Neuroscience is racist

It looks like Sam Harris is going to be very, very disappointed where the science of brain imaging experiments looks to be headed:

Following up on the cultural differences between Asians and Americans, one study published in Neuroimage found that when faced with the same image, people’s neural responses are totally different. Scientists found that when American subjects viewed a silhouette in a dominant posture (standing up, arms crossed) their brain’s reward circuitry sparked. Not so for Japanese subjects. For the Japanese, their reward circuitry fired when they saw a submissive silhouette (head down, arms at sides). This physiological response matches a well-known behavioral difference: Americans favor and encourage dominant behavior. Japanese culture reinforces submissive culture.

So, instead of neuroscience providing a scientific means of defining morality outside of religion, it looks as if it will be providing a scientific means of defining racial and/or cultural superiority outside of morality. All of Harris's reasoning in support of scientific morality, which was constructed in support of his hypothesis of differences in religious and non-religious beliefs and put forth in The Moral Landscape, can now quite reasonably be utilized in support of scientific racial and cultural superiority.

How fortunate for everyone that his reasoning is so completely flawed.

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The Fifth Definition

Paul Krugman explains why Keynesian economists have now begun to switch to a fifth definition of inflation, "core inflation", that is distinct and increasingly distant from the Keynesian school's theoretical, official, textbook, and practical definitions.

Since I’m taking a break from shoveling, I thought I might take a few minutes to address an issue that seems to confuse many people: the idea of core inflation. Why do we need such a concept, and how should it be measured? So: core inflation is usually measured by taking food and energy out of the price index; but there are alternative measures, like trimmed-mean and median inflation, which are getting increasing attention.

First, let me clear up a couple of misconceptions. Core inflation is not used for things like calculating cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security; those use the regular CPI.  And people who say things like “That’s a stupid concept — people have to spend money on food and gas, so they should be in your inflation measures” are missing the point. Core inflation isn’t supposed to measure the cost of living, it’s supposed to measure something else: inflation inertia....

The standard [core inflation] measure tries to do this by excluding the obviously non-inertial prices: food and energy. But are they the whole story? Of course not — and standard core measures have been behaving a bit erratically lately. Hence the growing preference among many economists for measures like medians and trimmed means, which exclude prices that move by a lot in any given month, presumably therefore isolating the prices that move sluggishly, which is what we want.

And then these great minds of the dismal science wonder why their models don't work in either a predictive or an explanatory manner. Of course, the reason they need to keep coming up with these additional "definitions" is because not because the "measures have been behaving a bit erratically" but because the conclusions that are based on the definitions don't line up with what is visibly taking place in the actual economy.

The red line is the standard "core inflation" CPI-FLENS measure that Krugman is citing in his second "Core Logic" post; the blue line is the standard CPI-U.  However CPI-FLENS cannot possibly measure the inflation inertia because the practical application of the various Keynesian definitions of inflation requires something to measure those price changes against.  Simply removing some of the more volatile (and generally higher) prices from the price index only smooths out the price index while tending to reduce it.  Since inflation - and therefore its inertia - depends upon the comparison of those price changes with changes in the production of goods and services, (in practical terms, with GDP minus the price increase of one's preferred index, be it CPI-U or CPI-FLENS), anything that leaves GDP out of the equation cannot be considered the inflation inertia anymore than the mere change in prices can be considered inflation if it does not take the change in production into account.

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Republicans plot betrayal

The incoming House Majority Leader is considering whether he can get away with keeping Ron Paul out of the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee panel that oversees monetary policy in order to protect the Federal Reserve from any uncomfortable oversight:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn't final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.

If this happens, it will be a strong indication that the Tea Party is either going to split in two or split from the Republican Party.  And this should tell you all you need to know about whether the House Republicans are going to govern any differently than they did the last time they were in power.

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That's why she's the frontrunner for 2012

Mike Potemra posts an email from Claire Berlinski:

Palin is probably the only GOP candidate Obama could beat right now. She runs, 90-year-olds who have never dreamt of voting in their lives will register for the first time to vote against her. And I wouldn’t blame them. I don’t hate her, as some think. I just cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would look at her and think, “I trust her to hold the most powerful office in America at a time of uniquely grave national peril.” It’s mind-boggling.

