Guns and Truth

I have stayed away from this blog too long. I wasn’t cruising the South Pacific on my McGregor 26, as you might expect. I was just editing my memoirs; I was trying to be thorough. (It’s called: “I Used to Be French: An Immature Autobiography.” There are excerpts of it on this blog.)

 

 

On my last radio show, I made the subject of gun control come up. I did it because I had heard one of my colleagues, a liberal talk-show host on the same station make a statement that sounded bogus to me. (The station is KSCO A.M. In Santa Cruz; it’s available on-line. My show is called “Facts Matter.” It’s every Sunday 11a.m. – 1p.m.)

 

 

 

The statement that caught my attention was this:

 

 

 

For every time a gun is used in legitimate self-defense, a gun is used nineteen times for illegitimate or illegal purposes.

 

 

 

The figure was just too pat. It was calculated to be remembered by regular folks who are assumed by the Left to have no head for numbers. It sounded like pure propaganda. I thought it might also be trivially true, correct but without any meaning.

 

 

 

I called the liberal host during his show and challenged him to produce a source. He could not. We had eleven email exchanges. The other guy says he gave me the references. I say he did not.

 

 

 

 

If you insist on you shoring up your argument with figures – a good thing- you had better be prepared to explain where they come from. I think the Left is forever quoting imaginary numbers and numbers they misinterpret. Some just cheat and make up facts. Others are just conveniently loose with numbers, making mistakes always in the same direction.

 

 

 

 

 

Gun control is a favorite issue on the Left because it can’t stomach the bare fact that courts have affirmed over and over that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to own and to carry guns.

 

 

 

 

 

The Left makes a simple argument: The abundance of guns in the US makes its population much less safe than it would be if there were fewer guns around.

 

 

 

 

Here are some relevant facts:

 

 

 

 

The US has more homicides than every western European country, two and half times more than France, for example Yet, it has four times fewer homicides than Russia and three times fewer than Mexico. In fact, this country is pretty much average for homicides. Thus, South Africans are ten times more likely to die by homicide than are Americans. Notably, Americans are four times more at risk than the Swiss. This is notable since Switzerland almost certainly has more guns – long guns- in private hands than any other country because its army is primarily a militia.(All figures above from NationMaster.com 9/29/09).

 

 

 

 

In 2008, there were about 11 homicide per 200,000 people (computed from FBI’ s Uniform Crime Statistics). Two thirds involve firearms of some sort. That would include long weapons such as rifles and shotguns. Thus, if restrictive laws were passed, as desired by gun control advocates, effective enough to cut by half the murders by firearms, they would save the lives of 4 people out of each 200,000 Americans. (2/3 of 11 is about 8 – generously. Half of eight is 4. – Figures from FBI) This calculation assumes that, in the absence of a firearm, all murderers would simply give up and not seek an alternative means of homicide. The assumption is obviously untenable but we don’t know by how much. So, I will keep it in order to avoid biasing my reasoning against gun control.

 

 

 

 

 

The paragraph above ignores completely the possibility that guns in private hands may deter homicide. Hence, stricter gun control laws might increase the number of homicides on one side as they would reduce it on the other side. The two effects would be contradictory in their results but they are not logically inconsistent with each other. So, simplistic predictions based on basic arithmetic seem inappropriate.

 

 

 

 

 

Let’s put the issue of death by firearms in general in perspective. First, accidental death by firearms. It’s the nightmare of every parent and a frequent topic of liberal talk-shows, I think because it’s an emotionally brutal issue.

 

 

 

 

In 2004, accidental death by firearms were 80 times less frequent than death by automobile accident (Statistical Abstract of the US. Table 1130). Death by drowning was 4 times more frequent than accidental death by firearms. (Same source.) The figures are similar for latter years.

 

 

 

 

 

In spite of the fact that automobiles and water threaten the lives of Americans to a greater extent than do accidental discharges of firearms, no one is proposing to limit pleasure driving. or swimming, or boating. No one at all is proposing restrictions although those activities are not constitutionally protected like the right to bear arms.

 

 

 

 

Now, let’s give the problem of other deaths by firearms its proper dimensions. There are two main kinds, homicide and suicide.

 

 

 

 

Homicide deaths, about 2/3 by firearms, were 6,2 per 100,000 in 2006 (Other years data don’t differ appreciably.) To put it another way, a person dying in 2006 had only one chance in 130 of dying from assault at all, one chance in 170 of being killed by another person using a firearm.

