Gawker media’s primary audience is nerds. Their primary income comes from advertisers, who pay them to show ads to nerds. And this is what Gawker has to say about nerds. Ultimately GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission Upon receiving a hostile reaction from their audience: @hamiltonnolan @Based_Tet@max_read Max just told me I’m getting a raise because …
Category: economics
Chinese growth prospects
A politically correct Harvard paper “Asiaphoria Meet Regression to the Mean” by the politically correct authors Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers tells us, or seemingly tells us, that China’s rapid growth is unlikely to last. They examine fifty or so periods of rapid growth, and, almost always, sad to say, there is regression to the mean. In the long run, the periods of rapid growth make little difference. These are, …
China’s real GDP passes US
For many years, US statistics have been obviously fake, understating inflation by about two and a half percent a year, thus overstating real GDP growth by about three percent a year, and understating the fall in living standards by about three percent a year. Thus, according to official statistics, US real GDP is still higher than that of China. Yet, by every measure of actual stuff and technological capability, Chinese …
The Spandrellian trichotomy
Technology capitalism: libertarianism As the left gets ever lefter, it gets every crazier. Since the libertarian tries to make a separate peace with the left on behalf of capitalism, its craziness necessarily flows into libertarianism. Libertarians notice that capitalism, in particular the joint stock corporation based on double entry accounting, provides a great, humane, and highly productive system for creating wealth, advancing technological progress, and maximizing liberty. They therefore propose …
Why the art, literature, and science of decadent civilization is decadent
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …