In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients at six hospitals who received coronary bypass surgery, in which doctors reroute circulation around a clogged vein or artery.
The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.
The researchers asked the members of three congregations -- St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City -- to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names.
Assuming that the three groupings were randomized, you would expect that the recipients of the prayers would have an equal amount of faith, righteousness, God-willingness, or whatever other factor you would expect to influence the outcomes. If the studies were performed properly, the offerers of the prayers are also sufficiently randomized, so that the merits of any individual supplicant aren't going to be a factor.
Now, the prayers are unusual, because it's not often that people offer prayers on behalf of total strangers. But the study is strong evidence that at least that sort of prayer doesn't work, and in fact has no effect whatsoever if the recipient is unaware of the prayers.
But the overall point is, studies of large groups like this are explicitly intended to cancel out the noise caused by the variance of the individuals. Your possibility 3 fails, because whatever "other criteria" you might imagine, they should be equally distributed among the control group and the test group. You have to fall back to possibility 4, that God ignores the prayers of strangers, or possibility 5, that God specifically rigged the test so that he could heal those whom he would have healed anyways, without triggering a statistically significant result.
Sagan once asked the Dalai Lama, "What would you do if there was evidence that there was no such thing as reincarnation." His Holiness replied something to the effect of, "Buddhism would have to change." Then he added that such negative evidence might be difficult to find.
My impression was that Sagan was not anti-religion so much as pro-thinking, pro-logic, and pro-science. Some forms of religious devotion are perfectly compatible with those values. Others are not. Those who follow such incompatible beliefs were the ones who were always calling him anti-religious.
I once wrote a rather long essay, modifying Pascal's Wager to account for multiple religions. Basically, you have to score each religion by the nastiness of their hell, the awesomeness of their heaven, multiply by the probability of getting into each, then multiply again by the probability of that religion being true, and finally add in a weighting factor that describes whether you're risk averse or reward hungry. If you're risk averse, nasty hells play a stronger role in your decision.
I did not, however, account for religions that allowed members of other religions into their heavens, or for religions that allow you to do make-up work after death (Limbo in Catholicism, Spirit Prison in Mormonism, etc.) Presumably the more exclusive the religion, the more eager you should be to enlist.
>> While there are numerous problems with the curriculum, isn't teaching students to be skeptical of government a good thing? If you blindly follow what the government says, democracy in a free society falls apart.
"Skepticism" is always good. Skepticism demands a desire to look at all the evidence as objectively as possible, to try to come to your own conclusions, and to be willing to recognize the possibility that you could be wrong.
The Texas curriculum has nothing to do with skepticism. Their school board doesn't want open-minded questioning of everything; they want cynicism about a few specific things that suit their agenda. That's clear from their public pronouncements and from the substance of the changes.
Believe that the founding fathers were of a single mind, and that they intended for America to be a Christian nation.
Learn well that government programs are always too expensive and that they always hurt those whom they are intended to help.
The free market is the greatest system of prosperity that God has given to man on the face of the Earth. It never hurts those whom it is intended to help.
Be cynical about those who oppose Israel, but never question the historical justice of the country's establishment.
Republicans are awesome. Never question that Republicans are awesome. Remember who freed the slaves? That was us! Republicans. Awesome. Are you writing this down? It will be on the test.
Now, you can't come up with a curriculum without taking certain historical questions for granted. If we took nothing for granted, your history course would end the year exactly where it began: debating the existence of Christopher Columbus. You have to teach history as the facts indicate that it happened, and teach critical thinking skills along the way. But there is no excuse for coming up with a curriculum which is blatantly contrafactual.
I would happily put Zimmerman's A People's History of the United States up against any textbook following the Texas guidelines, and have a diverse group of educators and historians compare them for quality and accuracy.
Sorry for waiting a week to reply. I'm sure you felt the lack most keenly.
Whether utility is personal or communal is arguable, but it is also irrelevant to my argument. If I can increase my own wealth (however I may define it) by enslaving you, and I have the power to do so, then there is advantage to me to enslave you. Whatever losses you -- or society as a whole -- suffer by your being enslaved, advantage accrues to me. It's called an externality, a bedrock principle of economics.
>> Morals don't come from God, they come from reality, there is a reason why we seek individual freedom, it must have provided an evolutionary advantage, most likely through the ability of maximizing personal utility, which maximized group output.
This statement shows a deep misunderstanding of history, because slavery is in fact common throughout history, and not just in crappy failures of societies. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Maya, the Aztecs, etc., were all incredibly wealthy societies, and they were all built on expropriated labor. I'm a bit annoyed that I have to explicitly state that this was a tragic, immoral thing, as though I might feel otherwise.
The statement also contradicts the claim you made earlier, where you mocked me for being so stupid as to think that there was such a thing as "group output." All utility is personal, remember?
You were wrong then, and right now. There is such a thing as collective/group utility. There are many different ways to measure it, depending on what you're trying to maximize. Average happiness? Average wealth? Likelihood of a long-lasting, resilient society? Ecosystem protection? However you try to benchmark it, there are activities that contribute more to the goal than others.