 

 

 

 

For 2006, about 11 people per 100,000 people died from suicide. Half used a gun of some sort. About one person of 65 who died in that year committed suicide. (All figures in the two preceding paragraph from the Center for Disease Control FastStat.)

 

 

 

 

 

To put things in perspective again, deaths by alcohol, excluding accidents, was just as common as death by homicide, in 2006. (Both were very rare.) Being killed by a firearm wielded by another person was slightly less  likely than death by misuse of alcohol.

 

 

 

 

 

No one is talking about prohibiting alcohol, which is also not constitutionally protected. (Thank God!)

 

 

 

 

Defenders of the Second Amendment point out that the right to bear arms is to protect me from bad people, and eventually, from government illegal use of force against me and against my neighbors.

 

 

 

 

Liberals laugh about the latter. “You can’t fight an army with a handgun, they say.”

 

 

 

 

 

Two things about this. First, don’t assume the armed forces, or the whole of the armed forces would be on the side of a tyrannical government.

 

 

 

 

 

Second, I know for a fact that the first thing dictators do everywhere is to confiscate privately-held weapons. The second thing they do is to create parallel armies because they can’t count on regular forces to repress citizens. See, Hitler and his SS, and Ahmad the Camel and his Revolutionary Guards.

 

 

 

 

Digression: I am not, not advocating sedition. President Obama is the constitutionally elected president of this country. However, some of his followers are clearly fascists who might throw him under the bus when they realize that he is not fulfilling their program.

 

 

 

 

What about the issue of self-defense against bandits and serial murderers? Even if it were just an illusion, I would fight for my right to do so. It’s a matter of dignity. It turns out it’s not an illusion. The evidence on this is More guns, Less Crime, published in 2000, by John Lott, a law school professor who really looked at the data with a thoroughness gun control advocates rarely ever demonstrate. Lott used up-to date statistical techniques seldom found in gun control advocates’ work.

 

 

 

 

 

(There is a long empirical article published in 2003 critiquing More Guns… pro-gun conclusions by Ayres and Donohue. It’s linked to Wikipedia entry on More Guns, Less Crime. I have not read that negative treatment.)

 

 

 

 

How about guns and suicides?

 

 

 

 

 

Again, about half of the firearms deaths are suicide. I will agree right away that my carrying a gun does not deter my neighbor from doing away with himself.

 

 

 

 

 

Gun control advocates make the argument that that suicide may be easier with a gun. Half the suicide deaths are by firearms (Miller and Hemenway, New England Journal of Medicine; September 2008 – ) Advocates of regulating guns say that if guns were less common, there would be fewer successful suicides. It’s true that a gunshot is quicker, requires less preparation, and is less likely to be reversible than attempted suicide by most other means. The arguments is plausible. This does not make it true. A lot of things that are plausible are not true. The sun does not dive into the Ocean west of Santa Cruz every night though I see it do it with my own eyes.

 

 

 

 

 

You can gage roughly the factual correctness of this arguments by making comparisons between countries because we know that different countries practice very different forms of gun control, or no gun control.

 

 

 

 

 

Countries with more arms regulation, or tighter regulations, than the US should have less suicide, by and large, if the argument is correct. The fit does not have to be perfect but there has to be a pattern: More gun control= fewer suicides.

 

 

 

 

 

The World Health Organization, a specialized UN agency with a good reputation, gives cross-national suicide figures for 2008 on its website. According to WHO numbers, the US has a higher suicide rate than all the sunny countries on the list, except two: Cuba and Sri Lanka (the latter has 2.5 times the US rate).

 

 

 

 

The US has a lower suicide rate than all of the following countries: Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, France, and Finland.

 

 

 

 

 

I focus on those because I am reasonably sure, without having researched the issue, that those countries all have stricter gun laws than does the US.

 

 

 

 

South Korea and Japan, where I am certain guns are scarce, have suicide rates respectively 65% higher and twice higher than the US.

 

 

 

 

Gun control advocates will claim that I am cherry-picking in this case, choosing the cases that support my argument. Two answers: First, If you pick enough cherries, it ‘s not picking; it’s using the evidence. Second, if the pattern were reversed with exactly the same countries, you can be sure the enemies of the Second Amendment would claim victory.

 

 

 

 

The usual rational-sounding arguments for gutting the Second Amendment are not supported, except at the cost of ignoring masses of important facts. All those facts are readily available on the Internet, from reliable sources.

