Author Archives: Free Northerner

Why Are Children So Expensive?

I wrote this a few months back, but never got around to posting it. Scott’s post on wage stagnation reminded me to post it, because I discuss some of the same things here, while he ignored what I think is the most obvious cause of wage stagnation.

Someone posted on twitter, asking why kids became expensive. I answered mostly about the spiritual reasons: the unwillingness to sacrifice. And that’s true; kids are affordable, IF you’re willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

However, as Nick B Steves has said, ordinary virtue should not require heroic effort. You can have many kids if you’re willing to make extraordinary effort to do so, but any sane and healthy society should make it relatively easy to have many kids, ours does not. So,I’m going to show why kids are so expensive.

****

Wages

The first reason is wages. Inflation-wise wages have been stagnant since about the 70s. Despite massive increases in productivity, people are not making more real money.

Wages are determined by where the demand for labour and the supply of labour meet: how many jobs are there and how many people need jobs. This is elementary economics, but I’m going to make it clear here, because when it comes to discussing labour supply and demand, I notice people tend to make self-serving analyses as if basic economic principles change when it comes to labour, so I want to make it clear:

The more jobs that need to be filled, the higher the demand for labour, so this pushes wages up. If the jobs to be filled decreases, demand for labour decreases, which pushes wages down. If the size of the labour force increases, labour supply increases, which pushes wages down. If the size of the labour force decreases, labour supply decreases, pushing wages up.

Over the past 60 years or so, there have been multiple major trends both increasing the labour supply and decreasing labour demand.

The biggest trend is feminism. Feminism pushed women into the workforce which (more or less) doubled the labour force over a period a few decades. This pushed wages down hard.

The second major trend is immigration. Since the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed in 1965, opening immigration up, 59 million immigrants (as of 2015) have arrived in the US. The US population in 1965 was 194 million, in 2015, it was 321 million, for a total growth of 127 million. 46% of US population growth since 1965 has been from immigration.

That is a unnaturally massive growth in the labour supply, which has had a massive downward pressure on wages.

I will note here, that keeping wages low has been a near explicit part of the arguments for immigration. “Labour shortage” is synonymous with “wage shortage”; when employers argue that there are not enough workers, what is really being said, is they are not paying enough to attract workers. “Jobs Americans won’t do” is synonymous with “Jobs Americans won’t do unless paid more than currently offered”.

To make matters worse, the 1965 INA opened up immigration from third world countries, where wages were already naturally low. So labourers being imported into America would be willing to work for much below what an American would accept as reasonable, increasing the downward pressure on wages.

While these two trends where increasing labour supply, other trends were decreasing labour demand. Particularly off-shoring and mechanization.

Off-shoring moved industry from high-wage America to low-wage third-world countries, while mechanization has replaced human workers with machines. Both of these have had large depressive effects on labour demand, and therefore wages, particularly in non-service, low-skill occupations, which are the easiest jobs to both automate and move.

You can’t afford children, because you’re not getting paid decent wages because capital has systematically forced you into competition with poor third-world labour, imported labour, and your wife over jobs, forcing wages down.

****

Housing Costs

Housing costs are the single biggest expense (rivaled only by taxes) to your average person, and housing costs have exploded.

In 1960, the median house price was $58,000 (in 2000$). In 2000, the median house price was $119,600. In 2015, the median house price was $294,200 (in 2015$), which comes to $213,700 in 2000$.

In 55 years, housing prices have almost quadrupled, while wages have stagnated.

One of the major reasons is the increase in housing size. Since 1975, housing size has doubled. But that does not explain a quadrupling in housing costs. It would at best explain a doubling, but should be less than doubling because new marginal square footage should theoretically be cheaper due to the fixed costs in a home.

Another major drivers of house pricing includes increased demand from the fracturing of the family. In an intact nuclear family, two parents and their children share 1 house (possibly with a grandparent or two). In a divorced family, two parents and their children share 2 houses. An unmarried man and an unmarried woman have 2 houses (roommates amerloriate this to an extent). A single mother with children and her baby daddy have 2 houses. Etc. Throw on top of this the shift from multi-generational homes, and the fracturing of the family and the turn away from marraige has had a large, but, AFAIK, unmeasured effect on home prices (this would make a good study proposal for any economists out there).

Another major driver is immigration. 59 million people needing housing is a huge upward driver of housing demand and therefore housing prices.

A third major driver is schooling and safety. “Good schools” is a major driver of house prices and “safe neighbourhoods” because most parents, understandably, want their kids to get a good education and to be able to live without worry they’ll won’t become involved with or victims of drugs, gangs, and crime. Everybody is also aware that “good schools” and “safe neighbourhoods” are politically-correct codes words for schools and neighbourhoods without poor minorities who statistically make schools bad and neighbourhoods unsafe.

