Schools, Skills, and Synapses

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

James J. Heckman makes 15 points in his Schools, Skills, and Synapses (PDF):

  1. Many major economic and social problems such as crime, teenage pregnancy, dropping out of high school and adverse health conditions are linked to low levels of skill and ability in society.

  2. In analyzing policies that foster skills and abilities, society should recognize the multiplicity of human abilities.

  3. Currently, public policy in the U.S. focuses on promoting and measuring cognitive ability through IQ and achievement tests. The accountability standards in the No Child Left Behind Act concentrate attention on achievement test scores and do not evaluate important noncognitive factors that promote success in school and life.

  4. Cognitive abilities are important determinants of socioeconomic success.

  5. So are socioemotional skills, physical and mental health, perseverance, attention, motivation, and self confidence. They contribute to performance in society at large and even help determine scores on the very tests that are commonly used to measure cognitive achievement.

  6. Ability gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged open up early in the lives of children.

  7. Family environments of young children are major predictors of cognitive and socioemotional abilities, as well as a variety of outcomes such as crime and health.

  8. Family environments in the U.S. and many other countries around the world have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

  9. Experimental evidence on the positive effects of early interventions on children in disadvantaged families is consistent with a large body of non-experimental evidence showing that the absence of supportive family environments harms child outcomes.

  10. If society intervenes early enough, it can improve cognitive and socioemotional abilities and the health of disadvantaged children.

  11. Early interventions promote schooling, reduce crime, foster workforce productivity and reduce teenage pregnancy.

  12. These interventions are estimated to have high benefit-cost ratios and rates of return.

  13. As programs are currently configured, interventions early in the life cycle of disadvantaged children have much higher economic returns than later interventions such as reduced pupil-teacher ratios, public job training, convict rehabilitation programs, adult literacy programs, tuition subsidies or expenditure on police.

  14. Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, it will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.

  15. A major refocus of policy is required to capitalize on knowledge about the life cycle of skill and health formation and the importance of the early years in creating inequality in America, and in producing skills for the workforce.

Arnold Kling says that “Heckman is one of the most careful researchers on the topic, and this paper is an outstanding summary of his findings.” He emphasizes a few points:

An important inference to draw from the paper is that trying to reduce economic inequality by, say, subsidizing more young people to go to college, is likely to be very ineffective. Even interventions at the primary school level are mostly too late.
[...]
One of Heckman’s themes is that while IQ is difficult to change with intervention, it is possible to affect what he calls socioemotional skills, and those in turn will affect performance on test scores and overall achievement.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Education, Policy | No Comments »

Bumper stickers reveal link to road rage

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Bumper stickers reveal link to road rage — something I’d long suspected:

Bumper stickers such as “Make Love, Not War” and “More Trees, Less Bush” speak volumes about a vehicle’s driver — but maybe not in the way they might hope. People who customize their cars with stickers and other adornments are more prone to road rage than other people, according to researchers in Colorado.
[...]
The researchers recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos and even plastic dashboard toys. They also asked questions about how the participants responded to specific driving situations.

To keep the participants from realizing that the team was collecting information about aggressive driving, questions such as “If someone is driving slow in the fast lane, how angry does this make you?” were interspersed with decoy questions such as “What kind of music do you listen to in the car?”. Szlemko’s team used a pre-existing scale called “Use of vehicle to express anger” to diagnose the presence of road rage in their participants.

People who had a larger number of personalized items on or in their car were 16% more likely to engage in road rage, the researchers report in the journal Applied Social Psychology.

“The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,” say Szlemko. What’s more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage — so “Jesus saves” may be just as worrying to fellow drivers as “Don’t mess with Texas”.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

Laptop Jihadi

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Lexington Green points to Adam Shatz’s London Review piece, Laptop Jihadi, on the recent book, Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus’ab Al-Suri by Brynjar Lia:

Abu Musab al-Suri never received an advance for his magnum opus, The Global Islamic Resistance Call, written in safe houses after the fall of the Taliban and published in December 2004 by a clandestine press. But a few weeks before his book appeared, the Bush administration bestowed an honour on him more valuable than anything the jihadi market had to offer: the announcement of a $5 million reward for his capture.

