Month: May 2009
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Best Line of the Week: Not-So-True Conservatives
Okay, so the week happened to be more than two years ago. But it’s the best line of my week: The old formulation defined conservatism as the desire to protect traditional values from the intrusion of big government; the new one seeks to promote traditional values through the intrusion of big government. Related posts: Keynes:…
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“More Investment Needed!” Oh, Really?
Following up on posts here, here, and here questioning the supply-side orthodoxy that more money for the rich results in more investment, hence prosperity for all (see the long-discredited Say’s Law), I give you this (click for source): Between 2003 and 2008, US gross fixed capital increased by about 25 percent, a reasonable number during…
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The American President: Why IQ Matters
In a recent post I pointed out that Humans are Pathologically Nuts. In particular they’re forever playing obvious win-win games as if they were zero-sum or worse, and everybody loses as a result. Now I come across this study (PDF) showing that there’s a significant correlation between lower IQ and that very type of irrational…
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Religious “Indoctrination”?
I am really confused by Charles Blow’s confusion in the opening paragraph of his latest column: …most children raised unaffiliated with a religion later chose to join one. Indoctrination be damned. By contrast, only 14 percent of those raised Catholic and 13 percent of those raised Protestant later became unaffiliated. So kids raised unaffiliated feel…