Anatomy of a Coup

Speaking of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, didn't the transformation of Mr. Mubarak into the Evil Man of the Middle East seem to happen faster than Dr. Jekyll could turn into Mr. Hyde with a drink of his special potion? Who was beating those war drums, anyway? Let's look at how the New York Times viewed Mubarak over time. Was he always a dictator? I searched the Times for all articles containing the words "dictator" and "Mubarak", and what I found was a pattern that would have made Hearst himself smile.:

Note that the two words were seldom used in the same article (and not once in all of 2010!) until January 2011, when they were used 12 times then in February 48 times! Note also that prior to January 2011 the graph shows annual counts, while it's monthly thereafter - so the incidence of the use of those 2 words now occurs on a monthly basis about as frequently as it used to occur annually before 2011. But the difference is even more stark - if you look at the actual articles before 2011, the word dictator was almost never actually applied to Mubarak himself, but was used to refer to a different autocrat in the region - Mubarak nearly always being referred to respectfully as "President Mubarak."

Where's the Challenge in That?

Tom Friedman, the great cheerleader for the Tahrir Square uprising, today discusses the Great Dilemma now puzzling our Foggy Bottom cogitators given recent developments: Is the now politically-dominant Muslim Brotherhood a modern, moderate force pretending to be radical to its backward Egyptian constituency; or a radical Islamic force pretending to be moderate to the international community? Friedman, of course, argues that surely, both are right! And of course he has no second thoughts - no regrets whatsoever - about the overthrow of the clearly moderate Hosni Mubarak. And why should he - it's all good.

In short, the days of dealing with Egypt with one phone call to one man just one time are over. This is going to require really, really, really sophisticated diplomacy with multiple players — seven days a week.

Yeah, who wants our foreign affairs to be easy? That's like rooting for a football team and wanting them to have easy victories every game. Are you a true sports fan, or just a "homer"? Not Tom Friedman - he's a foreign policy aficionado - he's no "homer".

Things Not to Do in 2012

Do not skydive.

Do not take a ride in a hot-air balloon.

Do not fly in a small plane.

Do not bungee jump.

Do not go on a cruise.

We're Eating Less Meat - Hooray?

It's taken about 3,500 years for high-density, sedentary societies to get to the point where animal protein is finally abundant enough to be eaten at every meal - and no sooner has this day arrived than our benevolent rulers have decided we'd be better off going back to 3 daily servings of gruel. Today the Times' food writer, Mark Bittman, celebrates the recent strides Americans have made in debasing their diets.

...our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007. Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.

He goes on to attribute much of the reason for this decrease to the troubled economy. And, apparently, we're supposed to think that's really great news - that our most nutrition-dense food product is being consumed less because it costs more. He then goes on to point out the obvious trend in people purposely eating less meat - and nothing could be better than that!

Over the course of the 3 decades that meat consumption has declined, obesity and diabetes among Americans have grown to epidemic levels. The apex of the American diet was probably the late sixties, when middle-class married women stayed home and cooked meals for the family: meals that would invariably consist of meat, a vegetable, and a starch. Desserts were often little bowls of jello or pudding or fruit cocktail. These meals might have featured too many carbs for some, and too many saturated-fats for others, but overall it was a well-balanced, nutritious meal.

Meat not only has protein but its fats provide essential nutrients as well (Vitamins A, D and E, for example). Some mothers even had the audacity to fry up beef or calve's liver in bacon grease and serve the liver topped with bacon and sauteed onions. It's hard to imagine any child managed to ever grow to maturity with the onslaught of protein and vitamins such a meal must have delivered. I still see liver sold in the supermarket, so obviously some mothers are still preparing it - perhaps DYFS should subpoena grocery-store purchase records to track these child abusers down and remove their children to safe vegan homes.

Reading the article's comments is a surreal experience - Who Are These People?

I read this article while eating my tofu, green bean, and brown rice stir-fry. I have been vegan for two years and have never felt better physically or morally. I applaud Mr. Bittman for the great piece- yes, people are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons: animal suffering, environmental degradation, and the horrendous health effects of a meat-based diet. I think we will continue to see the numbers drop as well as the incidence of lifestyle-related diseases.Chris Settino, Huntington NY.