Abu Musab al-Suri is the nom de guerre of the Syrian jihadi Mustafa bin Abd al-Qadir Setmariam Nasar, al-Qaida’s most formidable and far-sighted military strategist. Al-Suri played a key role in the 1990s in establishing al-Qaida’s presence in Europe and forging its links to radical jihadis in North Africa and the Middle East, the Balkans and the former Soviet Union, South and East Asia. He was a spokesman for the Algerian Groupe Islamique Armé, a press attaché for Osama bin Laden in London and an adviser to Mullah Omar in Kabul, and he appears under a variety of aliases in books by foreign correspondents he escorted to meet the man in Tora Bora. Until he was captured in Quetta by Pakistani intelligence agents in October 2005 and handed over to the CIA, he went wherever the jihad travelled. Indeed, it was al-Suri who first argued that in order to survive, al-Qaida had to become a kind of travelling army based on mobile, nomadic, flexible cells operating independently of one another, unified by little more than a common ideology – and by the sense of shared grievances that the West’s ‘war on terror’ was likely to foster among Muslims. The concept of ‘leaderless jihad’, now much in vogue among so-called terrorism experts, is to a great extent al-Suri’s invention.

Some of the details of al-Suri’s life are not what you might expect:

Madrid, where al-Suri made a living selling second-hand furniture at a flea market, proved a comfortable base. With his red hair, green eyes and pale complexion, al-Suri passed easily for a European and soon enough he was one: in 1987 he married Elena Moreno Cruz, a left-wing student of philology who converted to Islam and helped him become a Spanish citizen. They moved to Granada and began to raise a family. Al-Suri opened a giftshop but found his true vocation as a jihadi author.

It guess it comes as no surprise that we should have been paying more attention to what Islamic terrorists were up to in the 1990s:

The GIA, however, thought al-Suri would be more useful in London, so in 1995 he moved there with his family and settled in Neasden. He became a staff writer for the GIA newsletter, al-Ansar, and travelled throughout Europe promoting the cause. The GIA was taking the war to France. It hijacked an Airbus in Algiers on Christmas Eve 1994 with the intention of flying it into the Eiffel Tower (the plane was stormed by gendarmes while refuelling in Marseille), and planted bombs in the Paris Metro the following year. Al-Suri praised these operations as efforts to punish France for supporting the military regime and to ‘expose the hidden hand of the West’. What neither al-Suri nor Qutadah knew at the time was that Algeria’s Sécurité Militaire had agents inside the GIA, and that they were probably encouraging the attacks on French soil in order to expose the barbarous face of the Islamist opposition and thereby persuade France that defending the military was in its national interest. Eventually, however, the GIA went too far even for al-Suri, when it began to execute many of its own leaders and to kill wavering supporters in order to ‘purify’ Algeria. Al-Suri resigned from the party and began looking for other work.

We also probably should have been paying more attention to the situation in London:

He didn’t have to look for long. London, as he later wrote, was ‘the centre for communications between Islamist groups and groups opposed to the governments of their own countries’, and there was no lack of opportunity for a ‘media jihadi’ like al-Suri. Still reeling from the Rushdie affair, the British government looked the other way, and showed particular indulgence towards jihadis who shared a common enemy with the Foreign Office, notably the Libyan jihadis conspiring against Gaddafi. British hospitality led al-Suri to assume, not unreasonably, that he and other jihadis had a tacit agreement with John Major that they ‘would never target Britain as long as the security forces left us alone’, and he abided by the ‘truce’. He spoke regularly to al-Zawahiri from a telephone box in the London suburbs, and came to serve as a liaison between British journalists and the jihadi movement. He was remarkably industrious – and successful – in his efforts to attract British attention.
[...]
He felt betrayed: ‘When Tony Blair came to power in 1997 he tore up the unwritten understanding and stabbed the mujahedin in the back by changing the laws and harassing us.’ Britain had lost its ‘democratic virginity’ to ‘the American cowboy’.

Posted in War | No Comments »

Inconspicuous Consumption

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption; he “argued that people spent lavishly on visible goods to prove that they were prosperous”:

“The motive is emulation — the stimulus of an invidious comparison which prompts us to outdo those with whom we are in the habit of classing ourselves,” he wrote.

This, it turns out, is quite true of the African-American subculture:

On race, the folk wisdom turns out to be true. An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

It’s not quite that simple though:

Since strangers tend to lump people together by race, the lower your racial group’s income, the more valuable it is to demonstrate your personal buying power.

