The Stupid! It Burns! (pot/kettle edition)

Atheism: A Belief in Unbelief

The challenge of endeavouring to debate atheists, secularists or other non-Christians is the deceptive machinations they adopt. They will name-call, misattribute comments or positions to their opponent, and drop out of the discussion when their assertions are called into question. Others will cherry-pick scripture or comments taken out of context, or shoehorn favoured talking points into unrelated issues. Most condescendingly marginalize the Christian by suggesting their faith makes them too irrational to debate with; and they carefully craft a premise that automatically discounts the Christian worldview, accusing their adversary of being hateful or not grounded in reality.

I do respect the atheist who at least makes attempts to join the dialogue. It’s just that I find it tiresome to be respectful enough to engage in a debate only to be met with ad hominem attacks rather than genuine debate.

Sigh. There goes another irony meter. Happily, I buy them in bulk.

Maxine Udall dies

Dr. Alison Snow Jones, aka Maxine Udall, Girl Economist, passed away suddenly on Monday, January 17, 2011. Although she was a capitalist economist through and through, she brought a clear and distinct moral vision to economics, and asked many of the same uncomfortable questions that led me to communism.

The Stupid! It Burns! (sorry excuse edition)

Is P. Z. Myers a sorry excuse for an atheist?

I have said many times before that the New Atheists are a pale imitation of the old atheists of late 19th and early 20th centuries who were not simply cultural barbarians, but men widely learned beyond science, most of whom actually understood much of what they criticized. The Thomas Huxleys and H. L. Menckens have, alas, been replaced by the likes of Myers and Richard Dawkins. ...

Where are the atheists now who can come with lines like Huxley's, "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science like snakes around the cradle of Hercules"? Or Mencken's "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing"?

They were wrong, of course, but they were magnificently, gloriously wrong--unlike Myers and his ilk, who, when they go wrong (which is not infrequent), do it with an unfortunate lack of rhetorical sophistication. If you're going to be wrong, you should at least provide your audience with something to marvel at.

You have to hand it to the religious: By the standards of the last sentence quoted above, they have performed magnificently.

The Predator State

Mark Thoma quotes a review of The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, by James K. Galbraith in an upcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Issues:

While conservatives toyed with laissez-faire, they quickly abandoned it in all important areas of policy-making. For them, it now serves as nothing more than an enabling myth, used to hide the true nature of our world. Ironically, only the progressive still takes the call for “market solutions” seriously, and this is the major barrier to formulating sensible policy. ...

In truth, all economies are always and everywhere planned—for the simple reason that planning is the use of today’s resources to meet tomorrow’s needs, something that all societies must do if they are going to survive—so the only question is who is going to do the planning, and to whom are the benefits going to flow? There are still a few true believers (principled conservatives that Jamie compares to noble savages in the political wilderness), but most conservatives realized that there is no conflict between “big government” and “the market” as they abandoned the myth but usurped the “free market” label. All we are left with is the liberal who embraces the myth out of fear of being exposed as a heretic, a socialist, or a fool. Thus, the liberal pines to “make the market work better”, never challenging the view (abandoned by all but the most foolish conservatives) that government is the problem. ...

Wherever one finds a sector that still operates reasonably well, one finds remnants of New Deal institutions that support, guarantee, regulate, and leverage private activities, in spheres as diverse as higher education, housing, pensions, healthcare, the military-industrial complex (and the prison-industrial complex).

Fictional bank capital

Why our Fundamental Approach to Banking Regulation is Inherently Unsound

Our current approach to banking regulation exposes us to recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The good news is that because we reached an all time low in Basel II, Basel III almost has to be an improvement. The bad news is that Basel III has not reexamined the fundamental assumptions underlying the Basel process. As a result, Basel III will be a variant on the common ineffective theme of banking regulation designed by economists and the industry. ...

The fundamental disconnect with making capital requirements the pillar of banking regulation is that “capital”, “net worth”, and “equity” are accounting concepts. They have no meaning outside of accounting. Worse, they are all residual accounting concepts. Accountants do not, and cannot, count a modern bank’s “capital.” They determine assets and subtract liabilities to determine capital. The implication of that is that the accuracy of reported “capital” depends on the accuracy of the valuation of every asset and liability. That means that capital is not only an accounting concept, but the accounting concept most subject to error. For a large bank, there are literally tens of thousands of ways to use accounting to distort reported capital by enormous amounts. Beyond the obvious – understate liabilities and overstate asset values – banks are the perfect vehicles to self-fund “capital.”

Shell game

Shell game: Zero-interest policies as hidden subsidies to bank

The shell game is a roadside con as old as civilisation. This column argues that the same swindle is being performed on a massive scale at the expense of the unsuspecting taxpayer. It says that, with their near zero interest rates, central banks are effectively subsidising the banking sector – with barely a pea passed on to the public.

(via Mark Thoma)

The Stupid! It Burns! (top 10 edition)

A Top 10 List: What Atheists must Believe

1. God is imaginary. ...
2. The universe created itself. ...
3. Once there was something, dead matter evolved into living and self-aware creative beings. ...
4. The Bible writers were liars. ...
5. There’s no such thing as morality. ...
6. There’s no such thing as love. ...
7. The universe has no design. ...
8. Life has no purpose or meaning. ...
9. Human life is not sacred. ...
10. Jesus was crazy or dishonest. ...

Evolution and economics

Allen Small compares evolution and economics. (Allen at least denies Creationism and Intelligent Design; congratulations, Allen: that's two fewer stupid ideas, a 100% increase.) But Allen makes the same mistake that Christian deniers of evolution make. Evolution is not a normative judgment; it is a scientific theory. In other words, evolution is neither good nor bad; it is true. Whether you like it or not — and I really don't like evolution — evolution has happened, is happening now, and will continue to happen. So saying that Austrian economics is good because it somehow promotes evolution is nonsensical.

