The Stupid! It Burns! (redefining stupidity edition)

Atheists Redefine Atheism Rather Than Admit Defeat:

As most philosophy dictionaries and encyclopedias, like those published by Routledge and Stanford, clearly state, TRUE atheism is the belief or view that affirms there is no God or Gods. Labeling yourself an atheist but failing to make this claim means you are not an atheist. ... [atheism's] best supporting arguments [were] demolished by a revolution in theist thought beginning in about the latter half of the 20th century, led by intellectuals like [snicker] Michael Behe, Francis Collins, [chuckle] William Lane Craig, [guffaw] William Dembski, John Lennox, Alister McGrath, [snort] Alvin Plantinga, John Polkinghorne, Hugh Ross and [howls of derisive laughter, Bruce] Richard Swinburne, to name a few. ...

[A]theists will usually just make their statements then resort to angry, vitriolic, hyperbolic attacks against those who do not hold those same sentiments, including agnostics.

One cannot help but notice, of course, that the post offers no argument, just a vitriolic, hyperbolic attack against those who do not hold the same sentiments as the post author.

Real and Nominal Prices

Before I continue to talk about inflation and deflation, I want to take a detour and discuss real and nominal prices. Nominal prices are prices denominated directly in units of money; real prices are more subtle. If, as I note in my previous essay, the nominal prices of everything change all at once, by a little or by many orders of magnitude, nothing real has changed. The real height of a building remains the same whether we measure it in feet, inches meters, micrometers, or even fractions of a light-year. Economists go to great trouble to try to abstract away purely nominal prices and measure real quantities, such as Real Gross Domestic Product.

If it's so important to measure and talk about real prices, if nominal prices are as irrelevant as they seem, why not cut to the chase and do our economic transactions directly in some "real" quantity? Scientists do so all the time: They measure length in real meters, weight in real kilograms, etc.; the notion of a purely nominal measure with a varying relationship to anything real would be inconvenient and pointless*. The problem in economics, however, is that it's impossible to immediately determine real prices; whereas nominal prices are by definition immediate; they measure the immediate relations of particular commodities and factors to each other. It is only in retrospect, when we can identify how all these ever-changing relations have sorted themselves out, that we can actually identify real prices. (And economists cannot really identify real prices; they can only estimate real prices.) We can know nominal prices exactly, although we cannot know what they "really" mean; real prices by definition mean something real, but we cannot know them at all immediately, and only imperfectly in retrospect.

*I am not a scientist; it might be the case that scientists do use purely nominal measures. If so, I would very much like to know about these measures, and how scientists go about relating them to real quantities.

Physical objects — a house, a table, a cabinet full of canned goods — always have a specific real value that can be related to the nominal price at any given time: it is simply the replacement cost in present nominal price less the present nominal maintenance price. Regardless of what I nominally paid for my house ten years ago, its real value today is the nominal price of a new house minus the nominal price of fixing the house to make it of a similar quality to a new house. (If standards of quality have fallen, the maintenance price may be negative, increasing the real value of the house.) Since the real value is a function of present nominal value, we can hold the real value constant and use simple algebra to make nominal price a function of time in relation to the constant real value.

Another way of looking at real value is to look at the specifically physical components of a house.

A house requires a certain amount of lumber, wires, pipes, shingles, etc., all of which require raw materials; everything, from the extraction of the raw materials, to the manufacture and transport of the intermediate components to the final assembly of the house require a certain amount of human labor, fixed by the natural world and current levels of technology. So long as none of these components change substantially — the cost in labor of extracting materials, or manufacturing wires or pipes, etc. — change, the real value of the house will not change, even if prices overall rise or fall, changing the nominal value of the house. Of course, if the fundamental natural or technological conditions change — wood becomes more scarce, requiring more labor to satisfy marginal demand, or efficiency of production lowers the total labor cost of producing wires and switches — then the real value of the house — irrespective of the nominal value — will change.

If all wealth were held in purely real terms — in things such as houses, factories, cans of food, or even ingots of gold — then there would be no nominal prices, and inflation and deflation would be meaningless. The problem comes in when we start to socially construct assets with purely nominal value. I'll talk about the effect of these assets in another post.

Modern religion

The trouble with basing values on religions, though, is that the premises of most of them are pure wishful thinking; you either have to refuse to scrutinise those premises - take them on faith, declare that they "transcend logic" - or reject them. As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more "modern" view than the average believer. But by the time you've "modernised" something like Christianity - starting off with "Genesis was all just poetry" and ending up with "Well, of course there's no such thing as a personal God" - there's not much point pretending that there's anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you're an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God.

— Greg Egan

The Power of Green

The Power of Green

(It's not really an endorsement; it's for my friend, Joe.)

The Stupid! It Burns! (demwit edition)

No, it's not a typo in the title. From the aptly named blog, DemWit, we have On considering atheists:

What I question is [atheists'] need to attack the beliefs of others.

Millions of people around this world find solace and strength and peace in their religious beliefs and great comfort in the power of prayer. Why would any reasonable human being deny them this?

The Stupid! It Burns! (whimsical edition)

Practical Nonsense

The problem with atheism is that it has no standard. Actions follow from whimsical readings and various influences. Your actions, as an athiest [sic], have a reason, but those reasons tell nothing about whether the action is right. They tell nothing of whether anyone else should do the same as you.

