretty obvious why they felt they had to raising the debt limit. Thanks to the contraction of the private economy, the government has had to take unprecedented measures to keep the overall economy from plummeting. The 2010 deficit was 1.7 trillion, this year’s one should be similar. If the Government ran into its ceiling and was forced to balance its budget, there would be an instant 1.7 trillion reduction in GDP. That’s over 10% over the Gross Domestic Product, which would put us well into depression levels. By raising the ceiling, congress has bought the economy some time. But sooner or later it must stop; it mathematically must stop.

This is precisely why we must hit the ceiling now and take the pain that goes with it. President Obama and Chairman Bernanke think they are averting a depression, but they are simply moving its appearance to a future date, thereby ensuring that it will be even bigger once it arrives. Oh let it be known, the Great Recession will turn into another Great Depression. Don’t let the optimists deceive you. Their mindless cheerleading only serves to maintain “consumer confidence.” But the problem is much bigger than that.

I don’t pay much attention to politics, except for when I’m in those rare moments in which I am fettered by self-insecurity. Watching these elites meander ineptly in the dark, it allows me to rest secure in the knowledge that while the light may be elusive, my stumbles simmer in comparison to the trainwreck that the central planners have almost flawlessly navigated.

But there is no reason to lower your head over this. It is not always the happy-go-lucky times that testify to the truth of ourselves; it is the difficult times as well. Many men and women have relished the heroic opportunities presented by arduous times such as these. And out of the ashes may there emerge a bright and magnificent Phoenix. A creature that builds rather than destroys. With every problem there is always an opportunity to fix it. It may be an incredibly risky and dangerous endeavor to do so, but it is almost always worth taking.

Harry Potter critics haven't surprised me

Having recently engaged many Christians on the topic of the morality of Harry Potter, I cannot help but notice that there has been no attempts to actually support their belief in the immorality of Harry Potter with anything that can be recognized as logic or evidence. Apparently those two concepts are wholly foreign to their shallow minds. Alot of handwaving and naked statements, yeah, but nothing more.

And there has been no attempt to rebut my article defending the integrity of fantasy fiction. No surprise there, as it is probably way over their heads. And even if they could muster up the intellectual firepower to understand the argument, the unforgivable wall of my logic precludes any honest attempt to dismantle it.

The truth of the matter is, it really isn't very difficult to grasp why their is nothing intrinsically wrong with the Fantasy genre in general and Harry Potter in particular. One just has to have the upsight to discern the difference between the witchcraft as described in the Bible and the witchcraft described in the Harry Potter books. The former refers to "power derived from the devil" while the latter refers to power systematically harnessed through a set of fictitious laws of nature. There is no substantive difference between the wizard that discovers that waving a wand in a certain motion and uttering a certain word produces a specific result than a scientist or engineer that invents a device based on his own understanding of what our laws of nature entail.

Come on guys, it really isn't difficult to comprehend and anyone with an I.Q over 90 should be able to do so, assuming, of course, that that intelligence is actually utilized and that the person isn't locked under an army of pretty lies. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with their concerns about a potential satanic influence, I just don't see it in Harry Potter. They would be far more fruitful in attacking the socialism and atheism implicit in much of the sci-fi genre than an innocuous children's story. And by the way, where is the evidence that reading Harry Potter leads people to do bad things? Like I said, evidence isn't exactly their forte.

Some may wonder why I have taken the time to smash these (non)arguments up. The problem is that theirs is a fundamentally anti-intellectual worldview. One of the things that one can't help but notice is their distaste for abstract thought, probably because they woefully lack it.

Is Harry Potter anti-christian?

With the new harry potter movie coming out, one can scarcely go about without hearing haters and praisers alike. It is deeply amusing to see people hating on it, proclaiming that is is "gay" or "retarded," when the movies they watch and the books they read (if any) are utter trash. Seriously, it's one thing to read harry potter uninspired if you have read the works of authors such as Umberto Eco, Robert Heinlein, Neal Stephenson, George R.R Martin, Michael Crighton, and J.RR Tolkien. But, alas, I can personally attest that I have never - Ever - seen a teenager read any of those authors with the exception of Tolkien.