Because federal laws make discrimination in housing on any basis but price illegal, the only way to keep schools good and neighbourhoods safe is to discriminate on price. This puts a huge upward pressure on price, as people move to high price neighbourhoods to escape poor minorities (who may then follow them, because they too want good schools and safe neighbourhoods, forcing the process to repeat, escalating prices even higher).

Because of this, safe, affordable housing is functionally illegal in American cities and prices ever increase.

****

Two Income Trap and Child Care

The increased upward pressure on housing prices has the side effect of forcing more families into the two income trap, so they can afford a good house.

This has a variety of effects that increase costs, making children expensive.

Child care is the largest of these. As I’ve explained before, affordable child care is impossible, so child care will immediately eat up a significant portion the second income. Child care by itself, is a major factor of why children are so expensive.

A second income usually requires a second vehicle (more on this below), another major fixed expense. A stay-at-home parent has time to cook home made meals, mends clothes, and participate in other cost-saving activities; a dual income household will eat out more often, purchase more expensive pre-made food, have to replace clothes, etc.

The two income trap imposes a number of large extra costs on families and removes many cost-savings that an at-home parent allows.

****

Taxes

I was going to write about the increasing tax burden here, but I couldn’t find much much data on the overall US tax burden; most of it was just federal tax rates, and calculating overall tax burden for the average middle class person over time is much more effort than I’m willing to put in to a blog post.

But according to this 2012 NYT article, the overall tax burden has been declining somewhat, except for low-income people, who continue to pay minimal taxes.

So we’ll say increasing taxes probably aren’t particularly responsible for kids costing too much.

****

Vehicles

Among average people, vehicles are second largest major fixed expense after housing, and they have generally gotten more expensive over time, primarily as more families have moved to being two car households and gas has gotten more expensive.

This site compared a few classic cars and all have increased by half to almost doubling since 1965 (inflation-adjusted). But these are classics and so might no be applicable.

According to Wiki, the Chevrolet Impalla was the best-selling full-size car in 1965 and is still the best-selling today, so we’ll use this and assume other similar cars are competitively priced. In 1965, a 4-door V-8 sedan Impala was 2,779, which comes to $20,910.17 in 2015$. The base price of a new Impala in 2015 was $27,700. An increase of about a third.

But large families need more than five seats. The 1965 Impala 9-passenger station wagon was $3,073, $23,122.33 in 2015$, the 6-passenger was $22,347.32. You generally can’t buy station wagons today, because US regulations classified them as cars, making them uneconomic to produce under US fuel standards, which was a major regulatory backfire for environmentalists, as families switched to minivans and SUVs, which were much worse on fuel. The best-selling SUV in 2015 was the Ford Escape, which started at $24,000, but only can seat 5 passenger. The best-selling minivan, is the Dodge Grand Caravan, it seats 7 passengers, and started at $22,000. The Chevy Express was the cheapest 9+-passenger I found on a site, and it starts at $29,000 for the cargo version, so probably just a bit more for a passenger vehicle.

So, it looks like 3-4 child family vehicles are significantly more expensive to buy, as are larger 8+ child family vehicles, but, contrary to my expectations, the large 5-7 child families are about the same.

Except that the SUV’s and vans cost a lot more in fuel and as mentioned above, 2-income families now almost always need 2 vehicles.

Gasoline costs have increased: with the exception of the 1973 and 1979 oil crises (when prices hit $3/gallon, post-WW2 gas prices generally stayed between $1.50-$2/gallon (in 2015$). Since 2000, gas prices have ranged between $2.50-$3.80 per gallon. Since 2006, gas prices have generally been higher than the $3/gallon they were at the peak of the oil crises. During this time gasoline usage has also been increasing, likely largely due to increasing suburbanization.

Another hidden cost: older vehicles were generally easier to repair and maintain at home, but the increased inclusion of electronics in vehicles, makes it increasingly difficult to repair without very expensive specialized electronic equipment, necessitating an increasing reliance on professionals for maintenance and repair, adding significant cost.

So, the need for two vehicles due to the two income trap has increased the cost of vehicles significantly for your average family, while vehicles themselves have become moderately more expensive. The cost of gasoline has increased significantly while consumption has increased.

****

Food

Food is generally the fourth biggest cost to families after housing, taxes, and vehicles. The average American spends less on food, as a percentage of income, then they used to. Hoever, good expenditures have stopped declining and been flat over the last 15-20 years.

However, this is deceptive, if you look at average household size since 1960, it mirrors average household size relatively closely. The levelling off of food costs as income share matches the levelling off of household size. This suggests food costs have been mostly constant per person, but less kids means less spending on food.