To test this idea, the economists compared the spending patterns of people of the same race in different states — say, blacks in Alabama versus blacks in Massachusetts, or whites in South Carolina versus whites in California. Sure enough, all else being equal (including one’s own income), an individual spent more of his income on visible goods as his racial group’s income went down. African Americans don’t necessarily have different tastes from whites. They’re just poorer, on average. In places where blacks in general have more money, individual black people feel less pressure to prove their wealth.

The same is true for whites. Controlling for differences in housing costs, an increase of $10,000 in the mean income for white households — about like going from South Carolina to California—leads to a 13 percent decrease in spending on visible goods. “Take a $100,000-a-year person in Alabama and a $100,000 person in Boston,” says Hurst. “The $100,000 person in Alabama does more visible consumption than the $100,000 person in Massachusetts.” That’s why a diamond-crusted Rolex screams “nouveau riche.” It signals that the owner came from a poor group and has something to prove.

This nouveau riche phenomenon goes well beyond a few racial minorities in the US:

It suggests why emerging economies like Russia and China, despite their low average incomes, are such hot luxury markets today — and why 20th-century Texas, a relatively poor state, provided so many eager customers for Neiman Marcus. Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor.

So, Veblen was right — but he was also wrong:

Or at least his theory is out of date. Given that the richer your group, the less flashy spending you’ll do, conspicuous consumption isn’t a universal phenomenon. It’s a development phase. It declines as countries, regions, or distinct groups get richer. “Bling rules in emerging economies still eager to travel the status-through-product consumption road,” the market-research group Euromonitor recently noted, but luxury businesses “are becoming aware that bling isn’t enough for growing numbers of consumers in developed economies.” At some point, luxury becomes less a tool of public status competition and more a means to private pleasure.

For today’s affluent, success is about inconspicuous consumption:

In Veblen’s day, the less affluent scrimped on their homes in order to keep up appearances in public. “The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers,” Veblen wrote, noting that people therefore “habitually screen their private life from observation.” By contrast, consider David Brooks’s observation in Bobos in Paradise that, for today’s educated elites,
it’s virtuous to spend $25,000 on your bathroom, but it’s vulgar to spend $15,000 on a sound system and a wide-screen TV. It’s decadent to spend $10,000 on an outdoor Jacuzzi, but if you’re not spending twice that on an oversized slate shower stall, it’s a sign that you probably haven’t learned to appreciate the simple rhythms of life.

Virtuous or vulgar, what all these items have in common is that they’re invisible to strangers. Only your friends and family see them. Any status they confer applies only within the small group you invite to your home. And the snob appeal Brooks pokes fun at corresponds to the size of the audience. Many friends may see your Jacuzzi or media room, but unless you’re on HGTV, only intimates will tour your master bathroom. A slate shower stall may make you feel rich, but it won’t tell the world that you are. As peer groups get richer, the balance between private pleasure and publicly visible consumption shifts.

Posted in Economics | No Comments »

Cocaine Cowboys

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

I found these snippets from Cocaine Cowboys fascinating. As you might imagine, the documentary looks at the Miami drug trade in the 1980s, the Miami Vice era, and these clips look at the Florida pilot who transported much of the coke — he almost seems like the hero of the piece — the New York-born dealer who worked with him, and the Colombians who supplied the drugs:

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Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol — or, rather, they create them:

Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory — funded by $20 million of start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems — Mr Pal explains that LS9’s bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E. coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe $20,000.”

Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products, such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.

For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to produce electricity to run the plant.

The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock, given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel, such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in California, for example, or woodchips in the South.

Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.

The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.

That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.

“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost about $50 a barrel.

Posted in Science, Technology | No Comments »

A Mixed Martial Arts Superstar

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Nancy Mullane, reporting for NPR from San Francisco, interviews “Mixed Martial Arts Superstar” Jake Shields.

There’s something vaguely amusing about that.

Posted in Martial Arts | No Comments »

Andrew Stanton confirms John Carter of Mars

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Apparently Andrew Stanton has confirmed that he is writing John Carter of Mars for Pixar.