Uh, not likely Chris - "the incidence of lifestyle-related diseases" has continued to go up while meat consumption has dropped - and that's what you'll continue to see. A small handful of people - those whose lives are under perfect control at all times - can indeed switch to a vegan diet that will allow them to feel satisfied and live healthily. But for most, avoiding meat will mean glombing down dreadful foods like cheese fries and mozzarella sticks and California rolls, or they will eat value-less ramen noodles or more likely pizza. But mostly, the constant scolding about eating meat has just frustrated the typical mother (fathers are still for the most part completely useless in this regard) who doesn't know what to do. Preparing a truly healthy meatless meal is quite daunting and not very tasty for children (who naturally avoid bitter tastes), and so they tend to get take-out, where the nutritional quality is exceptionally poor. The illuminati should be scolding parents to cook basic, well-rounded meals for their families, not shaming them into abandoning their traditional meals so that they can fail at preparing quinoa with roasted beets and yogurt.

Now it may be that the way meat is processed today - with all the hormones and antibiotics and fertilizers and soy grains - it's not as healthy as it should be. I don't know how true that is. But that seems like a simple matter to correct. If people were more confident about their meat diets - and these SWPL scolds turned their attention to cleaning up meat processing, then less pharmaceutical farming methods would no doubt prevail. But the goal isn't to make meat healthier - it's to eliminate it. Because, you see, meat eating is the province of troglodytes - i.e., lower-class, reactionary whites - not of the enlightened. And so eliminate it we must!

The Fourth Way

The start of the presidential election season - when a bevy of opponents battle in undignified jostling for their party's nomination and a hapless chief executive transitions the White House from executive mansion to re-electioncampaign headquarters - is often cause for lament that there isn't an alternative to this partisan bickering. But the alternative that everyone seems to want - a Third Way - a centrist course - is probably the worst. Studies have shown that the average conservative is dumber than the average liberal (it's an average, not you - calm down - think of all the left wing college professors) - but the dumbest of all are moderates. Being a moderate often means you lack the imagination and knowledge to take a real position on the issues.

But since both parties are messed up, what alternative is there? The best way is to pick and choose from the more extreme positions of each party - not too blend them together. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are always right and always wrong - but splitting each issue down-the-middle Solomon-like is no solution. Taking the best ideas from each optimizes policy. But that is really hard to do, since the result is alienating others on your side while failing to win over the side on the issues where you remain in disagreement.

Take an issue where the Democrats are clearly right - raising taxes. I would argue that taxes need to be raised on everybody - but especially the wealthy. Unfortunately, Republican ideologues will not hear of it. On O'Reilly a couple months back, both Ben Stein and Wayne Rogers - two conservative money guys - both assured O'Reilly that raising taxes on the wealthy will not cause any economic dislocation. Stein even pointed out that there is no correlation between higher economic growth and low taxes. [In fact, the opposite is probably true. Our finest growth occurred from 1947 thru the late sixties, when marginal tax rates were in the 77 - 90% range, and tax shelters were the norm - allegedly the most inefficient tax policy of all. And the 90's had overall higher growth than the 80's or (obviously) the 00's, despite higher taxes that decade.] But O'Reilly wouldn't hear of it - he prefers his ideological certainty that higher taxes just have to restrict growth over any facts that might contradict it.

The concept of a "living wage" is also a Democrat idea that should be our policy. How to implement that is not entirely clear - but certainly U.S. corporation ought to be sacrificing some level of profit and/or executive compensation so that American workers can afford to raise a family is a decent dwelling in a decent neighborhood. I'm not sure that I'm in favor of how Democrats would like to accomplish this - i.e., heavy unionization, as I feel labor unions are political animals unto themselves that ultimately harm the very communities and industries they infiltrate. But the main benefits of unionization - decent pay and fair and safe working conditions - ought to be national policy. Yet such a simple concept immediately runs afoul of modern Republican dogma that in order to compete in a global economy firms must operate unfettered by any considerations other than profit maximization.