It's not mind-boggling, it's ludicrous. Not the idea of Palin winning the Republican nomination, but the idea that the opinion of a Jewish woman living in Paris, whose family connection to America is but a single generation, is even remotely relevant to the probable primary voting behavior of American Christians living in Iowa, Florida, Texas, and Ohio. And since the "uniquely grave national peril" comes from the Federal Reserve, not a few third world goathumpers who haven't managed to do so much as take out a single Christmas tree or lemonade stand in nine years, Palin will almost surely continue to become more popular because she is the only Republican politician besides Ron Paul who has been speaking out against Bernanke's futile attempts to keep the insolvent banks afloat.

I am not a Palin fan myself; I'm a libertarian and Ron Paul is the only Republican for whom I would vote. But Palin has the political starpower and common sense synchronicity with popular opinion that the other candidates completely lack. I mean, Newt Gingrich? Trig Palin has a better chance of being elected president in 2012 than that fat little troll does. John Bolton? Mitt Romney couldn't even beat the corpse of John McCain. The only Republican who looks capable of beating Palin for the nomination right now is the New Jersey governor, Christie. That's why I expect to see the moderate elite fire up a Draft Christie campaign soon.

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So much for inflation

Apparently QE III is in the cards:

In an effort to thwart counterfeiting, the US Government has implemented a $100 bill design so difficult to print even the U.S. Treasury cannot print them. The government needs to burn $110 billion in flawed $100 bills, more than 10% of all existing cash. The cost of printing the flawed bills was a mere $120 million.

If inflation is derived from the money supply, then burning 10% of the the entire currency stock should cause prices to fall, right? Given the current M2 figure of $8,767 billion, this bonfire of the Franklins should result in an immediate 1.3% reduction in the rate of inflation.

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Mailvox: the daughter of the Devil and other emails

SF presents a succinct case:

Two wrongs don't make a right, you fool.

That may be true, but the more salient point is that one right does. Bill helpfully illustrates the importance of owning a dictionary, or at least a passing familiarity with the English language:

Back in the real world, this was known as treason and the perpetrator would tried and hung. That is the way that true Americans feel about the betrayal of their country. These are also the ones that have fought and served their country, something, more than likely unknown to the likes of you and your kind. Sad that people have died defending the rights of traitors!

It is sad that Julian Assange should have so treasonously betrayed all those Americans who died defending his rights when the British invaded Australia... or something. Important rights like the freedom of speech, which that traitor should have known better than to exercise! Seriously, what is it with these conservatives who can't seem to figure out that you cannot commit treason against a country to which you owe no allegiance?

GL, on the other hand, quite liked the column:

I purposefully read Barbara Simpsons article before yours and my mind was going off like it was Chinese New Year. I wanted so much to e-mail her and either yell in her face to shut her stupid illogical lying mouth or conversely to quietly tell her how wrong she was on so many levels. Fortunately I read your article before I did and now my mind is perfectly at ease. You said what I would have wanted to say if only I had been articulate, smart and cruel enough to say it.

And then there was this masterpiece of reason from JT:

I usually disagree with just about everything you say and usually just toss off your doffus opinions as probable doobie influence, but this time I so vehemently disagree I have to comment. You sit behind your PC in, no doubt, your cushy chair in your very cushy home, just like that little weasel you think is a hero, and make comments that are so unreal I can smell the pot. Join the military, put yourself in danger—not just the danger of getting sores on your butt by sitting too long in one position behind your PC screen—real danger—people shooting at you, people lobbing grenades at you, people hiding behind women and children and firing at you and you may have some kind of credibility.

But since you have never done anything to put yourself in that kind of danger, as my son has done by serving on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have no idea how disgusting your hero worship of this little piece of vermin is. You are as disgusting as the Wikileaks Weasel. I used to think that libertarians were just as dangerous as liberals. I’ve now had to change my mind. You’re even more dangerous.

To which I responded: "Julian Assange is not putting anyone in any danger that George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not already put them. The fact that the truth may be dangerous does not justify the lie. You talk about others being disgusting, but you are daughter to the Devil, the Father of Lies."