You run into the same troubles trying to measure personal utility. You can't say that people following their whims automatically create the highest personal utility for them. Even the most ardent libertarian will rant about how children need to be taught about the importance of self-discipline, respect for others, and the ability to delay gratification, which indicates that people often get themselves in trouble by following their desires. For a list of the other, well-documented deficiencies in our ability to figure out how to make ourselves happy, read "Stumbling on Happiness."
Your whole argument boils down to:
1) I think personal freedom is the highest good. 2) I am a product of evolution. 3) Therefore, evolution thinks personal freedom is the highest good. 4) Hey, take it up with science. I'm just the messenger.
Unlike you, I would never claim that evolution is the arbiter of morality. That's a dangerously stupid meme you're tossing around there.
>> This requires a priori knowledge that I am best at making widgets. Maybe I am better at something else, only your racist mind can't fathom that. Or perhaps along comes a new piece of technology (such as steam locomotives, the cotton gin, etc.) that suddenly makes me more efficient at doing something else, which I would certainly think about and perhaps change my job, but you are enslaving me, so I can't. Infact, I might want to work for a more efficient employer who can afford to pay me more, but you enslave me and keep me from making free market choices.
If you had been plucked from a society which didn't have anything resembling a free market (say, a tribe in 1800-era Africa), then your arguments are moot. You never would have had the opportunity to work for that other, more efficient employer. Were you not a slave, having your labor stolen from you by your owner, you would have been back home, living in a subsistence economy. You probably would have been happier for it, but our market was blind to your happiness, since you weren't paying it for the chance to be happy.
I'm not arguing -- nor have I ever argued -- that slavery was anything but an abomination. What you probably don't recognize is that, while you are certainly an abolitionist,
Sorry for the delay in replying. I see what you mean. But to say that classroom time is "wasted" is to ignore the primary purpose of public education: to warehouse kids so that adults can do economically rewarding work.
Call me cynical. I don't like it, but I think it's true, and any talk about teaching kids more efficiently does have to grapple with the knock-on effects to greater society.
I'm sorry, but your argument is 99.44% full of fail.
Let's build a toy economy, wherein there are two agents (you and me) and two jobs. You create 100 units of value for every day you spend making widgets, and 20 units of value for every day you spend writing. I create 20 units of value for every day spent making widgets, and 10 units of value for every day I spend writing. According to standard comparative advantage, we should both be making widgets. But you like writing, and do that instead of making widgets. So the economy hobbles along at 40 units/day.
Now let's open up a third job category: slaver. By forcing you to make widgets, I can pocket 100 units every day (minus care and feeding of you). The economy is more productive because now everyone is at maximum utility. It would be irresponsible for me not to enslave you, right?
Now replace "you" with African natives, "me" with American southerners, "writing" with tribal life in Africa, and "making widgets" with "harvesting cotton," and there you have it.
Arguments against slavery should be based entirely on the immorality of slavery. The only reason you're trying to argue any other grounds is to defend the ability of the free market to always deliver beneficial outcomes, regardless of the rhetorical contortions required. By doing so, you're arguing that most societies throughout history took part in a wildly suboptimal, self-immolating practice.
Any argument that slavery always takes the economy away from maximum utility rests on the assumption that there is only one possible maximizing function. But there are many to choose from. Maximum GDP. Maximum self-reported happiness. Minimum number of people below some absolute consumption threshold. A function that maximizes absolute GDP times some income inequality coefficient. A function that maximizes expected happiness over fifty years, or five thousand. Minimum environmental damage. Each one says something vastly different about how your economy should behave.
But unless you begin with the assumption that the happiness of participants matters (which economists generally don't do, because they wrongly assume that people know how to make themselves happy) then yes, you can "improve" the economy by forcing people into a life of slavery.
Expropriating the value of another person's work is generally always beneficial to the expropriator, regardless of whether or not the economy as a whole deviates from "maximal utility" as a result. So even if you could show that slavery is economically suboptimal (which I doubt you can), there is nothing in unfettered capitalism to prevent it from happening.
P.S.: Mises and Hayek were idiots. It's clear that the free market does a terrible job of valuing natural resources. Under the free market, oil, water, natural gas, etc., are valued not as assets but as revenue streams, with values proportional to the maximum rate of extraction. That's like treating a bank account as a revenue stream, with a value exactly proportional to the maximum daily withdrawal rate. Add some Herman Daly to your economics readings, expand your horizon beyond conspiracy theorist economics.
I don't think "a sense of urgency" promotes educational achievement at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. As I said in another post, Finland kicks our ass in public education, despite:
1) having a hefty social safety net that shields citizens from the dangers of unemployment and poverty. 2) having a relatively narrow gap between poor and rich, so the financial rewards of doing well in school are less. 3) having a substantially larger number of youth who see trade school as a viable alternative to secondary education. Why do well in subjects you don't plan on seeing again?
You would think that, if fear of poverty was a powerful motivator for educational excellence, the picture would be roughly the opposite.