 

 

 

 

It’s hard not to suspect bad faith.

 

 

Conservative Racism

This is one of those times when being an immigrant confers a mental advantage. I am pretty sure that during the whole period of American slavery, my ancestors were digging potatoes in northern and eastern France. They lived far from the couple of French Atlantic ports that took part in the slave trade. My heart if free of racial guilt and my mind of the suspicion of racial culpability. I have no trouble thinking about race in America.

Liberals are giving a racial explanation to the rising sentiment against President Obama’s spending initiatives, and against his bad faith, and against ACORN’s gangsterism. I don’t think they are being cynical. Liberals believe it, for the most part. Here is why.

Many liberals are unable to recognize a constitutional revolt when they see one because the Constitution does not have for them the fixed value it has for conservatives. They think it’s a point on a map, not a compass.

Liberal Democrats attempted to use a modest majority to engineer abrupt and fundamental societal change. They failed. Many have trouble figuring out why because what they wanted is – in their minds- obviously good for everyone (except “the rich”).

It was a childish plot. They react childishly to the fact of their failure.

Being overwhelmed by the spectacle of their man going down in flames, they resort to a false explanation that has two merits, two advantages.

First, there is no sensible and effective comeback to it. If someone says to you: You are doing this because you are racist, what do you answer: No, I am not?

Second, putative racism is right in the middle of the general liberal perception of the world: It’s going to pot and America, especially, is full of unenlightened, mean people.

Incidentally, there are many liberals I can’t like personally because they hate what I love, American society.

They see this country as full of evils although they seldom witness evil personally. They are sure that in some parts of the country where they have never been, somewhere, sometimes, it’s still 1960 from the standpoint of race relations. If they acknowledged progress on that front, their whole world view would be threatened. White America’s racial guilt is the linchpin of their thinking.

The Democrats’ own collective, racial party guilt plays a part in liberals’ obstinacy on race.The foundation Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed by more Republicans than Democrats (in %). The main opposition was from Democrats. Democratic Senator Byrd led a filibuster lasting fourteen hours to block the legislative process on civil rights. The only known former Ku Klux Klan member in the political class of our country is a Democrat, the same Senator Byrd. (This is not a rumor; he apologized publicly.) The apparatus of legal segregation the Civil Rights Act aimed to destroy was entirely a Democrat construction. Labor unions – not a stronghold of Republican loyalty – resisted equal opportunities in employment for decades.

In recent days, the only obviously racist acts were those of union members beating up a black conservative in Missouri and calling him a “nigger.” How do I know they were union members? Their union t-shirts. Their union never denied it, by the way.

It’s common to accuse your adversaries of your own sins. It makes the sins look more common, and therefore smaller.

There is undoubtedly anti-black sentiment in this country, including among conservatives. It’s different from what it was thirty years ago. It’s not an automatic reflex to skin color and African facial features as it used to be. If it were, Oprah would not be the most influential woman in America. If it were, there would not be so many black men serving as barely disguised sex symbols under the pretext of professional sport.

The current anti-black sentiment focuses on social dysfunctions where African-Americans are greatly more numerous than their numbers in society would predict. It’s not all forms of social dysfunctions by the way. Black comics are fond of pointing out that young black people don’t engage in mass assassination and rarely in serial murder, and they are right.

The most obvious disproportionately black social dysfunction is out-of-wedlock births. We know that it’s a source of many other social problems, whether the fatherless kids are black of white.

In 2005, about half the births to unmarried mothers were to black women. African-American are only 15% of the population, perhaps 20%. Black children are thus 2,5 X times more likely than whites to be born to unmarried women.

In 2005 also, the homicide rate for blacks (victims) was six times higher than for whites. Everyone knows who is killing blacks. If it were whites doing the killing, you would know it. Count on it.

(Figures from the Statistical Abstract of the US)

The things that horrify whites about blacks are exactly the same behaviors that horrify the overwhelming majority of African- Americans who are honest and hard working. That’s why they move out of black areas as fast as they can.

Against this background, an elegant, well-spoken, rational-sounding, obviously middle-class seemingly black President must come as a huge relief among all whites, including among conservatives.

Incidentally, I go on the record today to state that Barack Obama is the best-looking President this country has ever had. Michelle looks fine too, much of the time, although she is a little broad in the beam. (OK, that was bitchy. Nobody is perfect!)

Rather than being dismayed by the fact of a black President, many whites think inside their heads: “We got off easy!”