I am dangerous, Ice...man.

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Voxiversity 5.2: Inflation and Keynesian Economics

This should be an interesting discussion. The conclusion will initially strike some as a priori insane, but I encourage everyone to consider the empirical evidence before issuing a diagnosis. I may need to revisit this one after the critics have shared their presumably constructive input, so I look forward to hearing everyone's take on it.

In case you're wondering why these esoteric and pedantic debates over definitions are of interest to me or why they are important, consider this recent interview with Ben Bernanke. The relevant statement is highlighted in bold.

Pelley: Some people think the $600 billion is a terrible idea.

Bernanke: Well, I know some people think that but what they are doing is they're looking at some of the risks and uncertainties with doing this policy action but what I think they're not doing is looking at the risk of not acting.

Pelley: Many people believe that could be highly inflationary. That it's a dangerous thing to try.

Bernanke: Well, this fear of inflation, I think is way overstated. We've looked at it very, very carefully. We've analyzed it every which way. One myth that's out there is that what we're doing is printing money. We're not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we're doing is lowing interest rates by buying Treasury securities. And by lowering interest rates, we hope to stimulate the economy to grow faster. So, the trick is to find the appropriate moment when to begin to unwind this policy. And that's what we're gonna do."

It should be clear that the Fed Chairman does not define inflation in any of the Keynesian manners described in this video. But is his definition correct? That is the $600 billion question.

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WND column

Wikileaks is Freedom in Action

I write not to condemn Julian Assange, but to praise him. More than that, I write to accuse those so-called conservatives who have waxed hysterical in their contemptible fulminations against Assange and his organization, Wikileaks, of being ideological frauds, enemies of democracy and false friends of human liberty.

One of the favorite accusations made by the totalitarian bootlickers who condemn Assange's free speech is that by making information available to the public about the actions of certain individuals that were recorded by other individuals, he has blood on his hands due to some mysterious transitive property that no one has yet managed to rationally explain. And the idea that an Australian citizen can be a traitor to the United States of America is simply absurd. These are abuses of logic so severe that it is a wonder the corpses of Aristotle, Descartes and Gödel do not spin right out of their graves and tear those making these ridiculous arguments limb-from-limb in righteous zombie-philosopher retribution.

ADDENDUM: For an example of incoherent conservative insanity on the subject, read my WND colleague Barbara Simpson's call to execute the Australian for committing "treason, with a capital 'T'" against the United States.

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VPFL Week 12

95 Bane Sidhe (8-4-0)
36 Winston Reverends (4-8-0)

89 Moundsview Meerkats (3-8-1)
32 Valders Quixotes (8-4-0)

75 Greenfield Grizzlies (6-5-1)
72 Judean Rhyneauxs (6-6-0)

49 RR Redbeards (5-6-1)
46 Blackmouth Banksters (7-5-0)

68 MS Swamp Spartans (6-5-1)
43 Meigs Marauders (5-7-0)

The Meerkats may be out of it for the season, but that doesn't mean they can't skeletonize a frontrunner. The league-leading Quixotes were shredded like a cow in the Amazon by the Piranha of the Serengeti last week, but the Meerkats remained six points shy of the scoring the rarely seen First in Points, Last in the League award, just behind the suddenly fearsome Grizzlies who have ridden the Sanchize to win four straight and move into playoff position.

Looks like a bang-up finish with six teams battling for four spots.

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Let the women work

Calculated Risk presents a chart showing that the percentage of men aged 25-54 participating in the labor force declined to a record low of 88.8% in November.  And that was BEFORE the release of the new World of Warcraft expansion.  The chart goes back to 1948 and shows that the idea women first entered the workforce en masse after WWII or in the 1970s simply isn't true; about one-third of women have always had to work.  The increase in the percentage of women participating in the workforce is predominantly the result of young women who previously got married and had children while being supported by a husband now working instead of or in addition to having a family.  The chart is also a little misleading in that it only measures to age 54.  One of the chief impacts of more women entering the workforce is that men over the age of 60, who had previously been much more inclined to work, exited the workforce en masse thanks to the establishment of Social Security and Medicare.