In a time of major productivity gains and stagnant wages, food costs have not really shrunk.

A major cause of this is the increase in eating out. It costs more to eat pre-made food than it does to make your own food. The average American now spends about 43% of their food budget on eating out. As well, when eating in, they are more likely to buy expensive pre-made meals than making their own. All this increases food bills.

The primary cause of this increase in eating out and in eating pre-made foods, is the two-income trap. When one parent was at home, they had sufficient time and energy to create homemade food, saving money. When both parents work, food preparation time becomes a luxury often foregone due to a lack of time and motivation.

In addition, to eating out costing more, eating out itself has increased in cost.

In economics, there’s an informal purchasing power parity index known as the Big Mac Index, that can roughly how close inflation rates measure actualy close consumer price data.

In 1968, when it first came out, a Big Mac cost $0.49, $3.34 in 2015$. In 1986, the first year of the Big Mac Index, it cost $1.60, $3.46 in 2015$. In 2000, $2.51, or $3.45 in 2015$. In 2015, the most recent year the BMI measured, it cost $4.79.

The cost of a Big Mac stayed relatively even until sometime after 2000. Since then there has been a ~40% increase in the cost of a Big Mac beyond inflation. My anecdotal experience in Canada and basic market competitiveness theory, suggests that this growth is probably true across eating out on average.

So eating out, which is 40% of your food bill, is now 40% more expensive than it used to be.

I’ll also note here, that the rapid growth of Big Mac costs past inflation, suggests that inflation has been severely underestimated, in which case, everything I’ve posted is much worse than the numbers suggest. I’ve always been skeptical of CPI, but a 40% extra increase over 15 years in something as basic and omnipresent as a Big Mac heightens my doubts.

Food costs haven’t really increased, but they haven’t particularly decreased either.

****

Education

Saving for college is a major expense for many middle-class families. Lots of ink has already been spilled over this, so I’m not going to repeat much. College has been increasing in price much faster than wages. 8 times as much according to this article.

A lot of young people start off with a lot of college debt. The average student loan borrower has $37k in debt upon graduation. That’s a lot of money, the equivalent of a down payment on a house. Instead of buying a house and accumulating capital, they’re paying off usury.

And they’re not really getting anything of increased value for this debt. The money is being burned in cost disease and their job prospects are worse than those of college grads decades ago.

****

Consumer Debt

Now, one of the major destroyers of people is usury. The average millennial has $42,000 in debt, the plurality of which is credit card debt. The average American is $33,000 in debt. I’ve already written about usury (and inflation) before, but debt and debt payments are major

Usury takes advantage of the average person who is not mentally equipped to fully understand the implications of debt and compounding interest. It shackles them in debt bondage. The average American spends $280k over their lifetime just on interest. The average person with credit card debt pays $1.1k in interest each year.

Household debt has increase from 31% of income in 1951 to about 100% now (it was up to 120% during the housing boom). All this debt means increased interest payments to banks.

Usury is strangling the average household, particularly the young.

****

Communication Technology

This is a simple one, but the average American user spends $47/month on mobile phones and $132 on cable and internet. That’s almost ~$180/month. When I was growing up, cable was rare and internet and mobiles practically non-existent. And this is just monthly bills, not including the purchase of HD TV’s mobile phones, and computers. This is a huge added expense most families take on.

****

Personal Choice

Finally, personal choice is why you can’t afford children. This is what my tweets harped on. People can’t afford children, because they are unwilling to sacrifice for them.

People eat out instead of making meals at home (driven by the two-income trap). People buy larger houses than they should (driven by “safe schools” and the two-income trap). People by two cars (driven by the two-income trap) and new cars. People go into consumer debt. People take useless degrees. People buy luxuries.

There are major structural issues making children expensive, which I’ve outlined above, but on the individual level, you can probably afford children if you are willing to sacrifice. People have been raised and become accustomed to luxuries they can’t afford (hence the massive amount of consumer debt most have). This may be due to structural issues, but on an individual level you can probably afford kids if you sacrifice.

Don’t go into debt for a useless degree; take trades or get a useful degree. If one of the parents stays home and engages in traditional money-saving practices (such as home-cooking and coupon-clipping), the family can avoid buying a second vehicle and paying child care costs. This will require buying a smaller house, children may have to share rooms and you may have minimal private space. Luxuries in entertainment and food may need be cut back. Cable cut. Home internet forgone for mobile only, or vice versa. It may require moving to a lower cost county or state.

Your grandparents raised 6 kids in a small 3-bedroom house with no TV, 1 car, minimal entertainment or luxuries, home-cooked meals, and penny-pinching. You can too if you will it enough and are willing to sacrifice for it.

