Gibbon called the art and literature of the latter days of the Roman Empire “the second childhood of human reasonâ€. Back in the days when European art was the greatest the world has ever seen, the wealthy and powerful Cornaro family patronized the artist Bernini because he was a great artist. Because high status people like the Cornaro family patronized great artists, great art was high status, and, circularly, the Cornaro family gained status by patronizing great art, such as …
Category: economics
The cure for IQ shredders
Our best hopes for a high tech future, for avoiding a dark age, are consuming the genes needed for a high tech future. Smart people go to Hong Kong and Singapore and fail to reproduce. Singapore has taken numerous measures, similar to those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus, to improve fertility, which will doubtless be as ineffectual as those of the Nazis and Emperor Augustus. Just as the cure for Chinese poverty was to import the economic laws and …
The future belongs to those that show up
A fertility of slightly over 2.0 is a stable population.
Sarah Perry on the Economic Value of Children
Sarah Perry argues that children have been nationalized, have become property of the state and ceased to be the property of their parents, so have become a cost to their parents and a profit to the state, so parents decline to produce so many. Makes sense, certainly part of the story, but not what I seem to observe, not the main story. What I seem to see happening is that the major cost deterring people from children is not economic, …
The cause of population decline
At present, only poor countries have reasonable fertility. Â The fertile age white population is everywhere declining, and the most intelligent and educated women reproduce the least. But quite recently affluent countries such as pre Weimar Germany had high fertility, and many poor countries have fertility as low as the worst of the west. Conversely, Rome in its decline, and Sparta in its decline, had terribly low fertility, though their only methods of birth control were vice, abortion, and infanticide, …
Capitalism and entrepreneurial capitalism
Capitalism, in the sense of wealth creating wealth, wage labor, power derived from wealth, and trade, is a bronze age social technology. “Capital” literally means “head” in the sense of “head of cattle”. Originally, the amount of capital one had was the number of beasts in one’s herds. The biblical bronze age patriarchs were capitalists, in that their wealth was their herds, and their power derived from their wealth, their power was their employees. The actual figures on whom the …
“More Right†proposes communism
More right quoting “Men among the ruins†The preliminary condition would naturally be the overcoming of the typical situation in democracies, where the political element makes promiscuous alliances with the plutocratic element, opening itself to corruption and pretending to represent a “Right†in opposition to Marxism. Again, the pure political power must be released from every bond—first from the bonds of capitalism, and then from those of the economy This is, the state released from every bond, is the old …
Bitcoin failure
For bitcoin to work politically, authority over the currency needs to be distributed over a large group of peers. If power is concentrated at a single point, the state can dominate that point, whoever controls that point can steal other people’s currency and do a variety of bad things. Bitcoin was designed so that “voting” depended on computing power and network connection. Initially, almost everyone who had a client was a miner, there were a huge number of miners, everyone …
Why women need to kept on leashes
A software company just went bust.  Happens a lot.  That a woman happened to be running this company is not significant.  Lots of men have lost lots of other people’s money too.  What is significant is that she starts off her explanation of how she pissed away all her investor’s money by talking about her sex life. She begins: Something wasn’t right, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. On the surface, it seemed like I had the …
Technological decline
If we cannot build high buildings any more, progressives say we are now so sophisticated that we are now superior to status competition based on giant penis substitutes, and status competition based on having a higher corner office than the other business executives. If high art is an aids infested trannie projectile vomiting over the audience, progressives say that we philistines just don’t get high art. But the most important thing about a military aircraft is that it can fly …