So, as I have often said, the primary benefit to society from employing young women is to pay for old men collecting retirement.  In return for which the societal costs include declining marriage rates, skyrocketing illegitimacy rates, lower average wages for both men and women, reduced productivity, and demographic decline.  This would not appear to be either a rational or sustainable policy for any nation, especially considering that the first attempted solution, importing third-world workers to replace the missing children, has not worked out well for any nation that has adopted it.  The choice is as stark as it is simple.  Either abandon the notion of sexual equality and return to the traditional model where 70% of women are occupied with raising families or experience complete societal collapse.

On a tangential note, I saw this in the comment's at CR's place.  I don't see it as a positive indicator: A friend picked up a hitch-hiker in the National Park last week and gave him a ride, and it turned out he was a marine that had done 3 tours in the sandbox, but apparently our military is getting picky about who they allow to re-up, and he told my friend, "I hope something happens in Korea, so I can go back to work."  It is a time-honored fact of history that when men cannot find jobs, the rulers of society attempt to keep them occupied killing people somewhere else.

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I chuckled, I did

The Washington Post issues another call for an opponent to run against Obama in the Democratic primary. To, you know, "save the Obama presidency". Right.

But there is a real way to save the Obama presidency: by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unambiguously commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration's policies. Such a candidacy would be pooh-poohed by the media, but if it gathered enough popular support - as is likely given the level of alienation among many who were the backbone of Obama's 2008 success - this campaign would pressure Obama toward much more progressive positions and make him a more viable 2012 candidate. Far from weakening his chances for reelection, this kind of progressive primary challenge could save Obama if he moves in the desired direction. And if he holds firm to his current track, he's a goner anyway.

Seriously, I don't see how you can look at what has quite clearly in the process of happening over the last six months and not realize that Obama is going to either drop out or get kicked out by the Democrats. No one, least of all the Democratic elders, are in fear of the reaction of the 11% of black voters which has nowhere else to turn and also has one of the lowest turnout rates in the electorate.

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Low hurdles

I was bemused when I checked Channel Vox this morning preparatory to uploading the next video in the inflation series and saw that it had won a YouTube award. It appears Voxiversity was #3 Most Subscribed Channel in Italia this week. Of course, I would have needed 360x more to have reached the same ranking in the USA. Clearly the next video should be entitled Victoria's Secret Economics: Alessandra Ambrosio Explains Inflation.

But since I'm on the subject, I should mention there is a slight change of plans with regards to the 5.2 video. I am extremely loathe to make a case that depends upon anyone accepting my assertions undemonstrated, so the second video will not concern the credit-money definition of inflation as I'd originally planned, but will instead demonstrate the inutility of the four - yes, four - primary Keynesian definitions of inflation. The third video will examine the Monetarist definition, and only then, once the case against the various mainstream definitions is concluded, will I explain and defend my contention that the correct definition of inflation is an increase in the money supply plus outstanding debt.

Anyhow, I'm planning to do the recording tonight and upload it sometime this weekend, in case you're interested.

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Projection Anonymous

Charles Blow initiates a futile embargo:

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive.... People on the left seem to need her, to bash her, because she is, in three words, the way the left likes to see the right: hollow, dim and mean. But since she’s feeding on the negativity, I suggest three other words: get over it.

I never cease to find it amusing watching one clueless, shallow, and ignorant individual castigate others for their clueless and shallow ignorance. While Blow is correct and the attacks from the Left and the elite moderates of the Republican party only add to Palin's already formidable popular appeal, it's far too late to declare a moratorium on discussing her. No one cares if she's hollow, (she's a POLITICIAN, after all, and is therefore hollow by definition), no one of any political sophistication believes she's any more dim than the average politician, and she's demonstrably far less mean than her critics.

The reality is that there is a high probability that Palin will win the next presidential election if she a) elects to run and b) continues to strongly align herself with the opinion of the majority of Americans. This isn't because she is a secret genius, but because intelligence is vastly overrated when it comes to the public appeal of politicians. Consider: the two most intelligent presidents of the modern era were Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. And the last two presidents whose intelligence was methodically denigrated by the media both won second terms.