What is even more amusing is how Christians rationalize their loathing of HP by arguing it is satanic and unbiblical. Leaving aside the obvious absurdity of dismissing anything with magic - in other words, every fantasy theme out there - their argument makes zero sense from an historical perspective.

The concept of a fantasy novel has explicit Christian origins, starting with George McDonald and then popularized by Tolkien and Lewis. There is nothing inherently satanic about fantasy. The fact that magic and witchcraft are frowned upon by the Bible is irrelevant. But because most people are logically and intellectually inept that they don't see why this is the case, I shall elect to spell it out for them.

While it is true that in our World Satan and the evil side of the supernatural are behind witchcraft and other magical themes behind much of the fantasy genre, it need not be that way if you postulate a different World governed by a different set of parameters. Hence, magic may be satanic in this world ( although it is doubtful that all of it is, there is a good side of the supernatural as well) but it may not in another world. Heck, depending upon the Rules set by the Creator, it may not even be considered "supernatural". For all we know, the particular median of our material world that defines the mode of our existence is completely arbitrary. Moreover, there is no reason at all to believe that our universe is not one of many universes that are across the spectrum of what's "natural" and "supernatural." And from what can be interpreted from the Harry Potter books, magic isn't even a "supernatural" phenomenon in the sense that it transcends the natural, let alone an exploitation from a malicious being working outside their realm like Satan presumably does in our world. In the world created by J.K Rowling, what we consider magic is little more than a convenient set of natural laws that have been exploited by certain individuals. Quantum Mechanics is arguably more weird and remote in comparison to the traditional conception of our world, and yet I don't see these same fantasy haters beat down on the latest research collected by Switzerland's Super Collider.

As should be obvious to anyone who is not socially autistic, making a statement about a different world is not tantamount to making that same statement about this world. That's all fantasy is: world building, which is an ability that God specifically endowed Mankind with when he gave him abstract thought. And there are strong logical reasons to believe that the species that God made in His own image was designed to live, love, and create from the ground up

The real root of prosperity

Hans Palmstierna over at the end of civilization has lucidly explained the problem of *negative interest rates* - in which inflation exceeds the nominal rate of interest - and what they inevitably lead to: the evaporation of capital. The logic is simple. If savings is the root of investment and capital, then an enviroment that discourages savings will dry up the capital markets, which are the basis for any economy. Negative interest rates are a huge impetus to spend your money now - because why would you want to save money that depreciates faster than your rate of return - and even to borrow for consumption. There is no more instructive example of this happening than in the recent evisceration of the U.S manufacturing base.

Paul Krugman and other neo-Keynesians have it precisely backwards; it is not because of increased savings that have shredded the economy, but the lack of savings. Too much spending, too much debt. The answer to the question many observers have asked as they try to make sense of our economic plight is that our political ruling class, guided by academia, has identified the wrong source of prosperity. The reason mainstream economics is wrong and the policies based on it have failed is because it is savings, not spending, that leads us to the road of prosperity. In spendthrift lies the path to poverty.

Proph comes around

I've been a reader of Collapse: the blog almost since the beginning. The blogger there exhibits a sound grasp of history, economics, and ethics and has been a persistent predictor of the up and coming collapse. His primary focus has been the economic and political collapse, but has extended his analysis to the moral and societal condition of an increasingly decadent population.
What I find interesting is that even as a deist, he has decried many of the cultural ills spawned by secularism that have been the forefront of criticism by the Christian mainstream.