If only degree holders have a shot at a decent middle class life, and people are complaining about too many people getting degrees, well, it's easy to connect the dots.
>> The concept of an "oversupply of labor" is ridiculous. That's like saying a country has an oversupply of coal, or timber, or gold.
And that, friends, is the idiocy of treating labor as just another commodity. Labor is only an asset when they have something useful to do. But feast or famine, they need to be fed, sheltered, educated, and provided health care. It's an expensive proposition, and it's no wonder that some countries just don't bother.
When you cut your cost for any other resource, the whole economy benefits. When you cut your labor costs, you must either find something of equal or greater value for the labor to do, else you create human suffering in proportion to the cutback.
Do you know how much the life expectancy *dropped* in the decade after the Soviet Union fell and the country transitioned to a market economy? Look it up. Frankly, most Russians were better off under the old system.
As for "facts," please show me the numbers. The ones that show that strong social safety nets and income redistribution lead to unstable societies.
The USA has a poor social safety net and minimal redistribution. We also have among the highest crime rates, the highest obesity rates, the worst public education system, the highest teen pregnancy rates, and the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized nation. Countries like Japan, Norway, Iceland, etc., do the opposite, and score at the top of those same measurements of social well being.
So, I'm born poor, work like hell through high school, take out massive student loans to pay for college, then see my one chance at breaking out of the poverty cycle blown because the career path I gambled on five years ago suddenly has too many applicants?
I'm lost, because I haven't seen anything proposed that remotely sounds like "letting the government decide what jobs we have." But you seem to have no concern for the massive waste of human life that happens when people educate themselves for jobs they're never going to find. It's especially tragic when a bright, talented person works hard, ends up saddled with student loans, and ends up doing the sort of menial job she would have been doing had she skipped college.
There is a huge difference between having the government "telling us to be comrades" and the government saying that you have to pay the people in your employ a decent wage. One is about personal conscience, the other is about curtailing your ability to exploit your fellow citizens.
By your reasoning, it's also not the government's job to regulate banks to ensure that they're safe places for consumers to park their money. Why should they protect investors from disappointment? Investors will learn that their choice of institutions was unwise, they'll move to a different bank, and that's perfectly fine.
It makes perfect sense... so long as you ignore the deep disappointment and human tragedy that comes from the words "they'll move to a different bank."
Or they could C) manipulate the money supply to ensure that we always have at least 5% of able-bodied Americans out of work, so that no matter how crappy the wages you're offering are, there is always somebody desperate enough to take you up on it.
Follow that up with D), lobbying congress to make sure that the minimum wage laws stay low. Add in E) threatening to take your entire trash-generating factory overseas if your trash haulers try to unionize.
Your point misses the broader point: the garbage would need to be picked up even if we had an ironclad trash collector's union that demanded $100K/year and six weeks vacation. Ooh, and full dental. It would also get picked up if we trashed the laws against child labor and made you compete with your own nine year old for the job. The question isn't whether capitalism "works" in the sense of matching supply to demand. If supply meets demand at a price that is so low that the people doing the work are too poor to present themselves creditably to the rest of society, then capitalism is failing in its broader social obligations.
Look at actual organized crime syndicates. They're not based on either official government support or the production of a superior product. And yet it can take decades to build a case against them.
Also, it's not obvious why the section of government in charge of enforcing "the rule of law" would be less corruptible than the sections of government that oversee the interference you describe in b).
Hell, corporations already commit all manner of crimes to get or keep market share. Far more often than they get caught or prosecuted for it.
But when the shoe is on the other foot, and that foot is the foot of a sweatshop worker who gets paid a dollar a day for creating thousands of dollars of value for some corporate clothing outlet, suddenly the question isn't, "How does her salary stack up to all the value she's creating," but "What's the minimum amount we can get away with paying her?"
I don't care if Tiger Woods has a unique, singular talent that sells hundreds of billions worth of golf swag every year. He's a grown man who gets paid to fly around to exotic locales and knock a tiny ball around. I doubt many athletes would complain about making a hundred grand a year, if that were the going rate.
As for CEOs, it's nearly impossible to tell how well they're leading their respective companies, and literally impossible to guess how they'd be doing with someone else at the helm. There is, however, ample evidence that CEOs and boards of directors collude to get each other cushy, can't fail contracts. If they were so sure they were creating real value, they'd happily agree to contracts where their compensation was tied to the long-term performance of the company.
Regardless of anything else, would *you* personally hire someone who had been held back three times in their K-12 career?
Teachers know that there's a stigma to being held back, which is why they look for any excuse to keep pushing kids forward. Sometimes their hopes are rewarded, and the kid actually does pull things together in high school.
Show me a society where kids don't get branded for life when they get held back, and I'll show you a society whose teachers are willing to hold kids back.
His point was that the K-12 system doesn't always turn out functional illiterates. I think he made a strong case.
And I'm just going to go on the record and say, you know what? College calculus wasn't all that hard. I had to study a lot, of course. But it had a visiospatial component that programming doesn't. So for me, programming was harder. I'm sure others have found the opposite to be the case.