The main reason Palin enjoys such strong support is very simple and obvious. People do not see her as a Wall Street whore, unlike nearly every other national politician. Yes, she publicly supported the 2008 bailouts as John McCain's running mate, but charges of hypocrisy are not going to stick because everyone knows that a vice-presidential candidate is supposed to echo the presidential candidate's opinion, not express his own. Obama, Clinton, Biden, Romney, and every other national political figure who is taken seriously as a presidential candidate are all seen as Wall Street whores, with the sole exception of the New Jersey governor, Christie. Palin may be one as well, but she is not perceived that way now.

To win in 2012, whether Obama drops out or is defeated in the Democratic primaries or not, all Palin has to do is stay on the right side of the masses on immigration and the banks. She'd do better if she'd come out against the ongoing military occupations, but she can't be harmed on the issue since every other potential rival supports them as well. She'll come in for tremendous criticism, of course, if she refuses to give way on the two central issues but as Blow is among the first to finally notice, that won't hurt her in the slightest.

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Inherit the Science

Smarmy evolutionists and socially handicapped atheists almost invariably bring up the Scopes trial when confronting religious individuals or anyone skeptical about the theory of evolution by (probably) natural selection. Of course, as is reliably the case, they know next to nothing about it, it is merely a social marker upon which they've learned to place importance in the course of their cultural indoctrination. Jonah Goldberg brings to our attention a few of the more interesting aspects of the science that the defenders of the secular faith still deem so vital to teach in public schools:

"The Races of Man. – At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest race type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America....

Improvement of Man. – If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

Eugenics. – When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics."

The Remedy. - If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.
- George William Hunter, A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (New York, 1914): pp. 193-196, 253-254, 261-263.

So, the next time someone smirks and brings up Scopes, the monkey trial, or Inherit the Wind in an attempt to assume a posture of scientific superiority, don't forget to ask them which aspect of elementary biology they deem the most important to teach to American schoolchildren, the mechanism of natural selection, the moral imperative of artificial selection, the criminalization of unfit breeding, the forcible placement of the inferior in asylums, or the supremacy of the white race.

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The climate scam is dead

Tokyo says no to Kyoto:

The brief statement, made by Jun Arima, an official in the government’s economics trade and industry department, in an open session, was the strongest yet made against the protocol by one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

He said: “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances.”

The so-called science was always fictional and fraudulent and the economic implications were clearly insane, so it's about time that the politics began to reflect those realities. As Europe enters what has started off as its coldest winter in 100 years and the global economy collapses into depression, it doesn't matter how much or how frantically the true believers in global warming wave their hands and agree to concoct new scientific consensuses. The Chicago air exchange has been vaporized and the science-scammers' gravy train is about to be buried under snow.

Remember this the next time the science fetishists tell you that a scientific consensus is something upon which you not only can, but must, rely.

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2018 and 2022

Russia? That makes a degree of sense given the way in which Russian commodity wealth is making itself felt throughout the sports world. And Vladimir Putin is nothing if not a sports enthusiast. But Qatar? It's not as if I was planning on attending the World Cup no matter where it is, but an Arab country seems like a rather unusual choice of venue given the present difficulties from Afghanistan to Iran.

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An Irish Hitler?

Economist Barry Eichengreen reconsiders the European Union:

It pains me to say this. I’m probably the most pro-euro economist on my side of the Atlantic. Not because I think the euro area is the perfect monetary union, but because I have always thought that a Europe of scores of national currencies would be even less stable. I’m also a believer in the larger European project. But given this abject failure of European and German leadership, I am going to have to rethink my position.

The Irish “program” solves exactly nothing – it simply kicks the can down the road. A public debt that will now top out at around 130 per cent of GDP has not been reduced by a single cent. The interest payments that the Irish sovereign will have to make have not been reduced by a single cent, given the rate of 5.8% on the international loan. After a couple of years, not just interest but also principal is supposed to begin to be repaid. Ireland will be transferring nearly 10 per cent of its national income as reparations to the bondholders, year after painful year.

This is not politically sustainable, as anyone who remembers Germany’s own experience with World War I reparations should know.