Modern liberalism was birthed in the moral and intellectual squalor of the Enlightenment -- which, if there were any justice in the world, would have been called the Darkening -- when it shucked off the rational realism and essentialism of the classical and scholastic philosophers and embraced, instead, the manifold absurdities of nominalism, empiricism, and skepticism. Its worst excesses were constrained, at the time, by the residual self-control inculcated in society through a millennium and change of Christian worship, but with the passage of time, society has forgotten even the reasons for this self-control, and its irrationality has worsened, giving way to utilitarianism, totalitarianism, and, ultimately, the present degraded nihilism that cannot even be bothered to justify or rationalize itself. Centuries after the world supposedly liberated itself from the chains of theology, it has enslaved itself to darkness again. Thinking people must go to war against it: against the exultation and fetishization of all its base impulses, against the denigration of human life and the devaluation of the human person, and against the vile particularist passions of the world. And to go to war requires that one have a clear conception of who is fighting whom.

What man requires is a return to first principles: and modern man's first principle, long before he was industrious or economic or intellectual, was spiritual. He understood himself as arising from a natural order ordained by a rationally-provable God. He understood faith to be not a mere assertion of hope in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, but a willful trust in what reason has revealed to be true, no matter how much his unreliable senses scream out against it. And he understood that to embrace that order was to live virtuously, and thus rationally, and that to rebel against it was to reject the rationality of the soul that had been given to him by God and therefore to live in sin and disorder.

When I realize this, suddenly the mere collapse of economies or societies or even civilizations seems woefully unimportant. What matters, and what is at stake here, is the collapse of man: whether he is able to embrace his noblest traits -- his reason and his will -- and so to transcend the animality of his sensory soul, or whether he will become enthralled to his passions and his senses, rebel against all order and reason, and exile himself into spiritual darkness. What is at stake is souls, by the billions. What is at stake is Heaven.

Unlike many non-theists, Proph understands that the ideals of the enlightenment that so many secular humanists praise are no sound basis for a functional and sustainable society. And that while Man is a spiritual and moral agent, his efforts to concoct a rational morality without God are futile and merely a sure-way down the road of self-destruction. In light of this, it makes perfect sense to view the Body of Christ, His Church, as a light amidst a dark and fallen world, and that what theologians describe as "the violation of the will of God" is indistinguishable from the observable evil that we see violating an individual's consciousness, ruining a families' stability, and even threatening our society's very survival.

Proph has just made that leap:

And a return to first principles starts at home. So I'm joining the Roman Catholic Church -- bending my knee to Rome, as it were, and to the God whose will is all that sustains the universe in every second. The Church has been reduced to a pale shade of its former fierceness, but it is the last and best hope for the redemption of the world.

I begin the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults in a month or two. Wish me luck.

Very good news indeed. It touches me even more after realizing that I just started praying for him not more that a few weeks ago. Its likely true that his transformation was a gradual one, but its encouraging to see the fruits of an answered prayer.

Why the GDP is intrinsically innaccurate in mixed and command economies

As I found myself contemplating the implications of the the historical decline of the real wage rate, it struck me that it could be used a more reliable metric in measuring the health of the economy, accounting for changes of the employment to population ratio of course, than the GDP.

In fact, because GDP is merely the cumulative price value of all goods and services in the economy, artificial prices that distort the value of a good or service renders the calculation flawed because it creates a value mismatch. In a purely free-market economy, this would be less of an issue because prices are determined by their actual value; if I built a useless product or provided an unneeded service, the nonexistence of demand will suppress my product or services' value because nobody wants or needs it, thus it will not contribute to the GDP.

However, in a mixed or socialized economy, where a product's value is not necessarily determined by supply and demand - which is the measure of the collective population's assessment of its value - but by Government fiat, my service may not benefit anyone or increase the overall welfare of the population, but if it is arbitrarily mandated by the Government its price will be artificially inflated and thus contribute to the GDP, even though no wealth was created.