Never mind. You won't. So let me summarize: within the industrialized world, there is almost no correlation between average income and positive social goods like long life, good health, good education, low teen pregnancy rates, and social trust. But there is a strong correlation between income equality and those same goods. Societies with little income inequality (Japan, Norway, France, etc.) do very well, while countries with huge income inequality (U.S., Singapore, etc.) do very poorly. And absolute income does almost nothing to protect a country from those ill effects.
Do you think that Americans' uniquely high levels of obesity come about because none of the other countries can afford to fill their stomachs? That's absurd. In every industrialized nation, food accounts for a small fraction of the average person's budget. They could eat much, much more if they wanted. No, Americans are obese because an unequal society is a society full of stressors, and food is a natural coping mechanism. The idea of "comfort food" is a reality, proven by numerous studies. Also, stressed out people are more sedentary.
Let me pose a question, to see just how well your right-wing model of reality is calibrated:
Take two wealthy, industrialized societies. In society A, the price for not getting a good education is a life of poverty and shame. In society B, there is no reason to fear poverty because the government provides generous welfare benefits.
In society A, the wealthiest people make ten to twenty times as much as the poorest people do, so the rewards for being ambitious and doing well in school are huge. In society B, the wealthiest members of society only make a few times what the poorest do, so there is little financial incentive to do well in school.
In society A, polls of high school students show that almost all of them want to attend college. In society B, a large fraction of the students say that they'd be happy with trade school.
No surprise, society A is the U.S., society B is Finland, and despite what a social darwinist right winger would say are strong disincentives against performing well in school -- no chance at great wealth if you succeed, no risk of poverty if you fail -- Finnish kids outperform American kids by a wide margin (a gap that is even wider for the poorest kids).
It's almost as though giving kids security about their future and their place in society leads to a more conducive learning environment. But no, that's crazy.
If it were just a measure of life expectancy, then you might have made a showing with your arguments. But how do you explain why "impoverished" Europe outperforms us in:
* Life expectancy * infant mortality * educational outcomes * obesity * crime rate * teen pregnancy * measures of social trust * measures of life satisfaction * homelessness rates * the status of women and minorities
Further, why are differences in income inequality between the fifty states also predictive of their performance on these same benchmarks?
Do those leading the deny/delay/"the science isn't settled" charge not also standing to make Sagans of dollars? If you're going to assume that a monetary interest devastates the credibility of the AGW side, you're going to have to explain why your skepticism is so selective.
>> There may be, in fact, an AGW crisis looming that threatens mankind. Unfortunately, the sloppy and ideologically- and politically-driven "science" and election-campaign-like tactics using personal attacks, etc have completely wrecked the debate and delayed or killed any chance of doing anything about it for years or decades.
Ask any police officer. They get this exact same reasoning from every guy they arrest for assaulting his wife. The occasional arrogance and poor judgment by a few scientists -- in the face of a steady deluge of viciousness and stupidity from their opponents -- does nothing to undermine the legitimacy of the science.
>> The world just isn't going to give up many trillions in wealth, sacrifice many lives, reduce individual freedoms, lose national sovereignty, and destroy the standard of living of many millions without solid, verifiable, and dire reasons. This has only reinforced skepticism.
According to the Stern Report, the investments needed to mitigate warming will only be a couple percent of world GDP, whereas the effects of climate change itself could amount to 20% of GDP. If we were measuring accurately, and calculating the value of burning fossil fuels by including the additional risk every ton brings -- and it's poor economics not to -- then suddenly fighting climate change is like printing money, and burning oil is like burning money.
>> Right now there are large margins of error and much disagreement about exactly how "much" climate change we will experience.
While there is a lot of uncertainty over how the climate will react to a given input of CO2, there is much, much more uncertainty over how much CO2 we'll pump out in the first place. If we don't have the political will to cut emissions, we get a lot of warming. If we cut quickly and dramatically, we get only "a little" warming. So the uncertainty lies not in the models, but in ourselves.
Negative results are often inherently interesting and highly publishable. If someone built a decent model that performs well against past data, but then predicts a slow cool in the future, scientists would be trampling each other to figure out what was wrong with it. The harder it resisted being "fixed", the more interesting it would be. You seem to be insinuating that there are actually dozens of reliable models that have been buried by the establishment. Sorry, they just don't have that big of shovels.
Sure, science has a culture, but it's not a culture of blind acceptance of received wisdom. Every year, tens of thousands of new grad students pop up, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from overturning the consensus. If the science was as blatantly wrong as the deniers claim, it wouldn't stand long before that sort of assault.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the nuts and bolts of the study:
Assuming that the three groupings were randomized, you would expect that the recipients of the prayers would have an equal amount of faith, righteousness, God-willingness, or whatever other factor you would expect to influence the outcomes. If the studies were performed properly, the offerers of the prayers are also sufficiently randomized, so that the merits of any individual supplicant aren't going to be a factor.