****

The reason you can’t afford children is because wages stagnated while costs increased across the board.

Wages have been destroyed by a rapidly expanding labour pool due to immigration and feminism. At the same time, housing costs skyrocketed due to the two-income trap, a quest for safe schools and neighbourhoods, rapidly and artificially expanding population, and family breakdown. The two-income trap necessitated two vehicles, which along with gas greatly increased transportation costs.

Education has trapped the young in debt, while general usury eats people alive and prevents them from accumulating capital.

Finally, you’ve been raised to be accommodated to a lifestyle and luxuries you can’t afford and which you finance with debt.

On a personal level, you can overcome this and have children by making major sacrifices. On a societal level, it is insane and unhealthy to require the average person to make inordinate sacrifices just to be able to afford children. Any decent and sane society will do what it can to make raising a family comfortably affordable to most people.

Our society has been designed to destroy your ability to have children without either being rich or taking on massive usurious debt and making inordinate sacrifices.

****

Post-Script: I am not blaming immigrants for immigration, minorities for integration, or women for feminism. All of these are structural issues basically forced upon an unwilling populace by government and capital. Immigrants, minorities, and women followed, as would be expected, the incentives given them, and I generally don’t fault people for following incentives unless it’s a heinous evil, which none of the individual actions taken under this incentive structure would be. In fact, minorities and women probably suffered the most under this regime. Immigrants generally benefited, but being foreigners had minimal hand in the original changes in the 1960s.

The ones at fault are government and capital who imposed a destructive economic incentive structure upon society so they could destroy wages and increase consumption to feed their greed and lust for power. They are the ones who caused this and the ones responsible for why you can’t afford children.

Make sure you aim the blame properly.

The Authoritarian Power Base

As I’ve written, political power is, in essence, the capacity for violence and the will to use it. The power of a leader comes from his authority over, his ability to command, those with the capacity for violence because they believe he legitimately has authority to command them.

American politics, democratic politics, is a battle over who has authority and legitimacy to command violence of the democratic state and to what ends it may be commanded. These battles do not result in civil war because Americans accept that the democratic state, regardless of who holds the reins, is the legitimate authority over violence as long as the democratic process of transitioning this authority occurs in a mostly legitimate manner.

This legitimacy is crumbling.

Trust in American institutions is declining across the board. Trust in democracy is falling. The legitimacy of the process of authority transition is declining, with many thinking the process is rigged by, depending on the partisan side, illegal voting, foreign interference, gerrymandering, the electoral college itself, voter demographic changes, etc. A significant minority would theoretically support a military coup, while a significant minority currently support a legal coup by the deep state. (And this is only what people are willing to say, if a coup happened, far more would go along with it than would willingly say they’d theoretically support it).

The legitimacy of the democratic process is collapsing. If the legitimacy of the process collapses, so to does the legitimacy of the entire system who’s entire legitimacy and authority rests on the will of the people.

It is possible legitimacy could be earned back by the current system, but given the increasing diversity of America and the bifurcation of America between the Amerikaners and the urban cosmopolitans and their clients, it is unlikely, barring a Trumpian miracle.

Once legitimacy has faded, so to will authority. Power will be up for grabs.

With power struggles becoming viscerally real in a way democratic power papers over, legitimacy and authority will have to be reestablished.

The neoreactionary project is to establish legitimacy and authority in a peaceful way, to transfer legitimacy, authority, and power to an authoritarian autocrat with minimal bloodshed and without a descent into chaos.

Of course, the peaceful transfer of legitimacy, authority, and power itself requires a certain level of legitimacy, authority, and power.

Back to the beginning, power comes from the capacity and will for violence, it is essentially, ‘how many men with guns with how much morale and support equipment can I bring to bear should I call upon it?’

The capacity for violence doesn’t have to be used to exercise power but it has to exist and the will and authority to command it must be there.

This means that any person or group who wishes to reestablish legitimacy and authority after the terminal decay of current legitimacy and authority will require a base of power, a group of men willing to obey and, if necessary, commit violence on its behalf.

This includes the great man trying to establish the neoreactionary bargain or any other group trying to establish some form of right-wing authoritarianism.

The good news for for right-wing authoritarians is that there is a large, well-armed, pre-built power base waiting to be led: the middle-American radicals. As I wrote in my last post, the MARs are the largest single political group in the US but are also also one the politically least powerful.