The biggest example of value mismatch is Government and private Government-mandated bureaucracy. Jobs that promote little to no increase in prosperity and are yet a big contributor to the GDP. In fact, they may even be a hindrance. What is also at issue but is rarely acknowledge is the immense opportunity cost involved of having millions of people doing one thing and not another. Actually, given the opportunity cost, it wouldn't be the GDP increasing and prosperity stagnant, but the GDP being static and overall prosperity declining. The TSA is a textbook example. Unionization and featherbedding have also served to distort the price configurations. Bubbles also have huge effects on value distortions. A house increasing 2 x in five years because of unsustainable credit expansion is no indication of growing prosperity - the house is the same as it was before - but it does add to the GDP.

This is why the real wage rate, the average purchasing power of a worker in terms of goods that he really needs, like food, is a far more accurate measure of the actual health of the economy than the GDP that counts everything, useful or nonuseful. Because the wage rate is simply a measure of efficiency, jobs that contribute little will only suppress it.

However, efficiency is only one aspect of the overall size of the economy; you have to combine it with the amount of workers involved, either the employment to population ratio or the size of the labor force. The former would produce the size of the economy relative to the population, the latter would produce the size without regards to the population. Put differently, the former is equivalent to GDP per capita, the latter GDP.

With this in perspective, it is interesting to note that the real wage rate has declined since 1973 while the population to employment ratio is back where it was before women entered en masse in the workforce! So, there has literally been no economic growth for almost 40 years. For all the iphones and sophisticated technology that has been developed to increase our efficiency, there has been a huge parasitical sector dragging it down. One may object by pointing out that we are in a recession , so using current numbers is not indicative of a historical trend. But not only this recession is not even close to reaching its trough (this is a point already demonstrated in conclusive manner, only an idiot can believe otherwise), but it is simply a return to an illusory-free status. The only reason the economy appeared to be growing for the past 30 years is because of increases in debt. In all fairness, price distortions work both ways. You can buy a computer with an advanced duel core processor today for the same price as a windows 95 Dell 15 years ago.

What it all comes down to is that the true state of the economy is hidden within the intricate mirage of Government and FED distortions.

One compounding problem after the other

As I have implied on previous occasions, I don't believe that even the finest and well-informed minds have a comprehensive grasp of the situation the world in general and America is facing. On one hand you have the economic and financial turmoil that has survived despite the best efforts of the Government and FED. On the another is a story of rapid moral degeneration that is slowly eroding the moral fabric upon which any Civilization's survival is dependent upon. All of this is compounded by secondary and tertiary problems, from the overloading costs of health care spawned by the obesity epidemic and the imperial overstretch exhibited by an ever impotent military, to the evisceration of America's manufacturing base caused by free trade and its ethnic transformation via mass 3rd world immigration.

There are also demographic considerations that America is facing. And while it is hardly unknown that the WASP - White Anglo Saxon Protestant, the biological and cultural basis for American society - breed is in relative decline, what is less well known is the direction population genetics is moving toward. In any human group, there is always environmental pressure exerted upon it that moves the general population in a certain direction, causing natural or unnatural selection. The direction of this selection could lead to a significant transformation of the genetic and cultural makeup of the population, for good of ill. As it happens, there have been many changes in the past twentieth century that have changed the evolutionary game.

Thanks to the advent of the contraception, individuals who are more future-oriented have a perfectly viable means of avoiding child-spawning but still fulfill their impulses, while those who are myopic enough to bypass the contraception are having babies. This problem is compounded by the demographic decline of the middle class - courtesy to women's economic empowerment. Since the lower class is on average more short-term oriented than their upper and middleclass counterparts, whether myopia is a sympton or a cause is irrelevant - the rise of the lower-class has resulted in more short-term, live-for-the-moment people.

History has demonstrated that human idiocy and short-term guided people have always existed in abundance. But there are strong reasons to believe that we may be more myopic than ever.

You want to see an example of mass human myopia? 2003 -2007 housing bubble. For alot of people, it doesn't matter how much the house costs, just the initial down payment. That is why people saw the huge hike in housing prices as a good thing.

And there is a sure chance that chronic myopia is not the only thing that has been exacerbated by the turn in environmental pressure.