Suppose a new kind of Republican candidate bargained with Democrats - offering a Living Wage policy for an end to the Diversity Regime? Tax increases on the wealthy in exchange for a big rollback in the Federal bureaucracy? Big investments in Green technology in exchange for rolling back restrictions on oil, gas and nuclear technology? Dramatic reductions in defense spending in exchange for a dramatic cutback on immigration, a border fence, and large-scale deportations?

I don't know if such deals could ever be pulled off, but I contend that exchanging policies like that would be far better than attempting to split the difference on any one issue.

The Most Awesomest Recovery

An economist named Karl Smith, who writes at a blog called Modeled Behavior, seems to have invented a statistic that finally can demonstrate what an awesome recovery we are in. He calls it the "Labor Soakage Rate". I don't know if he actually did invent it - he doesn't make a point of claiming he did. But if you Google "Labor Soakage" you'll find references to his blog post and a bunch of stuff on soaking up water leaks and the work needed to do so. So I'd say he invented it.

At any rate, he's using it because it appears to show a very steep rate of job growth. He calculates this "soakage" rate as the percentage change in employment minus the percentage change in the civilian population from one month to the next. So, even if jobs are being lost, and the percentage change in jobs is negative, as long it's better than the prior month, the graph will trend upwards. So it in no way measures the magnitude of job growth, or even lets us know anything about job growth itself - it only tells us about the rate of change in the change - the 2nd derivative, basically - and that this change in the change is very high!

Now maybe this is a useful statistic - if people working in banks had looked at the 2nd derivatives of housing prices, a lot of pain might have been avoided. And of course generally it's useful to find peaks and troughs. But all you've needed to be doing over the last few months is pay attention to the weekly unemployment claims numbers - which have generally dipped below 400k of late - to know that there is some turnaround in the labor market. But this statistic gives you no feel for the what kind of recovery we're in. For that, I'd prefer to compare the actual magnitude of job gains.

One other dubious approach he takes is to compare this recovery to the last one - but early-2000's recovery was routinely derided as the Jobless Recovery. So it's not much of a comparison. Plus, that recession was relatively shallow, as was the 1991 recession. The last recession to rival this one for depth was the 1982 recession, where the jobless rate actually exceeded 11% at one point. But the economy began to recover sharply in 1983. The current recovery is now in its 29th month. The chart below compares the accumulated increase in employment net of civilian population growth over the first 29 months during the recoveries from the 1982 and 2008 recessions (or the Reagan vs. Obama recoveries, if you will). You can see what a dud this recovery is.

From this view, one can't even discern any improvement in the current labor situation whatsoever.

Yet it's hard to pin the blame on Obama. This dismal job situation has been pretty much the "new normal" since 1999. Note this chart, which shows total accumulated job creation net of population growth since the 1982 recession.

From 1983 thru 1999, the economy managed to create at least one new job for each additional adult. But since job-creation peaked at 6 million accumulated net new jobs in December 1999, there has been a steady erosion in the number of working people with respect to the adult population, with only a slight flattening of the decline during the housing boom. Another way to look at it is that in this century, the civilian adult population has added 30 million more people than jobs have been created. The most obvious trend behind this is the baby-boom retirement explosion, but high levels of immigration is no doubt involved as well. Not that immigrants are jobless, but clearly ten-or-so million jobs have gone to immigrants that have not gone to the native-born.

Is there any way out? Over the next decade, the baby-boom retirements should peter out, and baby-boomers should start dying in earnest during the 2020's. So if you're young enough, I suppose there's some reason to hope.

Rather Predictable

It's not even ironic that in the wake of a massive financial crisis driven by the Federal government's relentless pressure on lenders to relax lending standards and make more home loans to minorities, one of the few actions Eric Holder's Justice Department has taken in this sphere is to charge a bank with unfair lending practices to minorities. And not just any bank, of course, but the Typhoid Mary of minority-outreach lending, Countrywide. I'm not surprised - are you? No, I didn't think so - saw it coming a mile away.