Of course, the promise of a Barsoom movie goes way, way back:

In 1931, the first documented attempt was made by animation pioneer Bob Clampett. It was to be his first independent project since making a name for himself as an animator at Warner Bros. Clampett approached Edgar Rice Burroughs himself about making an animated version of the books Clampett adored. To the animator’s pleasant surprise, Burroughs was enthusiastic about the idea of an animated film as he was eager to give his characters wider exposure. (The Mars books had won a reasonable level of success on their own, but nowhere near the author’s Tarzan book series.) Burroughs’ son, Jack Burroughs, recently-graduated from college, was fascinated by Clampett’s unique animation style. He and the animator collaborated in creating an extensive cachet of notes, sketches, and models–that would be the film’s blueprints–and a reel of test footage. All the while, Burroughs the Author sold the film rights to Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the studio that was already producing the Tarzan film series starring Johnny Weismuller.

The project was moving ahead expeditiously, until 1935. The executives at M.G.M soon clashed with Clampett and the two Burroughs men over the direction in which to take the film: the creators wanted a serious sci-fi adventure tale; the execs wanted a slapstick comedy with a swashbuckling hero. Eventually, the studio put an end to the entire project, citing it as “too expensive”. Had it been created, the first in a series of short films would have debuted in 1936.

When Clampett toured colleges and universities in the late 1970s, he would screen test footage he had co-created with Jack Burroughs. The audience reaction was always ecstatic.

Take a look:

Ray Harryhausen also gave it a go in the early 1960s.

I can remember Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott talking in the late 1990s about their go at it:

The project came the closest to fruition in the late 1980s when the film rights were acquired by the Touchstone Pictures division of The Walt Disney Company. To help off-set unforeseeable costs, Carolco Pictures heads Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna were brought on as producers. For the first time since Bob Clampett was let go from the project, an official director was announced in 1988: John McTiernan, fresh off the back-to-back successes of Predator and Die Hard. McTiernan hired then up-and-coming screenwriters Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott to write the screenplay, while production designer William Stout was brought on board to create the unique look of the film. Both McTiernan and Stout have gone on record as saying that Tom Cruise was in talks to play John Carter (there are long-persistent rumours that Julia Roberts was in talks to play Carter’s love interest, Dejah Thoris, but there is little evidence to substantiate this.)

However, the project was once again marred by its sheer scale and rising budget. Furthermore, McTiernan was unhappy with the state of cinematic special effects at the time, feeling they needed to advance to achieve the appropriate effect needed for the landscape of Barsoom. The growing budget is one of many factors that contributed to the eventual bankruptcy of Carolco Pictures.

During the 1990s, Disney/Touchstone made several attempts to get the project up and running again, but to no avail. Sometime after, the rights expired.

That’s when I lost track of things, but it obviously kept bouncing around:

In 2002, the rights were acquired by Paramount Pictures, which originally planned to release the film under the title A Princess of Mars. It was changed during development to John Carter of Mars. Although this title has the same name as Burroughs’s final book in the Barsoom series, the content was to be based on several Carter novels. If the film was successful, Paramount made it known sequels were likely as the studio wanted to make it into a franchise.

The film was to be produced by Alphaville Productions partners Sean Daniel and Jim Jacks. The script was written by Mark Protosevich and rewritten by Ehren Kruger. No actors were attached to the project.

In 2004 it was announced that Robert Rodriguez would direct from a screenplay by Mark Protosevich. Soon after, Rodriguez’ friend, webmaster, and life-long fan of the books, Harry Knowles, was named as a co-producer with Daniel and Jacks. It would have been Rodriguez’s largest project with a reported starting budget of $100 million. Rodriguez even went so far as to hire as production designer one of his favorite painters, fantasy artist Frank Frazetta (whose commissioned painting have graced many covers of Edgar Rice Burroughs books, particularly the Mars). However, later that year Rodriguez got into a dispute with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) over the credits of his movie Sin City, forcing him to resign from the guild. As a result, he was forced to relinquish the director’s chair on what had just been re-named John Carter of Mars, the producers having an agreement with the DGA only to work with guild members.

Soon after, Kerry Conran, director of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, was named as the new director. In 2005, Conran left the project for reasons that are unclear. As of October of that year, Jon Favreau was scheduled to direct the film; subsequently, it was said to be helmed by Brad Bird of Pixar fame. Finally, in 2006, Paramount decided not to renew their option on the work, determining to make a new Star Trek film instead.