I like Eichengreen's work, but he is incorrect. The failure of the European Union is not a failure of French and German leadership, it is the structural failure of yet another European experiment in authoritarian, anti-democratic, centralized empire. Now, I tend to doubt that Ireland is going to develop into the 21st century version of National Socialist Germany for numerous reasons, chief among them the fact that it is an island without a navy. But given the harsh burden being imposed on the Irish people by their European and Irish governments for the foreseeable future, one can see where The Economic Consequences of the Peace might make for a timely read right about now.

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A Congress of Suckers

In which Washington D.C. is shocked, shocked, to learn that greater part of the money that was so desperately needed to save the American banks that were deemed too big to fail actually went to their European counterparts:

Foreign banks were among the biggest beneficiaries of the $3,300bn in emergency credit provided by the Federal Reserve during the crisis, according to new data on the extraordinary efforts of the US authorities to save the global financial system.

The revelation of the scale of overseas lenders’ borrowing underlines the global nature of the turmoil and the crucial role of the Fed as the lender of last resort for the world’s banking sector. However, news that banks such as Barclays of the UK, Switzerland’s UBS and Dexia of Belgium borrowed billions of dollars at favourable terms from US authorities may further anger critics already enraged about the Fed’s rescue of Wall Street....

Barclays was the biggest cumulative borrower from TAF. The UK bank, which bought the US operations of Lehman Brothers out of bankruptcy in September 2008, borrowed a cumulative $232bn from the TAF through various subsidiaries.

It's interesting to see that nearly four times more money went to the biggest European bank than to the biggest American bank. But as we've seen everywhere from Ireland and Iceland to the USA, this is always how the process of structural corruption plays out in a modern "representative democracy". The legislature forces through a pig-in-a-poke by any means necessary, threatening everything from widespread cannibalism to tanks in the streets if the legislators don't ignore the protests of the people and obediently "address the crisis". Then, a few years after the fact, it is learned that the actual purpose of the law was entirely different than the one that was provided in order to push it through the legislature.

I don't have much sympathy for the people, however. Because it doesn't matter how many times this happens, they will fall for it just as readily the moment that another crisis is announced and another solution to avert it is presented.

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Dissecting a defense of QE2

The Federal Reserve policy, that is, not the boat:

David Beckworth has offered a thoughtful, but I believe ultimately flawed, “conservative case” for the Federal Reserve’s latest round of quantitative easing. While I wholeheartedly share Professor Beckworth’s desire to see the economy improve, and share his concerns that if it does not we may end up with expanded government spending, it is hard to see QE2 as providing the environment of certainty the private sector needs in order to expand.

Professor Beckworth should be commended for clearly spelling out his assumptions. Public debate would be far more fruitful if others did the same. Let’s start with his core assumption: Because the monetary base has been expanding and there’s been little inflation and little increase in consumption, households must be hoarding money. The logic in this case is sound; I disagree with the facts.

First, the good professor argues that spending is far below trend. That is true enough as it goes, but this trend includes a massive housing bubble, where imaginary wealth fueled spending, aided by massive borrowing from abroad. The objective of our economic policies should not be to get back to the top of the previous bubble. It was this desire to replace the lost wealth of the dot-com crash that contributed to the Fed’s juicing of the housing market. All that said, consumption today is higher than at any time during the recent bubble. The primary problem facing our economy is not a lack of demand.

Like Ben Bernanke, Beckworth believes we have had no inflation. Again like the Fed, he arrives at this conclusion by subtracting out of the inflation numbers all the things that real people spend their money on, such as food and energy.

Articles like this and Beckworth's underline the importance of definitions. The money supply has been going up considerably. The CPI has been increasing, but not rapidly. Therefore, there is no inflation! (Notice that in practice, they never take production into account for the obvious reason that it is impossible to measure in any way that would be meaningful.) If we are to believe these expert economists, it doesn't matter what is happening to actual prices or outstanding debt levels, not so long as we squint very carefully at only those metrics that we believe to define the situation.