As I have explained before, Barack Obama is a kind of racial impostor, sociologically speaking. He is not an “African-American,” a descendant of slaves brought to this country by force. He is the son of a white mother and of a privileged, fellowship-rich African immigrant. His Muslin name does not suggest a family background of slavery in Africa but of coastal tribes actively engaged in slaving on behalf of the Arabs. I don’t know this to be a true. It’s just a strong possibility and it’s only relevant to underscore the bad faith on the other side.

The President was brought up by his white grandparents in Hawaii, and by his mother in Indonesia. Personal experiences of American racial prejudice must have been far and few. Instead, it’s extremely likely his physical appearance served him well, through affirmative action. Otherwise, why would his college grades still be under lock and key? What fifty-year old man is still ashamed of what he did when he was twenty?

Little-known facts about immigration tell us again that racial antagonisms are not about “race,” as in physical appearance, as they would have to be for Barack Obama to be a target.

In 2000, 600,00 people immigrated into the US from four black African countries alone. The number of foreign-born blacks in the US increased twenty-fold between 1980 and 2005 (Population Reference Bureau). That’s not counting illegal immigrants.

People with some African ancestry keep coming to this country voluntarily, in spite of considerable legal and economic obstacles. They have families and multiply here. Former general and Secretary of State Colin Powell and his parents are no exception but part of a broad phenomenon of people of African descent everywhere being drawn to this country. In this sentence, “descent” stands for visibly sub-Saharan African physical features.

People normally avoid going to where they are persecuted for something about which they can do nothing, such as physical appearance. Got it?

Behind the accusation of racism against conservatives is enormous disarray among the plotters of the early societal coup.

None of this means that American society does not owe a racial debt with respect to slavery and legal segregation. That’s another story though. We certainly don’t owe anyone the abandonment of the very values that made this country an exceptional pole of attraction for people everywhere in the world, irrespective of race.

Conservative racism is in the minds and hearts of childish people who can’t face political defeat or their own poorly-hidden guilt on this matter.

PS 1 Someone called me a “rightist” on Facebook. He is correct, I am a rightist, a fighter for individual rights.

PS2  (9/22/09) Another racist reaction, no doubt: I am sick of hearing the President’s voice in the media, every day, almost every hour. I would be sick of his voice even if he were saying anything interesting. It cured me of any fear of Big Brother I might have. Over-exposure just seems to be self-extinguishing

Afghanistan, Conservatives and Libertarians. Telling off the King.

There is an upsurge of hostility to the war in Afghanistan in conservative circles. Thus, the Independent Institute, an organization I have been supporting modestly but faithfully for years has a spate of statements against our anti-Taliban operations there. It’s understandable but disappointing.

Part of the reason for some conservative reserve is simply childish tit-for-tat: “You libs berated Bush about his war, in Iraq; the shoe is on the other foot and we will berate you about Obama’s war in Afghanistan.” It matters not to this mindset that it’s only Obama’s war in the trivial sense that he is not using his powers to withdraw.

The main cause of the upsurge of hostility comes from the strong libertarian component in our midst. Libertarians, by definition, dislike big government. They observe, correctly, that every war enlarges the importance and the power of government in relation to civil society, to society in general. They assert further that the taxation capability governments acquires in war time- largely with the help of the suspension of criticality occasioned by patriotism – is seldom rolled back. Thus, war means irreversible growth of the state and a corresponding shrinking of individual liberties. Hence, libertarians tend to be reflexively isolationists.

Of course, I think this is all true. However, this is only part of the story. It’s futile to ignore the concrete, short-term questions facing this country with respect to its involvement in Afghanistan. Here are three:

1 If we allow the Taliban, the same group that hosted Al Quaida and refused to turn Bin Laden over after 9/11, to seize again Afghanistan, do we think they will not do it again? I did not make up the assertion that they are the same group. If they were not, they would have taken the trouble to call themselves something else. By the way, the Taliban top leader then is still the top leader now. If we pick up and go home, isn’t it undeniable that it communicates to our enemies the following message: “Do whatever you want to us; we will not punish you, at least, not much.” I mean by “enemies” first those who have asserted loudly that they will continue killing us because of who we are. I mean, secondarily, those who don’t quite want to blow us off the face of the earth but would enjoy seeing us much diminished.

In one word: Isn’t it the case that leaving our declared enemies alone is plain dangerous? Ben Franklin said it best, “If we make ourselves into sheep, the wolves will eat us.”