Right now we are finding ourselves in a moment where every ill America has pushed aside in the past is conspiring to reveal itself. Many problems exploding have been properly diagnosed, others have not. And under the superficial veneer of Billions of people and interactions, nobody truly has a good hold of the magnitude and specifics of our situation. But this does not mean we cannot track the overall trend and direction we are heading. One does not have to know the precise angle of a vector to know that it is pointing downward.

The debt ceiling problem even confounds Ron Paul

Ron Paul has recently come out with a "creative" way to skirt the overly hyped-up debt ceiling problem: annihilate the debt between the FED and Government. This would have the effect of reducing the Government debt by 1.6 trillion. But, by his own admission, since the Government doesn't have to pay the FED back, it really doesn't make a difference besides buying time before the Government reaches the debt ceiling.

While I admire Ron Paul - he is literally the only on in Washington with a good grasp of the economic predicament we're in - I am dubious about the efficacy of his plan, in part because I want the Government to reach its debt ceiling. Moreover, there is no substantive difference between his plan and a straightforward ceiling raise to 16 trillion.

Contra most politicians and the brain doping media that serves them, the is no serious threat of default if it reaches the ceiling; being unable to service any more debt is not tantamount to being unable to pay it back. It will simply require vast reductions in spending. Spending cuts that would never have been implemented without sufficient pressure to do so. When left to themselves, politicians will never do the necessary thing until they have to. And while there are more *ideal* and *optimum* ways to dealing with it, this is the only plausible way grounded by the parameters of washington politics.

As will be no surprise, Republicans will succumb to raising the debt ceiling - with or without the spending cuts, not realizing that with the debt ceiling breached, there will be no need for democratic or anybody else's support for spending reductions. They will flow inexorably. Nothing is off the table now.

Why the reccession will turn into a depression

This graph has been making the rounds in the anti-establishment blogosphere ( courtesy of Karl Denninger). Its power lies in the fact that it completely inverts the entire economic paradigm the mainstream media has fed the American public for decades.

There has been no genuine economic growth for the past 30 years. None. All of it has been the result of increases in systemic debt. If our aggregate economic statistics weren't so perverted by a self-serving Keynesian worldview, it would be apparent that all the growth since 1980 has been illusory. In other words, if the GDP accounted for debt as a counter factor against growth, there would be no positive increases in GDP.

Bare in mind that this does not mean that we have not felt the benefits of a growing economy; we have, in a sense. In the tradition of the classical economists, I shall use a microeconomic example to elucidate an equivalent macroeconomic one. Take a household for instance. It has the ability to increase its standard of living by borrowing money, and maintaining it by borrowing even more. But once it is unable to do so - and unless you believe debt can be taken on indefinitely it must - not only will it must live without the borrowed money, it must undergo the opportunity cost of paying it back. Thanks to the modern miracle of credit creation and leveraged money, America has been doing this for 30 years now. (Note: I am refering to systemic debt, which includes but is by no means entirely Government debt). Because the media is so fixated on the Government debt, the public is pretty much ignorant of the crippling effect of the economy wide private-sector debt has as it hangs over the economy. Its a little over 50 trillion, around 350% of GDP. A mere contraction of 10% of this debt will shrink the economy by a third, and probably more given the multiplier effect.

This is why I am so confident that the reccession is not over; there is simply no way to avoid it. All recessions since 1980 have been the free-markets attempt to correct the malinvestment engendered by the Government and Central Bank. But the response has been inevitably to put off for another day. Keep spending, keep loaning, keep the the debt levels up. And it has worked, in the short term. But now is when our bad habits are catching up. We haven't seen anything yet.

Interesting times indeed.