Rodriguez + $100 million + Frazetta = Wow! I won’t sneeze at Pixar though.

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Where’s the Anarchy in Cedar Rapids?

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Where’s the Anarchy in Cedar Rapids?, Mangan asks:

Iowa: Cooperative and can do spirit and pride and compassion for the fellow citizen
New Orleans: fighting with and blaming of police and all authorities

Iowa: A sense of humor and optimism
New Orleans: bitching and hostility and insistence that government and the Corps of Engineers are out to get them

Iowa: Trust and willingness to follow orders from police and civil defense authorities — this includes everything from evacuating homes to cutting back on water use. The authorities’ urgings to reduce household water use have been so successful that Cedar Rapids will have more water services available, and sooner, than they had hoped. This trust and willingness has contributed to ZERO FATALITIES from the floods.
New Orleans: stupidity, inaction, lack of preparedness

Iowa: Willingness to work hard for nothing (eg, sandbagging, a job that can be struck from the list of “jobs that Americans won’t do”)
New Orleans: not much willingness to do much of anything to help except point fingers

Iowa: ZERO looting
New Orleans: looting galore

Iowa: organization, well organized news conferences, people following orders
New Orleans: chaos, finger-pointing, racial tensions, blacks and racist media thugs daring to point their fingers at whites and an “evil” government

Iowa: well run, orderly, well prepared shelters even though they are not really set up to house flood victims
New Orleans: chaos, unprepared shelters, Superdome a living hell for whites (ie, racism), even though New Orleans has a well publicized and well known Gulf hurricane threat every year

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The Shield

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Lloyd explains a few things about the shield that wouldn’t be obvious until you started re-enacting ancient combat:

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ADHD an advantage for nomadic tribesmen?

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Is ADHD an advantage for nomadic tribesmen? Yeah:

A study led by Dan Eisenberg, an anthropology graduate student from Northwestern University in the US, analyzed the correlates of body mass index (BMI) and height with two genetic polymorphisms in dopamine receptor genes, in particular the 48 base pair (bp) repeat polymorphism in the dopamine receptor D4 (DRD4) gene.

The DRD4 gene codes for a receptor for dopamine, one of the chemical messengers used in the brain. According to Eisenberg “this gene is likely to be involved in impulsivity, reward anticipation and addiction”. One version of the DRD4 gene, the ’7R allele’, is believed to be associated with food craving as well as ADHD. By studying adult men of the Ariaal of Kenya, some of whom still live as nomads while others have recently settled, the research team investigated whether this association would have the same implications in different environments.

While those with the DRD4/7R allele were better nourished in the nomadic population, they were less well-nourished in the settled population. Although the effects of different versions of dopamine genes have already been studied in industrialized countries, very little research has been carried out in non-industrial, subsistence environments like the areas where the Ariaal live, despite the fact that such environments may be more similar to the environments where much of human genetic evolution took place.

Eisenberg explains, “The DRD4/7R allele has been linked to greater food and drug cravings, novelty-seeking, and ADHD symptoms. It is possible that in the nomadic setting, a boy with this allele might be able to more effectively defend livestock against raiders or locate food and water sources, but that the same tendencies might not be as beneficial in settled pursuits such as focusing in school, farming or selling goods”.

These findings suggest that behavior differences previously associated with the DRD4 gene, such as ADHD, are more or less effective depending on the environment. Research into how this might occur in Ariaal children is planned in the near future.

(Hat tip to Randall Parker.)

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Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Scientists find monkeys who know how to fish:

Groups of long-tailed macaques were observed four times over the past eight years scooping up small fish with their hands and eating them along rivers in East Kalimantan and North Sumatra provinces, according to researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the Great Ape Trust.

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Reflections of a Russian Statesman

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

I hadn’t heard of 19th-century Russian reactionary Konstantin Pobedonostsev until Mencius Moldbug mentioned him in passing, but this passage from his Reflections of a Russian Statesman caught my interest:

What is this freedom by which so many minds are agitated, which inspires so many insensate actions, so many wild speeches, which leads the people so often to misfortune? In the democratic sense of the word, freedom is the right of political power, or, to express it otherwise, the right to participate in the government of the State.