Now, the prayers are unusual, because it's not often that people offer prayers on behalf of total strangers. But the study is strong evidence that at least that sort of prayer doesn't work, and in fact has no effect whatsoever if the recipient is unaware of the prayers.
But the overall point is, studies of large groups like this are explicitly intended to cancel out the noise caused by the variance of the individuals. Your possibility 3 fails, because whatever "other criteria" you might imagine, they should be equally distributed among the control group and the test group. You have to fall back to possibility 4, that God ignores the prayers of strangers, or possibility 5, that God specifically rigged the test so that he could heal those whom he would have healed anyways, without triggering a statistically significant result.
"The creative class" is a term I use to describe myself when trying to justify my MacBook purchase.
Sagan once asked the Dalai Lama, "What would you do if there was evidence that there was no such thing as reincarnation." His Holiness replied something to the effect of, "Buddhism would have to change." Then he added that such negative evidence might be difficult to find.
My impression was that Sagan was not anti-religion so much as pro-thinking, pro-logic, and pro-science. Some forms of religious devotion are perfectly compatible with those values. Others are not. Those who follow such incompatible beliefs were the ones who were always calling him anti-religious.
I once wrote a rather long essay, modifying Pascal's Wager to account for multiple religions. Basically, you have to score each religion by the nastiness of their hell, the awesomeness of their heaven, multiply by the probability of getting into each, then multiply again by the probability of that religion being true, and finally add in a weighting factor that describes whether you're risk averse or reward hungry. If you're risk averse, nasty hells play a stronger role in your decision.
I did not, however, account for religions that allowed members of other religions into their heavens, or for religions that allow you to do make-up work after death (Limbo in Catholicism, Spirit Prison in Mormonism, etc.) Presumably the more exclusive the religion, the more eager you should be to enlist.
I still have no idea how to handle reincarnation.
Ha! My test said I'm empathetic as hell. Take that, you hard-hearted, non-empathizing bastards!
>> While there are numerous problems with the curriculum, isn't teaching students to be skeptical of government a good thing? If you blindly follow what the government says, democracy in a free society falls apart.
"Skepticism" is always good. Skepticism demands a desire to look at all the evidence as objectively as possible, to try to come to your own conclusions, and to be willing to recognize the possibility that you could be wrong.
The Texas curriculum has nothing to do with skepticism. Their school board doesn't want open-minded questioning of everything; they want cynicism about a few specific things that suit their agenda. That's clear from their public pronouncements and from the substance of the changes.
Believe that the founding fathers were of a single mind, and that they intended for America to be a Christian nation.
Learn well that government programs are always too expensive and that they always hurt those whom they are intended to help.
The free market is the greatest system of prosperity that God has given to man on the face of the Earth. It never hurts those whom it is intended to help.
Be cynical about those who oppose Israel, but never question the historical justice of the country's establishment.
Republicans are awesome. Never question that Republicans are awesome. Remember who freed the slaves? That was us! Republicans. Awesome. Are you writing this down? It will be on the test.
Now, you can't come up with a curriculum without taking certain historical questions for granted. If we took nothing for granted, your history course would end the year exactly where it began: debating the existence of Christopher Columbus. You have to teach history as the facts indicate that it happened, and teach critical thinking skills along the way. But there is no excuse for coming up with a curriculum which is blatantly contrafactual.
I would happily put Zimmerman's A People's History of the United States up against any textbook following the Texas guidelines, and have a diverse group of educators and historians compare them for quality and accuracy.
Sorry for waiting a week to reply. I'm sure you felt the lack most keenly.
Whether utility is personal or communal is arguable, but it is also irrelevant to my argument. If I can increase my own wealth (however I may define it) by enslaving you, and I have the power to do so, then there is advantage to me to enslave you. Whatever losses you -- or society as a whole -- suffer by your being enslaved, advantage accrues to me. It's called an externality, a bedrock principle of economics.
>> Morals don't come from God, they come from reality, there is a reason why we seek individual freedom, it must have provided an evolutionary advantage, most likely through the ability of maximizing personal utility, which maximized group output.
This statement shows a deep misunderstanding of history, because slavery is in fact common throughout history, and not just in crappy failures of societies. The Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Maya, the Aztecs, etc., were all incredibly wealthy societies, and they were all built on expropriated labor. I'm a bit annoyed that I have to explicitly state that this was a tragic, immoral thing, as though I might feel otherwise.
The statement also contradicts the claim you made earlier, where you mocked me for being so stupid as to think that there was such a thing as "group output." All utility is personal, remember?
You were wrong then, and right now. There is such a thing as collective/group utility. There are many different ways to measure it, depending on what you're trying to maximize. Average happiness? Average wealth? Likelihood of a long-lasting, resilient society? Ecosystem protection? However you try to benchmark it, there are activities that contribute more to the goal than others.
You run into the same troubles trying to measure personal utility. You can't say that people following their whims automatically create the highest personal utility for them. Even the most ardent libertarian will rant about how children need to be taught about the importance of self-discipline, respect for others, and the ability to delay gratification, which indicates that people often get themselves in trouble by following their desires. For a list of the other, well-documented deficiencies in our ability to figure out how to make ourselves happy, read "Stumbling on Happiness."