The MARs are ineffective because they are leaderless. Trump is not of them and isn’t really leading them, but he’s sympathetic to them and appealling directly to them, which is the the most pro-MARS any political player has been since Buchanan last ran. The MARs propelled him to victory when his play to them was essentially: I don’t hate you, I think your concerns are legitimate, and I will work to address them. Given the vicious reaction from the current establishment that even this relatively minor level of play to the MARs base had, it is clear that in our current system the MARs are considered an illegitimate outgroup by the powers that be.

The MARs are effectively an occupied people ruled by an essentially foreign establishment. The Cathedral is run by people with different values who hate them, or at best condescend to them (“why don’t those rubes vote for their own best interests?”). Given the vicious reaction to Trump’s appeals to the MARs (and to the Tea Party and NRA), it is clear that the current American ruling structure will attempt to destroy any attempts by the MARs for democratic redress of their concerns. Their lot is to ground down for the system.

A large, alienated, armed, directionless, occupied group is sitting there waiting to be led. All that’s needed is to supply them with a leader, a will, a direction, and there will be a power base to reshape America.

The MARs are the obvious target group for any right-wing authoritarian action. They are patriotic and they are armed. They are increasingly desparate and not particularly ideological, meaning that someone willing and able to provide them the good governance they need will be able to create loyalty, legitimacy, and authority among them. Their attachment to democracy and the system that is destroying them, is not particularly strong and is weakening, leaving them open to more authoritarian froms of government.

Any populist right-wing movement, should be working to organize, radicalize, and mobilize the MARs, that’s where they will find fertile soil for any potential right-wing mass movement.

But, right-wing populism will likely not succeed. Every populist MARs uprising within the democratic framework, from McCarthy to Nixon’s silent majority to the Tea Party, has been either crushed or subverted. Hopefully, Trump will succeed, but the likelihood is he will at most buy a few more years until collapse, a few judges to protect MARs from leftist vengeance, and have prevented war with Syria, Iran, and Russia (which are certainly valuable in themselves, but are not going to change the tide we currently ride).

It also seems questionable whether a populist MARs movement outside a democratic framework will spontaneously arise. Despite the rhetoric, the MARs have proven to be overly long-suffering and law-abiding for us to expect 2nd amendment solutions in time for them to be effective. The current South African situation suggests that this long-suffering may last well beyond the point of no return.

Aside from concerns of feasibility, 2nd amendment solutions are something to be avoided if at all possible. Peaceful restoration is the goal, violent restoration, even if ultimately successful, is itself a partial failure, and there is a high probability of terminal failure should violent restoration be attempted.

Instead of populism, a better strategy is passivism. Build an elite class among the MARs, tap into existing MARs elites, and find allies with MARs-friendly elites, and build a network to create a leadership class the MARs will follow. Once this class has been built and has created the necessary legitimacy, a leader can be taken from it (or may arise spontaneously, as Trump did) and power can be peacefully transferred and restoration enacted.

Imagine what Trump could have done, could be doing, if, instead of having to rely on the deep state and eGOP to staff his administration and Twitter to spread his message, he had a ready built, legitimized set of loyal elites with a loyal power base to drop into any necessary role and have it spread their message. If, instead of having to spend most of his efforts on court politics and maintaining poll numbers, he could work at solving the US’ problems knowing his people were loyal to him and would support him.

He would be in a position to accept power and take upon himself the responsibility for restoration.

Given how much Trump has gained (or, perhaps more accurately, forestalled) with an isolated, hastily organized campaign filled with internal strife, working off little more than a single, fallible man’s charisma and ideas and a minor mobilization of MARs, think of how much could be accomplished if post-Trump, (2024, 2028, 2032), a true restorationist candidate ran an organized campaign centred around a well-led MARs power base fully organized and mobilized by a loyal, coordinated elite class with the purposeful intent of enacting restoration.

This would have a real chance of it being the true election that brings restoration. He would need to do little more than accept power.

Trump made the initial attempt at the Sailer strategy, he showed the way, now it needs to be fully adopted and implemented with the true election in mind.

The seed is there, among the MARs, who will grow it and pluck the fruit?

The Trump Realignment

You often see the lament from conservatives and the accusation from the left, of how the GOP has abandoned it principles by electing Trump. This is wrong, the Trump realignment is not a shift of principles, but a shift of power between groups with differing principles within the GOP.

The GOP is largely made up of 4 general groups.

The establishment (eGOP), also known as country-club Republicans or Chamber of Commerce conservatives is numerically one of the two smallest factions, primarily made up of the rich and upper-middle class. It’s the Buckleyian alliance of neocons and smallish-government “principled” conservatives who hold gate-keeping power over conservatism and the GOP. While numerically small, due to their riches, connections, and institutional power they hold tremendously outsized power within the GOP. Most major conservative institutions are controlled by them. eGOP principles are low taxes, somewhat limited government, business-friendliness, American Empire, playing by the rules (set by the Democrats), and being respectable. The eGOP is the right wing of the Washington uniparty and they set what “conservative principles” are.