The specific allegation - that Countrywide "steered" black and Hispanic customers to higher-fee, higher-rate loans compared to whites (with allegedly equivalent qualifications), is not entirely implausible. Given Countrywide's "$Trillion Pledge," some serious recruitment of minority candidates was needed. To really ramp up minority lending, you can't just sit behind a desk and wait for the customers to line up. You've got to go out and find them, convince them that they could indeed get a loan, and assure them that that dishwasher's salary won't be a problem, trust me. These recruits need a little heftier commissions to get the job done, so it's hardly shocking they might just convince the prospective borrower to pay a bit more in interest and a bit higher fees than a customer who comes knocking on your door with LendingTree data in hand.

Yet, despite a plausible scenario to explain it, I seriously doubt the allegations are backed up by the data. Typically these "equivalent qualifications" fail to take into account borrower's net worth. And more important, is there any data showing that minority borrowers performed better with subprime loans than white borrowers? I doubt it - if there were such data, it would have been revealed long ago. In fact, the Federal Reserve has carefully guarded any such data, leading me to believe the exact opposite is true - that minority performance was actually worse. Bank of America - which owns Countrywide - settled the complaint without a fight, of course.

Illegal? There was Nothing Illegal!

Obama has received characteristically little grief for his claim that the fraud that drove the Wall St. debacle wasn't illegal. For Obama and the left, such quaint, common-law legal concepts like "fraud" are irrelevant in a modern state. Regulations are the way to go - the government establishes detailed regulations and legions of regulators micro-manage firms actions. Fraud - a charge that requires detective work, witnesses, forensic accounting, etc. - is just too messy, too unpredictable to bother work.

Regulations, on the other hand, could prevent these bad actions before they occur, plus direct commercial activity towards achieving policy goals, such as financing for favored projects. Of course that was all tried before - the S&L crisis, the Enron scandal (which begat Sarbanes Oxley, arguably the most burdensome regulatory regime ever) - and it happened anyway.

Fraud prosecutions in this scandal might not have been all that difficult. You start with the borrowers who lied on their applications, and then go right up the chain to the brokers, their managers, the financiers who put together the CDO's and on up to the top. Sarbanes-Oxley itself, which effectively criminalizes incorrect earnings statements, should have been able to bag a few CEO's all by itself. But apparently no one in the Justice Department has found this massive web of fraud anything but an impenetrable morass.

I must confess, though, to having some sympathy for the banksters. Though I have no doubt they engaged in out-and-out fraud, I'm also convinced they're behavior was essentially foisted upon them by the government's minority-lending mandates. Starting early in the Clinton administration and then amped up by W. himself, banks faced the choice of stagnating or aggressively pursuing minority lending. But of course at the same time they are being pressured by the government to take on less profitable business (less profitable because the loans are riskier), the banks are under tremendous pressure by shareholders to be more-and-more profitable.

Well the only way to avoid losses on riskier assets is to increase leverage. So they appealed to the authorities for relaxed leverage rules, requests which the authorities all too willingly accommodated since it was towards a noble cause. But as we all know now, pumping up leverage is like being a mule-skinner transporting nitroglycerine - the pay's good but one bump and it's all over. The CDO's were an effort to share the risk - like paying the other wagons to each take a bottle or two of nitro - but then what happens of course is that when one blows, all the other wagons go up with it.

On the other hand, the banks could have showed some courage and fought back, insisting that no business model could withstand this kind of debasement of best practices. They could have insisted that bank lending is too fundamentally critical to the nation's economic health to be subject to politically correct mandates. But such courage is nowhere to be found in the business world. Indeed, the Diversity Doctrine is so deeply entrenched in corporate culture that almost certainly those in charge actually believe it.

Asymmetric Political Warfare

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear Texas' appeal of a judicially imposed apportionment plan and issued a stay against the plan's implementation. The Justice Department claims that Texas's reapportionment discriminates against Hispanic voters by reducing their representation. But what this case really comes down to - and how I think the 5 conservative justices will decide - is the Justice Department attempting to dictate to states the partisan makeup of their delegations, which is clearly a violation of state sovereignty.