2 No one doubts that the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and Islamists in general, want to implement barbaric policies and that they do implement them whenever they have a chance. (Remember, their harsh, extremist rule in parts of Iraq contributed to turning the Sunni population against them.) Among other rolling atrocities, the Taliban close, and often firebomb schools, overwhelmingly girls schools. They are overtly working on perpetuating obscurantism and the savage treatment of women that is undeniably common in much (but not all) of the Muslim world.

If you are a conservative, can your really read the short statement above, look at yourself in the mirror and say, “ I don’t care; none of my business”?

3 Is it not the case that a return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan would boost the morale and improves the material means of extremists Islamists in Pakistan next door. Such a development would have two unpleasant consequences, one strategic, one moral. An Islamist accession to power, or even an increase in influence of extremist Islamists in Pakistan would greatly enlarge the arsenal at the disposal of terrorists everywhere, including with portable nuclear devices. The resources of a large modern state at the disposal of those who hate us greatly threatens our existence, our democracy, and our ability to restrict the encroachments of our own government. Israel’s continued inability to deal effectively with Hezbollah, armed and trained by Iran, gives us a pretty good idea of what would happen if Islamists gained control of the much larger Pakistan.

The second consequence is this: India, facing a nuclear-armed Pakistan that it beat three times in war previously would not let Islamist terrorists come close to taking over the nuclear sites. It would probably strike pre-emptively. Hundreds of thousands would die because of our lack of enthusiasm for continuing the Afghan operation.

It’s not obvious that this chain of events would unavoidably unfold but are we willing to take the risk instead of committing the resources needed to wipe out our declared enemies in Afghanistan?

I know, I know, we are not the policeman for the world. Yet, when there is no police, armed vigilance is necessary. Would anyone argue that this vigilance is best exercised on the beaches outside San Diego. or in New Jersey, or in Chicago?

PS (9/1609)   Our NATO allies are letting us down: Germany, Canada, and soon the UK. The Canadians paid their price, as usual. The Europeans, beginning with the Germans, lack courage. Theirs are aging and decaying societies, undermined by thirty years of social democracy. Social democracy German style is Obama’s model, I believe, not Soviet communism. Peoples pay a psychological and and cultural price not often discussed for living in a nanny-state. (Perhaps the topic of another posting.)

NATO binds us, the Europeans and others, in a mutual defense pact. The effeminate western Europeans pretend to have forgotten the US protected them from barbarism for forty years. Among the “others” in NATO, are the Turks. They are the ones we need in Afghanistan: very tough, uncomplaining, not wussy, and mostly Muslim. Why are they not there in large numbers?

Libertarians keep avoiding this sort of debate. They tend to respond to the kind of arguments  about the necessity for extended defense I make above with straight statements of dogma. That’s one of the reasons the Libertarian Party does so badly in national elections, I will bet. There are many more libertarians outside the Libertarian Party than inside.

The liberals keep showing their childishness by keeping alive the pseudo-arguments of racism in connection with Congressman’s Wilson’s vituperation during the President’s nth health care reform speech.

Here is their logic: I yelled at a woman who allowed her dog to crap on my lawn and made no move to pick up. “You must hate women,” she asserted.You call, a black criminal a criminal, you must be a racist. You call a liar a liar, there must be some other agenda, one impossible to defend.

Congressman Wilson accused the President aloud of lying. Fact is, the President made several statements inconsistent with the truth, according to the Congressional Budget Office, among others. Whether the President lies habitually or whether he is indifferent to hard facts is a matter of debate. The first is certainly a logical possibility.

The underlying outrage concerns some imaginary “disrespect” for the President. Of course it’s disrespectful to call any man a liar to his face, and in public. Since when is there an obligation to respect the President? He is not a king by divine right. He is a politician who won because about 1% of all Americans gave him their vote which they denied to his competitor. That’s not exactly God’s mandate! Incidentally, I am not questioning the results of the elections, in spite of the support the President received from the ACORN gangsters.

In a democracy, disrespect for the President should be considered a morally mandatory attitude among citizens. The English started western democracy by beheading a king in 1688. The French followed through a hundred years later (and made a better spectacle of it, as you might expect.) Let’s remember that those were the cultural and psychological antecedents to popular sovereignty.

Yes, there are people tenuously in touch with reality on the conservative side, and extremists. Of course, such people don’t exist on the left side of the spectrum. Here is a rare exception culled from Facebook. (I will not publish the author’s name but I will give the proper references for purposes of verification to almost anyone who asks.)