Your whole argument boils down to:
1) I think personal freedom is the highest good.
2) I am a product of evolution.
3) Therefore, evolution thinks personal freedom is the highest good.
4) Hey, take it up with science. I'm just the messenger.
Unlike you, I would never claim that evolution is the arbiter of morality. That's a dangerously stupid meme you're tossing around there.
>> This requires a priori knowledge that I am best at making widgets. Maybe I am better at something else, only your racist mind can't fathom that. Or perhaps along comes a new piece of technology (such as steam locomotives, the cotton gin, etc.) that suddenly makes me more efficient at doing something else, which I would certainly think about and perhaps change my job, but you are enslaving me, so I can't. Infact, I might want to work for a more efficient employer who can afford to pay me more, but you enslave me and keep me from making free market choices.
If you had been plucked from a society which didn't have anything resembling a free market (say, a tribe in 1800-era Africa), then your arguments are moot. You never would have had the opportunity to work for that other, more efficient employer. Were you not a slave, having your labor stolen from you by your owner, you would have been back home, living in a subsistence economy. You probably would have been happier for it, but our market was blind to your happiness, since you weren't paying it for the chance to be happy.
I'm not arguing -- nor have I ever argued -- that slavery was anything but an abomination. What you probably don't recognize is that, while you are certainly an abolitionist,
Sorry for the delay in replying. I see what you mean. But to say that classroom time is "wasted" is to ignore the primary purpose of public education: to warehouse kids so that adults can do economically rewarding work.
Call me cynical. I don't like it, but I think it's true, and any talk about teaching kids more efficiently does have to grapple with the knock-on effects to greater society.
I'm sorry, but your argument is 99.44% full of fail.
Let's build a toy economy, wherein there are two agents (you and me) and two jobs. You create 100 units of value for every day you spend making widgets, and 20 units of value for every day you spend writing. I create 20 units of value for every day spent making widgets, and 10 units of value for every day I spend writing. According to standard comparative advantage, we should both be making widgets. But you like writing, and do that instead of making widgets. So the economy hobbles along at 40 units/day.
Now let's open up a third job category: slaver. By forcing you to make widgets, I can pocket 100 units every day (minus care and feeding of you). The economy is more productive because now everyone is at maximum utility. It would be irresponsible for me not to enslave you, right?
Now replace "you" with African natives, "me" with American southerners, "writing" with tribal life in Africa, and "making widgets" with "harvesting cotton," and there you have it.
Arguments against slavery should be based entirely on the immorality of slavery. The only reason you're trying to argue any other grounds is to defend the ability of the free market to always deliver beneficial outcomes, regardless of the rhetorical contortions required. By doing so, you're arguing that most societies throughout history took part in a wildly suboptimal, self-immolating practice.
Any argument that slavery always takes the economy away from maximum utility rests on the assumption that there is only one possible maximizing function. But there are many to choose from. Maximum GDP. Maximum self-reported happiness. Minimum number of people below some absolute consumption threshold. A function that maximizes absolute GDP times some income inequality coefficient. A function that maximizes expected happiness over fifty years, or five thousand. Minimum environmental damage. Each one says something vastly different about how your economy should behave.
But unless you begin with the assumption that the happiness of participants matters (which economists generally don't do, because they wrongly assume that people know how to make themselves happy) then yes, you can "improve" the economy by forcing people into a life of slavery.
Expropriating the value of another person's work is generally always beneficial to the expropriator, regardless of whether or not the economy as a whole deviates from "maximal utility" as a result. So even if you could show that slavery is economically suboptimal (which I doubt you can), there is nothing in unfettered capitalism to prevent it from happening.
P.S.: Mises and Hayek were idiots. It's clear that the free market does a terrible job of valuing natural resources. Under the free market, oil, water, natural gas, etc., are valued not as assets but as revenue streams, with values proportional to the maximum rate of extraction. That's like treating a bank account as a revenue stream, with a value exactly proportional to the maximum daily withdrawal rate. Add some Herman Daly to your economics readings, expand your horizon beyond conspiracy theorist economics.
Um, shouldn't you fix the K-12 system *before* you axe the classes that make up for their shortfalls?
Or do you get off on the idea of people not being able to recover from the mistakes and limited opportunities of childhood?
I don't think "a sense of urgency" promotes educational achievement at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. As I said in another post, Finland kicks our ass in public education, despite:
1) having a hefty social safety net that shields citizens from the dangers of unemployment and poverty.
2) having a relatively narrow gap between poor and rich, so the financial rewards of doing well in school are less.
3) having a substantially larger number of youth who see trade school as a viable alternative to secondary education. Why do well in subjects you don't plan on seeing again?
You would think that, if fear of poverty was a powerful motivator for educational excellence, the picture would be roughly the opposite.
Thank you! Finally, somebody says it.
If only degree holders have a shot at a decent middle class life, and people are complaining about too many people getting degrees, well, it's easy to connect the dots.