Back in the early days of the voting rights act, which imposes onerous restrictions on jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting rules, the question was whether you'd have a white Democrat or a black Democrat in the legislature or in Congress. Now that whites in the South have pretty much made a complete party switch, enforcing the Voting Rights act means mandating more Democrats than the legislature would prefer. But it is the right of state legislatures, going back to the early days of the Republic, to maximize their party's representation via apportionment.

States dominated by Democrats, however, have no such concerns - they can apportion their voters as they see fit (granted, California voters decided to implement a non-partisan apportionment scheme, but that's their choice). So how is it a level political playing field if one party is forced by the courts to give up seats while the other can operate without restrictions? It isn't, of course, which is why I think the 5 'good guys' on the court will overturn it. The question is how weasily will they do so?

This imbalanced political landscape is not just restricted to the Voting Rights Act. The Republican Party is basically the party of white America, but of course such an entity as "white America" cannot be acknowledged in mainstream outlets (except of course as a source of some evil). A Republican legislator cannot complain that his constituents are being forced to move because their schools are becoming disabled by excessive numbers of non-English speakers or poorly behaved minorities. So instead he must complain about "illegal" immigration in the vaguest of terms and express displeasure with the failure of schools by blaming teacher-unions (bastions of anti-Republican rhetoric). A Democrat, on the other hand, can freely rile up his constituents by denouncing "discrimination" and favoritism, regardless of the facts.

Similarly, any Democrat politician, black or white, can make unlimited hay over alleged racial profiling among the police or "institutional racism" in the law enforcement. But no Republican politician would dare court white voters by defending the police, pointing out, for example, the disproportionately high levels of criminal behavior in the black community. When it was recently revealed that some NYPD officers had the nerve to complain on a facebook page about having to work during the West-Indian Day parade which annually features gun-fire and police injuries, who came to their defense, pointing out that people who engage in gunfights during a parade deserve to be called 'animals'?

The essence of this asymmetry in political combat is that Democrats are free to rabble-rouse and demagogue their positions without penalty - indeed, often with great showers of media attention for doing so - while Republicans must rouse their constituents only obliquely through proxies - religious faith, gun rights, opposition to gay marriage, and of course "No New Taxes". Even then, we often hear pundits denounce the "Three G's" - Gays, Guns and Gods - so even their proxies are derided.

But this leads to dumb policies - or at least failure to enact sensible policies. We can't have sensible gun laws, because Republicans have to prove that they sympathize with white-Americans' anxiety over the baneful impacts of minorities on their neighborhoods not by addressing that issue directly but by supporting unrestricted gun rights. Gay marriage is stupid - but the real problem is the insidious "Diversity" mentality that so offends the white middle class, but instead of fighting that, Republicans must single out Gay marriage (and even that fight is being rapidly lost). And Religion leads to unnecessary constitutional battles, while it is just a proxy of course for the desire of white Americans to keep America the way it is - not a banana republic, not a dysfunctional, balkanized economic zone, as it is on its way to becoming.

Virtuosi Ain't All That

Friday night I attended the NY Philharmonic concert where they played Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with superstar Joshua Bell as soloist (NY Times review here). During the cadenza (an extended solo performance usually towards the end of the first movement of a concerto, for any Philistines out there), I got out my small pair of binoculars to get a good close-up look at his playing. But then I noticed that also in my field of view were first violinists (to the left) and the violists (to the right), up-close and personal.

As Mr. Bell's playing mesmerized the audience, one might expect these musicians to be looking on - if not in awe - in rapt attention, savoring the performance of one of their brethren, a professional like them but one who had reached the rarefied heights of superstardom. Well one would be wrong.