Dissecting atheist arguments one by one

As I have demonstrated on this blog numerous times, the overwhelming majority of arguments in the intellectual marketplace are filled with errors of fact and logic. Most people have minds poorly suited to art of proper logical and forensic construction that most of their opinions are simply post-facto rationalizations of a preconceived bias, not the systematic work of careful, logical examination. This analysis hardly excludes those who happen to be on the correct side of a debate; one can have correct conclusions without sound premises after all. Moreover, by just looking at the sheer width of the ideological spectrum that the collective human race holds to, and how many of the certain beliefs are wholly incompatible, one is forced to conclude by logical necessity that most people are wrong on a whole host of things.

So while most arguments you see will be void of sound reasoning, this holds particularly true for the arguments put forth by the leading atheists of our day. I plan to deconstruct many of their arguments against the validity of religion in general and Christianity in particular. The first argument, usually spouted out by less intelligent skeptics, is how can Christianity be true when there are literally thousands of different gods and religions to believe in?

This is a remarkably ignorant argument for several reasons. First, since the numerous religions like Christianity, Islam, Judaism, paganism, Spiritualism, New age, Etc.... and the various non-religions such as secularism, humanism, deism, atheism, etc.... encompass a tautology, at least one of those has to be true. Second, and more importantly, the existence of various gods and religions is not only compatible with the Christian worldview, it is required. There are numerous passages in the Bible that imply the existence of other supernatural beings that may or may not seek human worship. Much of the Old testament is a chronicle of the confrontation between the Jewish people and the pagan cultures that surround them, and that man's fallen nature has rendered him prone to worship other gods besides the one true God.

Third, the Bible has demonstrated itself to be a more accurate text in science and human behavior than every other religion, even the secularism of the academic science-fetishists. On that account alone the Biblical model should be considered in a different light than other religious models.

So has we have seen, this argument relies on a complete misconception of what Christianity really is. The reality it assumes, that there are many belief systems, does not only not discredit the veracity of the Christian worldview, it is absolutely required by it.

The *Case* Against Libertarianism

A commenter over at the Roissy Chateau elected to attack libertarianism. In doing so, he reveals a dearth of knowledge of what libertarianism really is. Specifically, he spouts out the incorrect but widespread meme that libertarians assume that mankind is generally good. His words below:

Libertarian philosophy is compromised by a number of flaws in the philosophical foundations of their philosophy; these errors are entirely due to their refusual to look at human nature as it actually is instead of what they want it to be.

A partial list of errors:

-The majority of people can understand the benefits of limited government and free trade (most people are stupid and/or ignorant)
-That their is no underlying biological wiring between the sexes or races that will cause them to favor tyranny over freedom
-That people will handicap themselves by principles of “justice” instead of amorally grabbing what they can in life (most people will rationalize any advantage they can attain for themselves)
-That Human nature is fundamentally “good”
-That Humans are a “blank slate” and are basically interchangable
-Based on the preceeding two premises- that the threat of force and fear of resiproisty is not necessary to keep the untermensch in line (it is).
-That other groups of people (governments) will play by the same nice rules that they want our government to play by

Ultimately, Libertarians take their native high intelligence and combine it with their do-gooder/moralist brainwashing and mirrorimage the the combination onto the rest of soceity while not realizing that they are the exception and not the rule.

This is a remarkably ignorant set of arguments. First, libertarians absolutely DO NOT believe that human nature is "fundamentally good." Human beings are so corrupt that they should never possess illegitimate power over others because they will invariably abuse it. This argument knows no introspection; it fails because it doesn't take into account that the Ruling Class are people as well, and are by virtue of their position more susceptible to corruption. While it is true that private exchange by mutual consent can bring about negative externalities, so do public-private exchanges. Critics of libertarianism love to vent around words like "market failure" and "failure of the commons." But there can be no heaven on earth, at least not through political or economic means, the marxists hope notwithstanding. And those things are vastly preferable to interventionism that eventually mutates into full-blown totalitarianism.

As for his other arguments, they can be easily dismissed. Libertarianism is not synonymous with anarchism; there are rules, its called private property. And the Government still has role of preventing oppression and violation of the private property laws.