>> The concept of an "oversupply of labor" is ridiculous. That's like saying a country has an oversupply of coal, or timber, or gold.
And that, friends, is the idiocy of treating labor as just another commodity. Labor is only an asset when they have something useful to do. But feast or famine, they need to be fed, sheltered, educated, and provided health care. It's an expensive proposition, and it's no wonder that some countries just don't bother.
When you cut your cost for any other resource, the whole economy benefits. When you cut your labor costs, you must either find something of equal or greater value for the labor to do, else you create human suffering in proportion to the cutback.
No such thing as an oversupply of labor? Tell that to Zimbabwe, which has a 90% unemployment rate.
Do you know how much the life expectancy *dropped* in the decade after the Soviet Union fell and the country transitioned to a market economy? Look it up. Frankly, most Russians were better off under the old system.
As for "facts," please show me the numbers. The ones that show that strong social safety nets and income redistribution lead to unstable societies.
The USA has a poor social safety net and minimal redistribution. We also have among the highest crime rates, the highest obesity rates, the worst public education system, the highest teen pregnancy rates, and the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized nation. Countries like Japan, Norway, Iceland, etc., do the opposite, and score at the top of those same measurements of social well being.
So, your numbers, sir.
So, I'm born poor, work like hell through high school, take out massive student loans to pay for college, then see my one chance at breaking out of the poverty cycle blown because the career path I gambled on five years ago suddenly has too many applicants?
I'm lost, because I haven't seen anything proposed that remotely sounds like "letting the government decide what jobs we have." But you seem to have no concern for the massive waste of human life that happens when people educate themselves for jobs they're never going to find. It's especially tragic when a bright, talented person works hard, ends up saddled with student loans, and ends up doing the sort of menial job she would have been doing had she skipped college.
There is a huge difference between having the government "telling us to be comrades" and the government saying that you have to pay the people in your employ a decent wage. One is about personal conscience, the other is about curtailing your ability to exploit your fellow citizens.
By your reasoning, it's also not the government's job to regulate banks to ensure that they're safe places for consumers to park their money. Why should they protect investors from disappointment? Investors will learn that their choice of institutions was unwise, they'll move to a different bank, and that's perfectly fine.
It makes perfect sense... so long as you ignore the deep disappointment and human tragedy that comes from the words "they'll move to a different bank."
Or they could C) manipulate the money supply to ensure that we always have at least 5% of able-bodied Americans out of work, so that no matter how crappy the wages you're offering are, there is always somebody desperate enough to take you up on it.
Follow that up with D), lobbying congress to make sure that the minimum wage laws stay low. Add in E) threatening to take your entire trash-generating factory overseas if your trash haulers try to unionize.
Your point misses the broader point: the garbage would need to be picked up even if we had an ironclad trash collector's union that demanded $100K/year and six weeks vacation. Ooh, and full dental. It would also get picked up if we trashed the laws against child labor and made you compete with your own nine year old for the job. The question isn't whether capitalism "works" in the sense of matching supply to demand. If supply meets demand at a price that is so low that the people doing the work are too poor to present themselves creditably to the rest of society, then capitalism is failing in its broader social obligations.
Look at actual organized crime syndicates. They're not based on either official government support or the production of a superior product. And yet it can take decades to build a case against them.
Also, it's not obvious why the section of government in charge of enforcing "the rule of law" would be less corruptible than the sections of government that oversee the interference you describe in b).
Hell, corporations already commit all manner of crimes to get or keep market share. Far more often than they get caught or prosecuted for it.
I had no idea the Geico Gecko was such a douchebag. I'm switching to State Farm or something.
Thank you for an outstanding contribution to this thread.
But when the shoe is on the other foot, and that foot is the foot of a sweatshop worker who gets paid a dollar a day for creating thousands of dollars of value for some corporate clothing outlet, suddenly the question isn't, "How does her salary stack up to all the value she's creating," but "What's the minimum amount we can get away with paying her?"
I don't care if Tiger Woods has a unique, singular talent that sells hundreds of billions worth of golf swag every year. He's a grown man who gets paid to fly around to exotic locales and knock a tiny ball around. I doubt many athletes would complain about making a hundred grand a year, if that were the going rate.
As for CEOs, it's nearly impossible to tell how well they're leading their respective companies, and literally impossible to guess how they'd be doing with someone else at the helm. There is, however, ample evidence that CEOs and boards of directors collude to get each other cushy, can't fail contracts. If they were so sure they were creating real value, they'd happily agree to contracts where their compensation was tied to the long-term performance of the company.
>> the market cap of HP went up by over $1 billion the day she resigned.
Citation?
I mean, I believe you. But I'd love to throw that one in a few Republican faces.
Regardless of anything else, would *you* personally hire someone who had been held back three times in their K-12 career?
Teachers know that there's a stigma to being held back, which is why they look for any excuse to keep pushing kids forward. Sometimes their hopes are rewarded, and the kid actually does pull things together in high school.
Show me a society where kids don't get branded for life when they get held back, and I'll show you a society whose teachers are willing to hold kids back.