The right-wing libertarians are the other small faction. Best exemplified by Ron Paul, they believe in small government, governmental non-interference, and are generally against foreign interventionism. They were numerically very small and had no real power in the GOP, but they controlled a few academic/think tank institutions, and their strict adherence to their ideology and their strong dedication to government policy solutions often had influence on GOP policies beyond what their lack of numbers and power would suggest.

The religious right (RR), also called the Moral Majority or evangelicals (although much broader than just evangelicals) were numerically a much larger faction. Made up of religious conservatives, it is where the bulk of solid Republican voters came from. This faction cares deeply about and votes on family values and anti-abortion. The RR has created a whole set of parallel institutions, none of which have much real impact on federal politics. Despite it’s numerical superiority and large institutional capacity, it wielded only moderate influence on GOP policies. Hated with a passion by the left and as basically single-issue voters, they were a reliable voting bloc for the GOP, needing only the occasional anti-abortion speech or small regulation here or there, to get keep them coming out to vote. Ultimately nothing concrete or lasting on the national level was ever implemented for the RR bloc, despite their loyalty and numbers.

The final and numerically largest faction, is the Middle-American Radicals (MARs). The MARs are not, strictly speaking, a GOP faction; they lean GOP, but are, as a group, not particularly partisan or ideological; they’ll vote for blue dog or union Democrats and probably think fondly of JFK. This group is by far the largest faction in US politics, comprising most all non-urban, working-class to middle-class, white Americans.

The MARs overlap the RR almost completely, the primary difference between the MARs and RR is that while the MARs may be sympathetic to the RRs on family values issues, they don’t particularly care and do not generally vote based on moral wedge issues. The RR are basically a subgroup of the MARs that attend church regularly and vote on their faith.

This difference though, is huge in political terms as it makes RR a reliable, loyal voting bloc for GOP as long as the GOP pay lip-service to family values and anti-abortion, but at the same time, the non-RR MARs are not particularly reliable. They’re not particularly partisan in voting and may not vote much at all. Unlike the other groups I’ve mentioned, who anybody can recognize, they are not a particularly well-defined or well-recognized faction.

The MARs do not have a particularly coherent ideology and their general political sentiments are “politicians are corrupt liars in the pockets of corporations stealing from little guy, except maybe this one guy from my hometown/state I like.” This is why there was a seemingly odd fluidity between Trump and Bernie, both tapped into this general sentiment.

They are strongly patriotic, pro-America, and pro-military and while not particularly in favour of international intervention, can be easily led to support war against America’s enemies if they are convinced there’s a threat. They are generally socially conservative-libertarianish (“I don’t like homos, but it’s not business”). They are wary of free trade as it tends to result in the factories they work for shutting down. On economic issues, they are generally for “fairness” for the average Joe. They hate socialism, big government, high taxes, handouts, and freeloaders, but they’ll also support government intervention they see as looking out for the little guy, supporting Medicare, Social Security, and such things. They’ll hate regulations that interfere with their farm or plumbing small business, but think somebody should rein in those corporate fat cats and bankers.

The MARs political beliefs are defined not by a coherent ideology, but by a general sentiment that government should work to make sure the working man gets his fair share and can live well without giving their hard-earned money to freeloaders. The Tea Party was the quintessential MARs political movement.

Illegal immigration is the one major issue the MARs stake out a clear policy stance: opposition. Illegal immigration hits every MARs button: it’s unfair that some get to jump the line, it’s wrong that criminal freeloading illegals get to take advantage of American tax dollars, they take jobs, and they lower wages.

The interesting thing about the MARs, is that despite being by far the largest constitutency in the US, they have minimal political power. They vote inconsistently, have no coherent ideology, and have no real political organizing (before the Tea Party) which makes it difficult for them to influence policy. MARs control only one notable institution, the NRA. This is why the NRA is so outsizedly powerful, because they are the only real interaction node between the MARs, the largest bloc of votes in the US, and the federal government.

****

Following the Bush administration’s many failures, the right was in chaos.

The libertarian faction had generally worked well together with the eGOP and the MARs. The non-ideological love of freedom of the MARs and lower taxes and less regulations of the eGOP gave the libertarians a home on the edges of the GOP.

But right-wing libertarianism is dead. It had it’s high water mark in 2008/2012 Ron Paul campaigns. With Ron Paul’s retirement, the “pot and sex” and bleeding heart libertarians took over libertarianism, while most right-wing libertarians moved on as they began to realize that mass immigration and libertarianism were incompatible and many began to think as Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible”.