And this is why I pay attention to indicators beyond those that I personally believe to be significant, because unlike the Keynesians, I am more interested in knowing what is actually taking place than I am in manipulating the publicbolstering animal spirits. If I am incorrect and we are headed for hyperinflation rather than debt-deflation, I would certainly like to know as soon as possible. The speed and complexity of economic events means that every economist is going to be proven wrong on a regular basis. Therefore, it behooves anyone with an interest in economics to refuse to be unduly wedded to any specific understanding or definition. This does should not be confused with some sort of conceptual relativism, it is merely a recognition of the inability of even the best economic models to reflect observable reality.

In any event, Calabria is correct. There is no rational defense of quantitative easing, regardless of the way in which one chooses to define inflation. QE2 is not an economic policy, it is the bank rape of the global economy. And by the way, there is an easier way to blow apart Beckworth's case than Calabria does.

"Because the monetary base has been increasing so rapidly and there has been very little inflation, it must be the case that demand for the money must be increasing even more."

Very well. Where is that "significant portion of the money supply" upon which the dread hoarders are supposedly sitting? Have bank deposits increased significantly? Beckworth also makes a classic Keynesian blunder in saying: "It fails to recognize that for every debtor there must be a creditor." (Keynesians absolutely love this macro equivalence nonsense.) Of course, what happens when the debtor defaults....

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The brothel or the burqah

The predicted consequences of post-Christian society are already presenting themselves in Britain:

What Alibhai-Brown exposes here is not merely a sexual double-standard, but also an ethnic or religious double-standard, where Muslim men have one standard for “our girls” and another standard for white girls, who are categorically presumed to be immoral.

If Alibhai-Brown has been willing to address the vicious attitudes among (some) British Muslim men that helped foster the environment in which the Derbyshire rape-gang flourished, wouldn’t it behoove someone to examine the problems among British whites that contributed to this horror?

The pimps in Bradford who talked to Alibhai-Brown about “cheap” white girls from “the estates” — British vernacular for government low-income housing, what we Americans would call “the projects” — weren’t just making up a stereotype out of thin air. In 2008, 45% of British births were to unmarried women and, in some low-income areas, the illegitimacy rate was as high as 68%. Such figures certainly indicate that a casual attitude toward pre-marital sex is commonplace in the U.K.

All of the airy secular notions about multicultural societies, sexual equality, universal suffrage, and premarital sex are finally running into the hard brick wall of historical reality. The various hypothetical coulds and shoulds are rapidly transforming into can'ts and don'ts. Now that Christian morality has been abandoned in favor of empty moral relevance, there isn't any means of rationally arguing with the immigrant pimps who are cheefully turning out Albion's sluttish daughters while guarding their own with all the primitive paternalism of a dragon guarding his treasure.

Now, set aside your instinctive emotional reactions for a moment and think about which of the two cultures a) truly values its daughters more, and b) is likely to demographically outperform the other. Is it the one that forcibly protects young women from their own behavior or the one that aborts them, deprives them of fathers, and generally abandons them to their momentary impulses? And is there any evidence that the positive aspects of the liberation of Western women, to use the rhetorical phrase, outweigh the negative aspects when viewed from a historical perspective?

As for one common argument to which those who admit the reality of the demographic problem often resort, the idea that the West's scientific lead will somehow allow it to win any long-term intercultural struggle doesn't hold water; intelligence agencies wouldn't be assassinating Iranian scientists if sufficient military science didn't translate across cultures and the same cultural forces that prevent Western fathers from controlling access to their daughters prevent Western universities from controlling access to their scientific technologies.

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Let's try this again

I think it's better this time. I'm getting more familiar with Camtasia, which tends to help, and the volume is significantly louder. I also managed to utilize the full screen this time instead of inadvertantly leaving a black rectangle around the perimeter. I also introduced minor errors into two of the graphs; the CPI recalculated for the 0.6% annual error only shows a line including a recalculation for the last ten years and the labels for the dollar devaluation chart were cut off, but I've decided to leave it as is so that I can move on to the next one. I found a better font to use for the pop-up notes as well, or "call-outs" as Camtasia calls them.

As before, suggestions for improvement would be welcome. The next video will address why inflation has to include outstanding debt; after that I plan to do videos examining the two conventional definitions of inflation. If you're interested in being notified when new videos are uploaded, you can subscribe to the Voxiversity Channel.

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