What I saw were eyes darting about unfocused - or more clearly not focused on him. Typically the eyes were looking down and away from Mr. Bell, or up towards the ceiling. Lips were pursed as if blowing out air, bows were lightly tapped in palms, bodies shifting around in their chairs. As the solo neared its conclusion and the players began to prepare for their return, I even saw one of the violists smirking as if thinking "Finally!". What I saw, in short, was impatience - that sitting through this solo was a chore and an annoyance, hardly a treat.

I've often wondered how these musicians - who are, as members of the NY Philharmonic, clearly among the most gifted in their profession - view the soloists who perform with them: are they thinking "S/He's not that awesome - I could play that just as well, if I ever got the chance or had the time" or are the soloists indeed viewed as having truly special talent. Well I still don't know what they think exactly, but one thing they clearly do not feel is awe.

So What Did Your Gay Uncle Give You for Christmas?

In the wake of the Andrew Sullivan racial-intelligence flap, Half Sigma's post on the topic devolved into a debate over the heritability of homosexuality. Regrettably, despite it being an "HBD" blog, the commenters generally proved themselves rather dense, with the host not helping much either. A common theme was the absurd "Gay Uncle" theory. This theory posits that homosexuality would be a favored trait because gay uncles help out raising their nieces and nephews. Mathematically this seems ridiculous as an uncle, sharing only 1/4 of his niece's genes, would have to be twice as beneficial to a niece/nephew than a parent (who shares 1/2 her genes with her children) to make up for the shortfall. But since I'm only mediocre in math, that doesn't bother me so much as the common-sense angle. Do these people know any gays? Have they ever seen them pay more than the most superficial attention to any children?

But perhaps gay men are more successful on average otherwise, and can bequeath benefits to their nieces/nephews. So I took a look at the General Social Survey (GSS) to see if there's any evidence of such a phenomenon. I looked at the GSS variables SEXSEX5 - which asks respondents the sex of anyone they've had sexual relations with over the last 5 years - and CONINC which is a measure of income in constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars. This question has been asked since 1991 so I tracked this over that time.

While the incomes of gays are jumpy, the incomes for straight males are substantially higher for all years but three. If there were a tendency for gays to be highly successful and thus well situated to help out their relatives, it sure doesn't show up here.

But, the sample sizes for gays are small, so how reliable are this data? Gay men constitute around 2 to 3 percent of the male population (I'm leaving out those with bi-sexual relationships - their incomes are consistently lower with one outlier). So if we wanted to validate that such a small population could be represented with reasonable accuracy at such low numbers, what might we look at - particularly when it comes to income? Obviously, Jews make up about the same proportion of the population, and the fact that Jewish incomes significantly outstrip those of non-Jews is well known. So this should show up clearly in the GSS if the income figures are reliable. Well here it is:

Just as we'd hope to see, incomes of Jews are significantly higher than non-Jews. Similarly, if gays were consistently more successful than non-gays, we should expect to that here as well - but we see, mostly, the opposite.

So the lesson is, if you want help from your uncle, you'll be much better off if he's Jewish than if he's gay.

Gays and Jews get a lot of attention in the media. While I know the readers of this blog are well aware of it, it might not be clear to the random person exactly what proportion of the population these groups constitute. Below, in full scale, are the percentages of those self-identifying as Jewish among all respondents and those reporting sexual relations exclusively with other men among all male respondents in the GSS:

Wishful-Politik

U.S. foreign policy continues to be in safe hands. In a speech she gave a few weeks ago (but that I only just heard about tonight in a gushing report on NPR), Hillary attempted to explain the unexplainable - our Mideast policy. She gave a little FAQ apparently, including this Q&A:

What will the United States do if democracy brings anti-U.S. governments to power? "The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong. They do it in this country every day," Clinton said. "Parties committed to democracy must reject violence; they must abide by the rule of law and respect the freedoms of speech, association, and assembly; they must respect the rights of women and minorities; they must let go of power if defeated at the polls; and, in a region with deep divisions within and between religions, they cannot be the spark that starts a conflagration. In other words, what parties call themselves is less important than what they do."