The religious right reached the high point of their power electing “compassionate conservative” George W. Bush. After 8 years, nothing was done about abortion or family values, meanwhile demographics shifted strongly against the religious right and its power has since faded. It is now a marginalized GOP voting bloc, rather than a major GOP power player; just a enough power to get a token VP, but not much more. They RR was betrayed and has permanently lost, and they know it.

The eGOP spent a lot of political capital on the Iraq War and other foreign interventions which turned out poorly. The 2007-2008 financial crisis and great recession was a powerful hit to their legitimacy on economic issues. After 8 years of Bush, the eGOP had burned through most of their legitimacy.

At the same time, libertarianism and the religious right were dying, and the eGOP was delegitimized, the Tea Party took off. The Tea Party was a MARs movement: lots of flags, lots of patriotism, libertarianish, less taxes, and less government, except where it helps the little guy. The Tea Party organized and began to throw out politicians of the other factions. It was then somewhat coopted by the eGOP during the Obama years.

This is where Trump’s realignment kicked in.

Trump decided to bypass the eGOP and in fact played on the anti-eGOP sentiment that had always been part the MARs and RR. Trump became the political avatar of the MARs. He attacked eGOP principles which had dominated the party for so long. He pushed a non-ideological Americanism for the little guy. He hit on illegal immigration. He brought the RR into the MARs: he’s not going to try to enforce family values, but he will at least try to be anti-abortion and will protect the defeated religious right from the left’s vengeance, while appealing to the RR’s sympathy to the more broadly-appealing MARs issues they support.

The Trump realignment is not an abandonment of conservative principles by conservatives, it is a fundamental realignment of ownership of the GOP from conservatives (the eGOP) to the middle-American radicals, who have fundamentally different values.

The RR’s embrace of Trump is not an abandonment of their religious values, but a recognition that they lost, that they will no longer hold even the moderate influence it once did in the GOP, and that they have to ally with the MARs to not be entirely crushed by the left.

****

Finally, beyond Trump: any authoritarian right-wing regime in America will have to make the MARs the base of their power. The MARs like (small-r) republicanism, because it is American, but they are also not particularly ideologically opposed toauthoritarianism. An American anti-democratic authoritarianism would be embraced by the MARs if it was American and patriotic enough.

While neoreaction is strongly in favour of converting elites, elites’ power comes from authority over and legitimacy from people. Any reactionary elite who pulls restoration off will have to have a power base to do so, and the natural reactionary power base is found in the MARs.

Power, Rights, and Illiberal Freedom

As I’ve noted before, power is the ability to enact one’s will.

Negative freedom is the ability to act according to one’s will without external constraint.

Positive freedom is the ability to act according to one’s will.

A right is a license granted by a higher (not necessarily divine) power to either act according to one’s will or enact ones will within a particular domain.

Notice how similar these definitions are, differing primarily in emphasis.

Freedom is a form of power, and power a form of freedom. Rights are a form of power granted from above.

Any right or freedom is necessarily an exertion of power.

Any right is conditional, and can be taken away by the granter of said right. The assignment of rights is an act of power of the superior upon the inferior.

Granted freedom, whether by court, law, or constitution, is not truly freedom, but a right. It is conditional.

All positive freedoms are necessarily granted, the provision of the ability to act is implied within the definition. Some negative freedoms may be granted, in which case they are not true freedom, merely another right, power bequeathed by the superior. Granted freedoms, freedoms as rights, liberal freedoms, are conditional upon the higher power granting them. They are constrained by that higher power and are therefore not true freedom.

As noted, power comes from, at base, the capacity for violence.

Rights are granted by a higher power with the greater capacity for violence; the superior grants his capacity for violence and his authority to his inferior.

True freedom is a form of power, and, therefore, comes from, at base, a capacity for violence.

True freedom is a reality, not a right.

The reality of whether a person or people has the capacity and will for violence to stay free.

True freedom dies well before any actual impositions on the people. It dies when reality becomes a right, and therefore conditional on a higher power.

Illiberal freedom is the freedom of fact, true freedom.

Gunn, Roseanne, and Power

You’ve probably seen that James Gunn (director of Guardians of the Galaxy) was fired by Disney for pedophilic jokes he made on Twitter years back after a campaign by Cernovish and the alt-light. You probably also remember Roseanne getting dumped from her show for a “racist” joke tweet after a campaign by leftists.

You’ve also probably seen many of the same people who supported the Roseanne firing opposing the Gunn firing, including cuckservatives who are nominally on Roseanne’s team and on the other side of Gunn and love to preach decorum when it comes to Trump and his supporters. You’ve also probably notice a surprising amount of people who normally take offense at the slightest slight against women or the tiniest implication that rape is treated in anything less than a grimly serious manner, suddenly leap to the defense of people writing jokes about raping children.

