Utopia, you are standing in it!

Conservatism at its best:

Here’s an original of the review. Here’s the quote in context:

[ . . . ] In discussing a book of such importance, with so much in it to praise, and with an instructive challenge on nearly every page to some “orthodox” or “unorthodox” doctrine, it seems ungrateful to call attention to flaws. Yet in a structure of thought of which the foundations are so carefully laid, and in the midst of an otherwise brilliant and penetrating discussion, Rothbard will suddenly announce some extraordinary conclusion based on a fragment of abstract doctrinaire logic. Examples are his sharp contrast between copyrights and patents, and his implication that the former might well be granted in perpetuity and the latter not at all; his conclusion that repudiation of government debt is no great evil; that it even has a “social utility,” and the added advantage of making…

Things that came to mind –

1. Klein addresses the “practicality” issue so common among critics of the Austrian school. The lives of the early Austrian economists show that they weren’t academics locked up in ivory towers, but business men trying to understand the problems of their day.
2. His contrast between the push for a “more relevant” curriculum with engaging the actual economists. If I remember correctly, the first charter school I went to used living books (point 13) to engage us. At the second charter school, all but one of my classes used textbooks – which always water down the genius and enthusiasm of the great minds.
3. The importance of theory. As Immanuel Kant wrote in The Critique of Pure Reason, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75).

Wow – I hadn’t seen this graph before, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ March 2011 report, Women at Work.

Since 1999, every one of these countries has seen an increase in women’s labor force participation except the United States and Japan:

The U.S. still has a relatively high rate — but it’s now only fourth highest out of these eight countries (here is the data table).

This reminds me of a quote from a 2006 New York Times article, when the paper first reported: “Stretched to Limit, Women Stall March to Work.” They wrote:

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University, said … that the [stalled] trend across nearly all groups of women had “led many to wonder if a ‘natural rate’ of labor force participation has been reached.”

I think the pattern in this figure belies the “natural rate” idea. Canada and the…

When social scientists first began noticing and studying the rise in earnings and income inequality in the United States, much of the focus was on technological change. The idea is that in the past generation technology — especially computerization — has advanced more rapidly than skills, so employers have bid up pay for those able to use and improve new technology and reduced pay for (or gotten rid of) employees less adept at doing so.

Though this remains perhaps the single most popular explanation, many are skeptical. In their book The Race between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz offer an especially compelling critique. They suggest that the pace of skill-biased technological advance actually hasn’t changed much over the past century. What distinguishes recent decades, they contend, is that growth of educational attainment has slowed. Here’s their key picture (the vertical axis shows the share with a…

Post updated, 9/14/14 6/5/14. See below!

In my earlier post on Gregory Clark’s work, The Son Becomes The Father, I laid bare the case for the known high heritability of human behavioral traits (including values and attitudes) and life outcomes. As well, equally important, I illustrated the complete absence of shared environment influences on these – that is, the effect common environmental forces that children growing up together share. This includes parents and upbringing, making it abundantly clear that parents don’t leave a lasting impact on who we grow up to be. These are towards what I’m calling the “75-0-25 or something” rule, which echos Satoshi Kanazawa’s “50-0-50 rule” summarizing behavioral genetic research, only more accurately so. This “75-0-25 or something” rule means the following:

For the variance in behavioral traits and life outcomes, each factor accounts for the following fractions:

• Heredity: 75% (though the variance…

by Thomas Sowell

When teenage thugs are called “troubled youth” by people on the political left, that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these young hoodlums.

Seldom is there a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as they create trouble and dangers for others.

Why then the built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called “troubled youth” and mass murderers are just assumed to be “insane”?

At least as far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing the plain fact of evil – that some people simply choose to do things that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse, from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain and excuse evil.

All the people who…