This universal aspiration for a share in government has no constant limitations, and seeks no definite issue, but incessantly extends, so that we might apply to it the words of the ancient poet about dropsy: crescit indulgens sibi.

For ever extending its base, the new Democracy aspires to universal suffrage — a fatal error, and one of the most remarkable in the history of mankind. By this means, the political power so passionately demanded by Democracy would be shattered into a number of infinitesimal bits, of which each citizen acquires a single one. What will he do with it, then? How will he employ it?

In the result it has undoubtedly been shown that in the attainment of this aim Democracy violates its sacred formula of “Freedom indissolubly joined with Equality.” It is shown that this apparently equal distribution of “freedom” among all involves the total destruction of equality.

Each vote, representing an inconsiderable fragment of power, by itself signifies nothing; an aggregation of votes alone has a relative value. The result may be likened to the general meetings of shareholders in public companies. By themselves individuals are ineffective, but he who controls a number of these fragmentary forces is master of all power, and directs all decisions and dispositions.

We may well ask in what consists the superiority of Democracy. Everywhere the strongest man becomes master of the State ; sometimes a fortunate and resolute general, sometimes a monarch or administrator with knowledge, dexterity, a clear plan of action, and a determined will.

In a Democracy, the real rulers are the dexterous manipulators of votes, with their placemen, the mechanics who so skilfully operate the hidden springs which move the puppets in the arena of democratic elections. Men of this kind are ever ready with loud speeches lauding equality; in reality, they rule the people as any despot or military dictator might rule it.

The extension of the right to participate in elections is regarded as progress and as the conquest of freedom by democratic theorists, who hold that the more numerous the participants in political rights, the greater is the probability that all will employ this right in the interests of the public welfare, and for the increase of the freedom of the people. Experience proves a very different thing.

(All emphasis mine, of course.)

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

England does not deserve pride

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I’ve read enough Dalrymple to agree with Mencius Moldbug when he says that frankly England does not deserve pride:

It has gone to the dogs, and that may be an insult to dogs. If England is to restore its sense of pride, it needs to start with its sense of shame. And the first thing it should be ashamed of its the pathetic excuse for a government that afflicts it at present, and will afflict it for the indefinite future until something drastic is done.

For example, according to official statistics, between 1900 and 1992 the crime rate in Great Britain, indictable offenses per capita known to the police, increased by a factor of 46. That’s not 46%. Oh, no. That’s 4600%. Many of the offenders having been imported specially, to make England brighter and more colorful. This isn’t a government. It’s a crime syndicate.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

Solar Power’s New Style

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Solar power's new style is thin — and thin is in because it’s cheap:

Solar producers measure their costs in terms of dollars per watt of energy produced, a formula that’s a combination of the cost of producing a module and its power efficiency. Right now the best crystalline-silicon makers can sell modules at $3 to $4 a watt; First Solar can sell at around $2.40 a watt, a price the company expects to reduce steadily. “They’ve really pushed this industry over the threshold,” says Travis Bradford, author of The Solar Revolution. “They possess great technology.”

But First Solar doesn’t generate the most buzz. That notoriety belongs to the start-up Nanosolar, which shocked its competitors in December when it announced it would begin profitably selling thin-film panels at $1 a watt. That figure is solar’s holy grail, the point at which power from the sun becomes generally cheaper than coal, without the help of subsidies.

Nanosolar ceo Martin Roscheisen, who, like many new solar kings, has roots in Silicon Valley, says he can achieve radical cost savings by directly applying photoactive chemicals with an ink composed of nanoparticles. Nanosolar’s PowerSheet cells roll off the machines like pages of newspaper in a printing press, at the rate of several hundred feet a minute. Roscheisen, an intense Austrian, says Nanosolar’s first 18 months of production have already been purchased. “We’re looking for a 35% market share in the next couple of years,” he says. “The simple truth is, we can scale a lot more product out for a lot less.”

Roscheisen’s competitors are, to put it gently, dubious about his claims, pointing out that the cost of raw materials alone should make it impossible to produce $1-a-watt panels profitably. “Of course they doubt it,” he says. “Otherwise it makes a joke of their business models.” Nanosolar’s claims should become more transparent as the company scales up and either meets demand or fails to; in the past, it has suffered production delays.

I guess we have to wait and see.

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