Governments, police and all the apparatus of "states" have themselves evolved. We have let evolution take its course — what choice do we have? — the modern world is what has resulted. The federal government of the United States, the Federal Reserve Bank, the European Union, are are products of social, political and economic evolution. It's nonsensical for Allen to object to our current system by endorsing the basis of its actual origin.

I really dislike evolution. The whole process is wasteful, inefficient, entails massive suffering. Evolution is morally abhorrent. I don't believe evolution happens because I like it; quite the contrary: I believe it in spite of my preferences. I believe evolution happens because the scientific evidence is crystal-clear. If I could wave my magic wand and make biological evolution just go away, even without a good alternative, I would do so. (Greg Egan makes a strong moral case against evolution in his story, Crystal Nights, available online.) Saying that some process is good because it mimics evolution is in my eyes saying that some process is good because it mimics cancer or the plague (both of which have, of course, evolved).

The only reason I can accept evolution calmly is that it's a feature of an unthinking, uncaring universe. But humans in society are not unthinking, we are not — with the possible exception of Allen and those like him — uncaring. We must accept evolution because its true, and we must take into account when making decisions that we have and will evolve, but just that it is true doesn't make it good. We cannot decide that the unfit will survive, but we can — through medical science, for example — change what "unfit" actually means.

Political economy, like medical ethics and environmental science, lives at the intersection of normativity and truth, and we have to be very careful at that intersection. People are tempted to let their preferences about what is good influence their beliefs about what is true. And any serious, scientifically minded student of economics sees those on both the left and right routinely succumbing to that temptation. Allen is no exception. He has a vision of what he wants, and he lets his notions about what he wants influence what he believes is true. He wants a dog-eat-dog, every man for himself society, so he cons himself into believing that such a society will — despite all the evidence to the contrary — deliver social benefits it cannot possibly deliver.

There are ineluctable truths of economics, truths that we must take into account when making our decisions. But those truths are true no matter what decisions we make; we cannot decide to make them more or less true. One of those truths is that political economies will evolve (by mechanisms similar in spirit but very different in detail from biological evolution), no matter what decisions we make. We cannot decide to not let our political economies evolve. So again, saying that Austrian economics is somehow "better" because its more "evolutionary" is nonsensical. Allen might as well be saying that we should remove guard rails on balconies because letting people fall to their deaths is more in line with the law of gravity. Putting up or taking down guard rails does not affect the law of gravity in any sense.

The normative component of political economy is a matter of what we want. I call myself a communist — and I have explained at length the kind communist I call myself — because that's what I want. Libertarians are no different, except that they talk about what they want in the language of truth. But it's about what they want. Allen can't coherently want more evolution; we have evolution whether we want it or not. Allen is probably deluding himself (he's not a particularly intelligent guy), but given social evolution as a truth, if he were coherent he would want to make specific kinds of decisions in the world.

And what decisions would he make? No collective action, except to protect his own personal privilege, or the privilege he imagines he would have were he freed from social obligations to his fellow human beings. (One really ironic feature of Libertarianism is that some of its most vocal adherents, the lower levels of the professional-managerial middle class, would be second in line to get really fucked over by the people whose power and privilege a Libertarian system would really protect. But religions have been preying on the stupid and credulous for centuries, and gaining vocal support from those they oppress.) I reject that desire: I want us to act collectively for our mutual well-being. If Allen and those like him get all butthurt that they have to pay some taxes to live in a moderately prosperous, safe and smoothly-functioning society — a society that evolved — well, I can live with that.

Plutonomy

The Plutonomy Symposium — Rising Tides Lifting Yachts

Over the last 20 years or so, in certain countries, the rich have been getting substantially richer. As Figure 1 shows, the share of the top 1% of the population of income has grown substantially in countries such as the US, UK and Canada. The countries, which apparently tolerate income inequality, are what we call plutonomy countries – economies powered by a relatively small number of rich people. ...

We should worry less about what the average consumer – say the 50 percentile – is going to do, when that consumer is (we think) less relevant to the aggregate data than how the wealthy feel and what they are doing. This is simply a case of mathematics, not morality. ...

But how do we make money out of this? Well for starters, by worrying less about “the consumer” and spending more time segmenting the data. Secondly, we can worry less about the apparent profligacy of the so-called US consumer, or their cousins in the other plutonomy countries like the UK or Canada. Finally, we can identify stocks than benefit from the concept of the rich getting richer.

Fascinating stuff.

(via Michael Perelman)

The Stupid! It Burns! (POW edition)

Atheist Alert: Do NOT Read This Book! “Unbroken”

[Laura Hildebrand's novel, Unbroken] would be a fantastic book for atheists to read, because it would challenge some of their cherished assumptions about Christianity. ...

Atheists offer many reasons why they think belief in God is not plausible, but one of their favorites is the old how could God let some tragedy happen. For some reason they think that makes the incomprehensible more comprehensible. Of course it does no such thing, but they prefer tragedy without God. For Louis his response to seeing and experiencing unmitigated evil every day for over two years [as a prisoner of the Japanese during WWII] was to plead to God for deliverance; seeing his comrades dying all around him, all the suffering and destruction of post Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan didn’t make him doubt God’s existence. ...

Isn’t it interesting how evil can lead some people to God and others away. At least Christianity offers us an explanation of why it exists and an ultimate solution for how it will eventually be banished. Atheism, not so much.

Ultimate solution? <facepalm>