“I know XXXXX. I was like finally! Go Rocky! Fight, fight! Stop trusting those fools. Hell will freeze over before they do something good fro this country. Enough is enough man. Damn. They all need to be euthanized or shot in my opinion. Something radical ”

Note: Nothing edited except the name of the addressee which I removed. JD.

Why Young Women Are Stupid (If They Are): A Scientific Inquiry.

The Victoria’s Secret catalog mailing list is several tens of thousand times longer than the mailing list of the National Organization For Women. The feminist wheel has turned enough for brave male social scientists like me finally to consider from a scientific viewpoint an issue that has been with us forever.

Here is the issue: Anyone who has ever tried to win an argument with a reasonably well-informed eleven-year old girl and lost knows that something pretty bad must happen – on the mental front – to the females of our species shortly after they reach that age. (A lexicographic irony is that “front” is the French word for “forehead.” )

I won’t affirm that young women tend to be stupid, for two reasons. First, it would offend my young Indian niece, back in Calcutta. (The parenthetical part of the title is in deference to her feelings.) Second, as my super-intelligent wife often states in a an accusatory tone of voice, I am still a kind of closet liberal. This is the same wife who suspects Attila the Hun was kind of a big softie with his silly cut-off heads of his enemies hanging from his saddle. Incidentally, I owe my wife many of my late-life insights about womanhood.

As so often happens in a the Verstehen school of sociological philosophy, my first grasp of the problem came to me during a moment of idleness. I was contemplating my twelve-year old son watching television with his index finger in his nose up to the elbow. The incongruous thought hit me: “In two or three years at most, some pretty young woman is going to think him irresistible!” I started chuckling when the double thought crossed my mind that I was facing a veritable scientific quandary and possibly the seeds of its solution.

Now, to get a handle on the problem, we need to go back a few thousand years, a few hundreds of thousands of years actually. Let’s remember that we, humans, have only known agriculture and animal husbandry for about 10,000 years. Both were discovered or invented in the Middle-East, widely defined, or in India. (An Indian friend of mine keeps telling me that India already had advanced agriculture when my European ancestors were still trying to figure out how to come down from the trees. That is pure slander; my ancestors walked from East Africa; they did not brachiate.) Before that, for as long as there have been humans, and proto-humans, they led a precarious existence.

At the center of this precariousness lied the cave bear. Imagine a carnivorous creature with ten inch-canines standing ten feet tall when irritated and weighing in at one thousands pounds. (That would be the smaller ones.) Our ancestors hanged out near cave bears much of the time for two reasons. First, they used the same caves as the bears to protect themselves from the elements. Second, they soon discovered in themselves a predilection for the carrion cave bears left lying around, like all predators.

With this propinquity, meals where our ancestors were themselves the main course, and close-calls, unavoidably occurred frequently. That we survived as a species nevertheless calls for an explanation. Here it is below. Although it’s somewhat speculative, it’s in full accordance with what we know of the more general forms of human behavior and with evolutionary theory both.

Grandpa and Grandma Caveperson most likely lived in small extended family groups of fifteen and to fifty people. There are good technical reasons for this explanation centered around what semi-nomadic humans can carry and, especially, the number of babies and small children. In close encounters with cave bears, you can be sure there were young males, teen-age boys, who stayed behind to throw stones at the monsters. Probably no one could lob rocks heavy enough, or with enough force, to do serious damage to any bear. Yet, an avalanche of rocks could delay the bear long enough to allow many, or some, women with small children, and pregnant women to scamper away.

This survival strategy poses one problem though: The young rock throwers must have suffered a high rate of mortality. Thus, the very traits of brashness, courage, and accuracy that saved the group at Time 1 were in constant danger of disappearing with those who bore those traits and thus to be unavailable at Time 2.

Something had to compensate for the high mortality among the young rock throwers. That something is obvious: They had to be able to reproduce disproportionately. Do the arithmetic: If one in ten of the wimpy youths dies before siring offspring but one in two of the tough ones, after a short while, the propensity to stay behind and taunt the bears will disappear in the population. That is, unless the surviving rock artists manage somehow to have more than twice more children that their timid brothers and cousins. It turns out that the best solution to this quandary, widely observed in many species, including humans, is female mating choice.

If young human females actively wanted to mate with rock throwers, the right traits could be transmitted down the generations forever. But of course, intelligent young women wanted to have nothing to do with the morons. Accordingly, they reproduced, and their children survived, at an inferior rate. Thus, the traits supporting simple good judgment had a tendency to thin out in the relevant populations.