I love that - "The suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting, dangerous, and wrong." What she means of course is "the suggestion that faithful Muslims cannot thrive in a democracy is insulting - and therefore dangerous and wrong." There's a lot of "musts" in there too - none of which have ever been followed in any MidEast Islamist state - ever. So is the plan to bomb these new governments when they ultimately fall short? No, they not. While it's silly to imagine that the administration has any particular goals in mind in stumbling upon its foreign policy, one theme can be expected to act as a guiding force: no government which professes an animus against the West - in particular those openly hostile to American interests - need fear our intervention. Thus Syria, Iran, Cuba, Korea, Venezuela - completely safe from our interference. Of course that's only right - no government, friend or foe, should fear our intervention provided they do not threaten or attack us. But it would be ideal if governments that are actually friendly towards us should feel safe as well.

How Come Super-Smart People Never Thank the Lord?

I have found that people get annoyed when star athletes start off with a word of thanks to the Lord when they're interviewed after games (Tim Tebow being the latest high-profile example of this much reviled type - but it's fairly routine among athletes). But I find it very understandable and actually quite endearing. Think of it from their point of view. After spending their entire lives dominating all their peers in their athletic pursuits, they're now competing at the highest levels against the best of the best, and still doing amazing things. How can one explain such mind-boggling talent? Why, of all the people you ever knew, are you so uniquely gifted? How is it that you were the one so chosen? The Lord's grace would seem to provide the most plausible answer. What are they supposed to say - "Yeah, I'm awesome - on your knees, bitch!"?

But when Warren Buffet is interviewed on CNBC, say, he doesn't start off the first answer with "First off Becky I'd like to thank the good Lord for giving me the opportunity to..." Instead, if pressed on why he's so successful, he'll spout out some platitude about being 'fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful' which is clever but no more explanatory than thanking the good Lord. Nor have we ever heard Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison give heavenly thanks for their phenomenal success. Are there any among the rich-and-powerful who are not also famous for being religiously devout who give God credit for their success?

After I wrote this, Steve Sailer put up a post about Billionaires who actually earn their fortune. The punch-line of his article is Oprah - she's probably the billionaire most personally responsible - from soup-to-nuts - for her fortune.  I don't disagree. But even as her show and network promote spirituality, she never talked about her own beliefs much, apparently - until her last show, when she gave a nod to Jesus himself:

"People often ask me what is the secret to the success of the show," she said. "How have we lasted 25 years. I non-jokingly say, my team - and Jesus."

Young People Saving Money - What a Disaster!

The madness behind Keynesianism can be found in an article today in the Times ("As New Graduates Return to Nest, Economy Also Feels the Pain") featuring uber-Keynesian Mark Zandi of Moody's. Saving money is bad, you see - and squandering it on useless frills is what the economy needs. What Zandi wants young people to do when they get their first job is to get their own place and start spending that money.

Every year, young adults leave the nest, couples divorce, foreigners immigrate and roommates separate, all helping drive economic growth when they furnish and refurbish their new homes. Under normal circumstances, each time a household is formed it adds about $145,000 to output that year as the spending ripples through the economy, estimates Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.

Clearly Zandi has learned nothing. That he didn't foresee what was coming is rather unfortunate, given that he's chief economist of a corporation charged with rating risk. But not to have learned from what happened is unforgivable. Zandi, Krugman and their ilk seem to believe that some weird event happened in the heavens - like a supernova that lights up the night sky - that spooked people and has led them to irrationally withdraw from the economy.

 But as we all know what happened was that people learned - when the bubble burst - that debt must actually at some point be repaid and can't be perpetually rolled over, that future high incomes are not guaranteed, that the amount of disposable income available is not infinite, and that future expenditures cannot always be paid out of current income.

 So what these young people are doing (at least according to this article's narrative) is staying a few more years with Mom and Pop to maybe save a few bucks for one of those down-payment thingies that used to be so popular back in the Middle Ages for buying houses. But apparently Zandi, on the other hand, is aghast that they're not frittering their incomes away in the expectation of landing a negative-amortization loan for a home costing twice what they can afford. Yeah, that's how a society builds wealth, Zandi - by spending.