So, while this is probably the best that libertarian would-be critics have to offer, it is so spectacularly incorrect that one is forced to conclude that libertarians really don't have to face much of a challenge in the intellectual marketplace.

Technoblog Found

Earlier this year I stated:

I have, however, neglected the role of technology in the entire process of cultural evolution. What reminded me of this was a dinner table conversation with my father, brother, and I about the possibility that Robots and advanced computers will obviate conscious driving; that cars will be driven by autopilot.

I tried to think of the future state of technology and its ramifications for the world, but I didn't get very far. I just realized that this was a job for much finer and more informed minds than my own. So I am looking for a blogger or author that writes with a morbid wit and expounds about not the technical details but of the general implications future technology will have upon our society. He must also have a major, a perhaps a bit insane, thesis.

Well, I finally found a site that purports to fulfill the criteria above: FuturePundit; Future technological trends and their likely effects on human society, politics and evolution.
It is the cousin blog of parapundit, which I enjoy as well. I haven't read a whole lot of material over there so I can't say for sure whether it is what I am looking for, but from what I have read it seems to be a promising start; the post about how the rise of the personal computer has lead to decreased amount of leisurely reading time made sense.

I await the vast sea of knowledge that will overflow me.

Hapless critics, please step it up

There is a recurring theme to every written discourse that I have with people when arguing a point. It goes like this:

Vanfair: X is wrong, Y is correct.

Hapless opponent: What?! No X is right, and how can you seriously believe in Y?

Vanfair: No, you ignoramus. X is not only incorrect, but it can easily demonstrated to be incorrect because it is contingent upon A,B, and C, which have been proven incorrect for 70 years. And Y is correct because D,E,F necessitate Y.

Hapless opponent version 1: Wow, I can't believe you think like that. Good thing you don't write for a popular news site deluding so many people.

Hapless opponent version 2:.......... [doesn't bother responding at all]


The reason so many of the written debates I engage in inevitably take the aforementioned path is because many people quibble with my seemingly insane conclusions without realizing there is nevertheless a sound and wholly conclusive foundation for them. Once I inform them of those foundations, they have no course of action but to retreat and pretend that nothing happened. Readers will know that this is exactly what happened to a woman I engaged in about feminism. So in keeping with this narrative, a facebook friend found it within himself to dispute one of my status updates:

Me: if America waves its collective middle finger at Rep. Ron Paul again in 2012, then it will surely deserve the ultimate destruction that undoubtedly awaits it.

Facebook friend I hope he doesn't get anywhere near the Presidency.

Vanfair: Ron Paul is literally the only candidate that respects human liberty, the constitution, and the rule of law.So what about him is so objectionable?

Facebook friend: He isn't a Republican. He is a libertarian that is using the republican party to dip into a bigger pool of voters. Also he wants to legalize drugs, prostitution and strip the military of its strength. So alot of things =D

Vanfair: Considering that the Republican establishment has produced so many abysmal politicians, I consider Ron Paul's deviance from it to be a good thing. Moreover, he is probably the most conservative candidate out there (at least fiscally), even if he hasn't flirted with the idea of legislating morality through banning drugs, prostitution etc... because it violates individual freedoms. As for the military, the historical evidence demonstrates that empire building overseas actually weakens it. Dr. Paul realizes that an expansionist foreign policy is incompatible with a small and limited governemt...

The point is, Ron Paul has shown he is the only politician with the balls to put an end to this profligate government spending and clamp down on the federal reserve that has financially raped this country. Whatever one's differences are with his other views.

Facebook friend: Thinking like that makes me glad he doesn't have a chance.

In which I would reply that it is very difficult to have sympathy for someone that willfully refuses to acknowledge the obvious. Its like having sympathy for a person that willingly stands in the middle of a highway.

If I didn't have to face this guy in person from time to time, I would have brutally tormented this hapless critic because that is exactly what his response merited. At times, I ask myself why I even bother seeking input by posting intelligent updates on facebook, its like going to the science fair looking for the next Michael Jordan.