Female air-heads, who were hot for the delinquents, passed on their genes in large numbers to both their female and their male children. And so on, to this day where we encounter few cave bears. These things are hard-wired. It takes a while for a trait that was useful previously to vanish from a population because it has lost its usefulness. The trait may never disappears if it does not become dysfunctional in the current situation. And this, my friends is why young women would be stupid (if they were stupid).

Scientific note: One condition that would hasten the demise of female stupidity would be if intelligent women had more children surviving to reproductive age than stupid women. There is no reason to believe that they do, overall. By the way, that’s what the phrase “survival of the fittest” means: Having children who themselves have children.

If you are of the female persuasion, Dear Reader, and if my sage observations make you livid, or red with anger, as the case may be, stop and ask yourselves: How many of your girlfriends actively demonstrate their erotic attraction to bad boys?

PS  THE PRESIDENT GAVE A SPEECH TO A JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS LAST NIGHT. IT WAS ABOUT HEALTH CARE. LIBERAL PUNDITS, AND MY LIBERAL ACQUAINTANCES, INSIST IT WAS A WONDERFUL SPEECH. I HAVE NO IDEA WHY THEY SAY THIS. I HEARD THE SAME OLD STUFF, INCLUDING CORRECTIONS OF INTERNET CONSERVATIVE URBAN RUMORS I NEVER BELIEVED ANYWAY. THE ONLY NEW ELEMENT WAS IN HIS TONE RATHER THAN IN SUBSTANCE. FOR THE FIRST TIME,  THE PRESIDENT MADE A REAL IF BRIEF EFFORT TO PERSUADE CONSERVATIVES THAT HE UNDERSTANDS HOW MARKETS WORK. GOOD TO KNOW BUT NOT MUCH IN THE BIG PICTURE. I STILL THINK HE IS AN ACTOR ONLY.

Soft Fascism?

I am trying hard to avoid joining the current hysteria but I can’t help reading signals flashing right in my face.

The President is going to address grammar-school, and middle-school, and high-school students. That might be OK though I don’t see why or what for. He is not a king but our hired servant. What’s not OK is that the federal Department of Education is sending teachers everywhere follow-up packets of suggested topics for post-speech classroom discussion, some with the word “inspiration.”

That’s a classical, conventional totalitarian strategy. A liberal commentator who struck me, that time, has   argued that it’s not because the teachers don’t have to follow the suggestions. I am sorry but I am sure 80% and up of teachers, at all grade levels, are Obama devotees. They probably constitute the core of the silly, adoring Obama constituency. They will follow the suggestions. They can be counted on to establish the foundations  of  an Obama cult of personality.

I have been holding casual, short conversations with a young man I like around the coffee- shop. (He is very likable in general; I think everyone likes him.)  He is a student of philosophy at one of the University of  California campuses. I like him for this; it takes bravery to major in Philosophy rather than in, say, Accounting. He is an Obama supporter, of course, but a thoughtful one.  He represents the best of what there is to like in political liberalism, including  a striving for rationality  and  generous  impulses.

We happened to be discussing local control of education. He began what sounded like a well-constructed argument with the rhetorical question, “You will agree that most people are stupid, right?” How can someone with such assumptions not be tempted to violate democratic process for a cause he considers as serving his idea of fairness? The lesson is that this young Obamist is not a bad person, far from it.

For all his disturbing actions and his strange discourse, the President is not Hitler, or even Mussolini. He is more like little-known dictator Salazar of Portugal. I warned months ago on this blog, very calmly, I must say, of the soft fascist character of the Obama movement. See my “Fascism Explained,” on this blog.

By the way, why do we have a federal Department of Education at all? Education is a local and state responsibility. Read the US Constitution.

When you create a government agency, it will sometimes do some good, I don’t deny it. It will always find some mischief to do to justify its continued existence. This is a perfect example.

National Economic Systems: An Introduction for Intelligent Beginners. – 3

My Debt, your Debt and Future Poverty.

I told you in previous installments of this series of essays that we, in the USA, are not facing one economic crisis but two.

The fist crisis is a recession. It’s a common event in the long run of market economies. Recessions are defined by serious people (according to me) as two consecutive quarters or more of economic shrinkage. Recessions go away whether any government does anything about them or not. One school of thought (Keynesian), to which the Obama administration belongs, maintains that large government spending – stimulation- can lessen or shorten a recession. I argued that the Obama stimulus package of several months ago cannot possibly stimulate, even if you believe in the stimulation scenario.

