Tag: not the cognitive elite

economics

Ben Bernanke pledges to throw gasoline on the fire

Bernanke pledges to keep interest rates low for at least the next two years – meaning real interest are several percent negative.  Large negative interest rates rapidly lead to economic crisis. “The low level of inflation is a validation,” Bernanke said. “There are some who were very concerned that our balance-sheet policies and the like would lead to high inflation. There’s certainly no sign of that yet.” Really?  Sales have gone …

culture

Not the cognitive elite

According to Murray, in the bad old days of elitism, the university was full of good old boys, rather than the smartest, but now, our elite are a bunch of really smart guys. Leading climate scientist Michael Mann and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman are really smart guys? The guys who write the New York Times are really smart?

economics

billion prices inflation estimate

The billion prices project spiders prices off the internet, and gets results broadly similar to the BLS, about thee percent per year, which surprises me, since  over the last three years the BLS has been applying “hedonic adjustments” to all manner of goods where hedonic adjustment is impossible or implausible.  Today’s supposedly three percent inflation as measured by the BLS is a lot higher rate of inflation than what the …

culture

The suicide of the elites

Participatory transexual vomiting as high art. This illustrates Unwin’s “Sex and Culture” – that no civilization long survives the end of the patriarchy and female chastity. Unwin’s suggested explanation for this observation is that civilization is produced by the Freudian energy of sexual repression. I favor the theory that civilization is created by patriarchs for their offspring. Another plausible theory is that civilizations survive by high asabiya, Roissy being a …