If we wanted an objective standard, we could just do what the Christians do and make one up.

Why deflation is a Very Bad Thing part 1

In the long run, inflation and deflation (negative inflation) don't matter. At all. In the short run, though, they do matter. A lot.

Macroeconomic inflation, remember, is a change in aggregate price levels; by "aggregate", economists mean all prices, including wages, rent, interest and profits. If the price of beef goes up, but all other prices stay about the same, that's not inflation. There are a lot of reasons why the price of some individual good can change without any change in overall price levels. For example, market forces or government regulations might require beef producers to spend more money on healthier feed or veterinary examinations, causing the absolute cost of producing beef to rise. There might also be a temporary shortage of beef, causing supply to be allocated to those who prefer beef the most, i.e. those are willing to forego more of other goods and pay more for beef. Similarly, improvements in efficiency can lower the absolute cost, or a temporary surplus would cost the cost to fall until the supply was adjusted. None of these phenomena have much to do with macroeconomic inflation. Inflation is a change in all prices and wages, not just one price or another.

This is an extremely critical point. A person can go into the grocery store and observe that the price of beef has just gone up, and say, "Wow! inflation is killing me!" He would often be wrong. When economists measure inflation — and I must repeat: inflation means changes in all price levels, the aggregate price level — they tend to exclude (at least in the short run) products with a lot of price volatility, such as, well, food. The price of food is dependent on an enormous number of factors: weather and climate conditions, consumer tastes, government policy; inflation — changes in the aggregate price level — is only one factor out of many. It is possible to have the price of food, oil* and other volatile prices go dramatically in directions other than the overall aggregate trend in prices. There are a lot of ways to measure inflation (core inflation, trimmed mean levels, rolling multi-year averages) but all of these measures try to factor out extremely volatile prices.

*And derivative products such as gasoline.

In the long run, inflation doesn't matter. The long run is by definition as long as it takes for all prices to adjust. We can see that inflation doesn't matter in the long run by imagining that the "long run" is instantaneous. Imagine that the government decides to add a zero to everything: to all prices, all wages, all bank accounts, all loans... everything. Yesterday, Alice makes $20/hour, has a $100,000 mortgage at 6% interest for which she pays $800/month, a $1,000 credit card bill at 10% for which she pays $80/month, and buys bread in the store for $2.50 a loaf. Today, Alice makes $200/hour, has a $1,000,000 mortgage at 6% and a $8,000 payment, a $10,000 credit card bill for which she pays $800, and bread costs $25/loaf. Nothing at all about Alice's standard of living, nothing about her real economic situation, will have changed. The same is true if we have instantaneous deflation, if we knock a zero off of everything. So if we define the "long run" as "the time it takes for all prices to adjust", inflation doesn't change anything about the real economy.

But as Keynes notes, in the long run we're all dead. Inflation and deflation matter a lot in the short run. Inflation matters in the short run because all prices and wages do not change all at the same time. Not only do they not all change at the same time, there's a pattern to the changes, and this pattern itself has an effect on the real economy.

Inflation essentially "measures" the relationship between the present and the future, or more precisely our expectations about the future. Very high inflation "says" that the present is much more important than the future; very low inflation (or deflation, i.e. negative inflation) "says" that the future is much more important than the present. Moderate levels of inflation, unsurprisingly, represent a balance between the present and the future. When inflation is very high, consumers want to spend their money as quickly as possible; they will be induced to save only with very high interest rates or rates of return on profit. Because interest rates are high, businesses, which shoulder the bulk of planning for the future by investing in physical capital, will borrow or invest less. (Note that even though prices will be higher in the future, increasing the nominal return on any investment in the present, other factors, especially wages, will also have increased, also increasing the costs.)

When inflation is very high, everyone spends. When inflation is very low or negative, everyone saves. But economics is built on trade. We want the people who want to save to trade with people who want to spend. If everyone wants to spend or save, there's no trade happening, which is (usually) bad.

I'll go more into the dynamics of inflation and deflation in another post.

2% Sellout

Mr. Obama’s Most Recent "2%" Sellout is his Worst Yet:

Now that President Obama is almost celebrating his willingness to renew the tax cuts enacted under George Bush for the super-rich ten years ago, it is time for Democrats to ask themselves how strongly they are willing to oppose an administration that looks increasingly like Bush-Cheney III. Is this what they expected by his promise of an end to partisan politics?

It is a reflection of how one-sided today’s class war has become that Warren Buffet has quipped that “his” side is winning without a real fight being waged. No gauntlet has been thrown down over the trial balloon that the president and his advisor David Axelrod have sent up over the past two weeks to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% for “just” two more years. For all practical purposes the euphemism “two years” means forever – at least, long enough to let the super-rich siphon off enough more money to bankroll enough more Republicans to be elected to make the tax cuts permanent.

The Stupid! It Burns! (bullshit meter edition)

Is the New Atheism Really Affecting People’s Belief in God?



"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

The Stupid! It Burns! (evidentiary edition)

Evidence for Athiesm

The question I wish to ask is this: How can the New Atheists employ evidentialist principles to argue that religious belief is irrational if they are unwilling to apply those same principles to atheism?

A little (philosophical) knowledge really is a dangerous thing.