The second crisis, by far the most serious, is the abnormally high debt the federal government has incurred since President Obama came to office. It disturbs me because the people, you and I, will have to pay interest on the debt for a long time, and eventually re-pay the principal. Else, the government will have to repay its debt in bad currency, in devalued or in eroded currency. If this happens, we will simply all be poorer, in real terms, If your dollar is worth half in ten years of what it is worth now, you will simply have to pay two dollars for what you buy today for one dollar. There is no reason to assume your income will automatically follow. This is a common fallacy (perhaps the topic for another essay): It takes about forty Indian rupees to buy a US dollar today and the same mountain bike that costs 400 US dollars in this country costs 600 US dollars in India. A good income in India would be 12,000 dollars per year. (That’s about twelve times the national average.)

Least but not last, I am worried about the extraordinary indebtedness of the federal government because it’s likely it will interfere with future economic growth in general. The national (federal debt) can be so large as to pump away money that would otherwise be available for private investment.

Simple fact: If I have $1,000 a month to live on and my regular expenses are $900 a month, I have $100 I could invest if I wanted to. I mean that I could buy stocks in a new Silicone Valley company that makes cool solar-sensing devices, for instance. (By the way, if I put it in a savings account in a bank, I am investing it also.) If the Federal Government takes $50 a month to pay for the debt incurred now, my capacity to invest will be reduced by half. That’s not minor. By the way, I think none of the figures are unrealistic although you may want to multiply the $1,000 starting point by some single-digit factor to mimic your own situation.

Technical note: I suspect that most people are like me: The notion of billions and trillions freeze their imagination. Numbers that are unfamiliar because of their size impede clear thinking. That’s why I put my examples in small, palpable numbers, to so to speak.

Historically, the economies of western, developed countries have grown because people – not governments – had money to invest and the confidence in the future to invest it. If either this discretionary income, or the trust disappear, there is no reason to believe there will be any more economic growth.

After all, economic stagnation has been the rule rather than the exception for most of human history (and before). Progress is not inexorable. (If you want to know more, you might take a look at my entry, “Capitalism,” in the current issue of the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.)

National indebtedness can reduce the rate of economic growth, even if it does not bring it down to zero. It turns out that a seemingly small difference in rates of growth has big consequences for how much you have at the end of a fairly short period. GDP growth is, for practical purposes, like personal income growth. Here are some small, simple examples that illustrate my point. (Computations courtesy of my friend and former student Astou)

If you have $100 and invest them at

• 2% interest (yearly), after 5 years you will get: $100 * (1+.02)^5 = $110.41

• 2% interest after 10 years you will get: $100*(1+.02)^10 = $121.90

• 3% interest after 5 years you will get: $100*(1+.03)^5= $115.93

• 3% interest after 10 years you will get: $100 * (1+.03)^10 = $134.39

• 4% interest after 5 years you will get: $100 * (1+.04)^5 = $121.66

• 4% interest after 10 years you will: $100 *(1+.04)^10 = $148.02

Please, focus on lines 4 and 6. It turns out the difference in GDP growth between developed countries is about of the 3% versus 4% order of magnitude. A heavy debt load can easily bring in the difference between the two rates, for reasons I explained above. This is not far-fetched.

142.02 minus 134.39 = 7.63

If you think about it, seven-plus more dollars, seventy more dollars if you have invested $1,000 instead of $100, seven hundred more dollars, if you have invested $10,000, those differences are the margin between eking along and feeling prosperous.

So it is with the income of nations, and of the regular people who compose them.

Now, let’s suppose you are an old geezer with an IRA of $100,000, not uncommon for many middle class people, not a lot, actually.

If the economy grows at 3% rather than 4% annually, and your IRA does the same, after ten years, you will be missing $7,000 per year in income. That’s the difference between being able to maintain a car and not being able to do so.

Technical note: The simplifying idea that your IRA pays at the same rate as the economy grows is not unrealistic, not for our purpose, at least. If you use more realistic rates – that are also more complex – you will arrive substantially at the same conclusions.

What about government debt in general? I think it’s fine and even possibly necessary to increase the public debt when the economy is growing. When it’s shrinking is a good time to act abstemiously. The Obama administration is doing precisely the reverse of what prudence and common sense would require.

Why?