His point was that the K-12 system doesn't always turn out functional illiterates. I think he made a strong case.
And I'm just going to go on the record and say, you know what? College calculus wasn't all that hard. I had to study a lot, of course. But it had a visiospatial component that programming doesn't. So for me, programming was harder. I'm sure others have found the opposite to be the case.
Read "The Spirit Level", then get back to me.
Never mind. You won't. So let me summarize: within the industrialized world, there is almost no correlation between average income and positive social goods like long life, good health, good education, low teen pregnancy rates, and social trust. But there is a strong correlation between income equality and those same goods. Societies with little income inequality (Japan, Norway, France, etc.) do very well, while countries with huge income inequality (U.S., Singapore, etc.) do very poorly. And absolute income does almost nothing to protect a country from those ill effects.
Do you think that Americans' uniquely high levels of obesity come about because none of the other countries can afford to fill their stomachs? That's absurd. In every industrialized nation, food accounts for a small fraction of the average person's budget. They could eat much, much more if they wanted. No, Americans are obese because an unequal society is a society full of stressors, and food is a natural coping mechanism. The idea of "comfort food" is a reality, proven by numerous studies. Also, stressed out people are more sedentary.
Let me pose a question, to see just how well your right-wing model of reality is calibrated:
Take two wealthy, industrialized societies. In society A, the price for not getting a good education is a life of poverty and shame. In society B, there is no reason to fear poverty because the government provides generous welfare benefits.
In society A, the wealthiest people make ten to twenty times as much as the poorest people do, so the rewards for being ambitious and doing well in school are huge. In society B, the wealthiest members of society only make a few times what the poorest do, so there is little financial incentive to do well in school.
In society A, polls of high school students show that almost all of them want to attend college. In society B, a large fraction of the students say that they'd be happy with trade school.
No surprise, society A is the U.S., society B is Finland, and despite what a social darwinist right winger would say are strong disincentives against performing well in school -- no chance at great wealth if you succeed, no risk of poverty if you fail -- Finnish kids outperform American kids by a wide margin (a gap that is even wider for the poorest kids).
It's almost as though giving kids security about their future and their place in society leads to a more conducive learning environment. But no, that's crazy.
If it were just a measure of life expectancy, then you might have made a showing with your arguments. But how do you explain why "impoverished" Europe outperforms us in:
* Life expectancy
* infant mortality
* educational outcomes
* obesity
* crime rate
* teen pregnancy
* measures of social trust
* measures of life satisfaction
* homelessness rates
* the status of women and minorities
Further, why are differences in income inequality between the fifty states also predictive of their performance on these same benchmarks?
Do those leading the deny/delay/"the science isn't settled" charge not also standing to make Sagans of dollars? If you're going to assume that a monetary interest devastates the credibility of the AGW side, you're going to have to explain why your skepticism is so selective.
>> There may be, in fact, an AGW crisis looming that threatens mankind. Unfortunately, the sloppy and ideologically- and politically-driven "science" and election-campaign-like tactics using personal attacks, etc have completely wrecked the debate and delayed or killed any chance of doing anything about it for years or decades.
Ask any police officer. They get this exact same reasoning from every guy they arrest for assaulting his wife. The occasional arrogance and poor judgment by a few scientists -- in the face of a steady deluge of viciousness and stupidity from their opponents -- does nothing to undermine the legitimacy of the science.
>> The world just isn't going to give up many trillions in wealth, sacrifice many lives, reduce individual freedoms, lose national sovereignty, and destroy the standard of living of many millions without solid, verifiable, and dire reasons. This has only reinforced skepticism.
According to the Stern Report, the investments needed to mitigate warming will only be a couple percent of world GDP, whereas the effects of climate change itself could amount to 20% of GDP. If we were measuring accurately, and calculating the value of burning fossil fuels by including the additional risk every ton brings -- and it's poor economics not to -- then suddenly fighting climate change is like printing money, and burning oil is like burning money.
Before I invest any more effort in you, I need to know: Are you a denier or a skeptic?
>> Right now there are large margins of error and much disagreement about exactly how "much" climate change we will experience.
While there is a lot of uncertainty over how the climate will react to a given input of CO2, there is much, much more uncertainty over how much CO2 we'll pump out in the first place. If we don't have the political will to cut emissions, we get a lot of warming. If we cut quickly and dramatically, we get only "a little" warming. So the uncertainty lies not in the models, but in ourselves.
Negative results are often inherently interesting and highly publishable. If someone built a decent model that performs well against past data, but then predicts a slow cool in the future, scientists would be trampling each other to figure out what was wrong with it. The harder it resisted being "fixed", the more interesting it would be. You seem to be insinuating that there are actually dozens of reliable models that have been buried by the establishment. Sorry, they just don't have that big of shovels.
Sure, science has a culture, but it's not a culture of blind acceptance of received wisdom. Every year, tens of thousands of new grad students pop up, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from overturning the consensus. If the science was as blatantly wrong as the deniers claim, it wouldn't stand long before that sort of assault.