This might seem mysterious given that raping children is generally seen as worse than committing racism, but it’s only mysterious if you think this is about either pedophilia or racism. It is not, those are only incidental issues, the real issue is deeper.

Nobody is truly offended by Roseanne’s joke insult and channers didn’t have a sudden change of heart and conclude that pedo jokes are now out-of-bounds. These are not what’s driving this debate over whose mob gets to have whom fired. The firings of Roseanne (and Dickinson and Derbyshire and Eich and etc.) were never truly about what they actually said or did. The firing of Gunn was not truly about offensive jokes.

The racism, the pedophilia are simply weapons, tools in a power struggle.

Power, nothing more*, is driving these conflicts. Both sides are in a struggle to build legitimacy for themselves and tear down the legitimacy of their enemies.**

Being able to have a mob destroy someone’s career over a few tweets is a display of power, a strong one. It is a display and building of moral legitimacy, which grants power.

Pedo jokes are leftist-affiliated, for the left is the tribe of sexual license, subversive sexual humour, and perversion, which maps somewhere near pedophilia in most people’s minds. Racist jokes are rightest-affiliated for the right are the tribe of patriotism, tribalism, and (white) ethnic interests, which maps somewhere to racism in most people’s minds.

Being able to say “this is off-limits at risk of firing” is not only a display of power, it also a strong strong form of delegimization. By having racist jokes leading to mobs and firing, by making racist jokes taboo, even if the right would say they oppose racism, it by proxy delegitimizes patriotism, white ethnic interests, and everything else that maps near racism in most people’s minds.

Likewise, making pedo jokes taboo delegitimizes the left, even if the left would say they oppose pedophilia. Delegitimizing pedo jokes, by proxy, delegitimizes sexual perversion, sexual subversion, sexual license, and everything else that maps near pedophilia in most people’s minds.

Even better are forced apologies, for they display a power to compel at the personal level, not just the institutional. Having your enemy deny his own words mapping near his own side’s values, delegitimizes the enemy’s side even more than then reinforcing a taboo against them.

The fight over who can legitimately mob and fire whom over what issues, is a fight over power, between two opposing tribes, which is why where most people line up on it it makes no sense in any strictly rational way.

Leftists defend pedophilia and pedophilic jokes, not because they support pedophilia per se, but because even in their own minds it maps closely to other sexual proclivities they support, and too strong a taboo around pedophilia will carry over to those proclivities.**

Knowing this though, makes the cuckservative response even more confusing, as they are turning against the tribe they nominally support, while supporting the tribe they nominally oppose (how often does NRO pretend to rage against Hollywood values and crudity in our culture?) in favour of values, sexual subversion, they’d normally oppose.

The answer once again comes down to power. Since they purged the Birchers from the movement, the NRO have been the gatekeepers of the right. Some, like Rush, Coulter, and O’Rielly, have challenged them with a more Middle America conservatism, but they’ve retained gatekeeping power.

But, the alt-light asserting their power by having leftists fired over mobs, without the blessing of True Conservatism delegitimizes them. It shows that they no longer have power over the right or the legitimacy to dictate to the right. Trump’s victories has delegitimized the True Conservatism from above, but the mob taking action against the left delegitimizes them from below. Seeing the right win fights like this, destroys their power.

Before Trump and the alt-right, True Conservatism may have been the permanent opposition, but they had cultural and ideological power over the opposition. Now, even though their side is taking power, True Conservatism are not the wielders and guides of the permanent opposition power. They have less power than they had when they were the leftist’s patsies. Condemning Roseanne, while defending Gunn, is a desperate power play to maintain a semblance of the power they once had.

All these mob firings have little to do with the nominal reasons given for the mobs, the outrage, and the firings and are almost entirely power plays by the various actors against their enemies.

****

One aside, are those making pedophilic jokes actually pedophiles? Probably not, for the most part. Just like most channers making oven jokes don’t want a second holocaust and Roseanne doesn’t hate black people.

But if you read the pedophilic jokes themselves, there is practically no comedic value in any of them. The jokes are often not even recognizable as jokes and none are anywhere near as funny as you’d expect from professionals paid to make jokes and nowhere near the value necessary to make violating such a firm taboo worthwhile from a strictly comedic standpoint.

The jokes are signalling. The most likely reason, as Hadley noted on Twitter, is that it is signalling to the pedophiles and pedarasts in charge of Hollywood (and that pedophiles and pedarasts hold power in Hollywood is an open secret, just as Weinstein’s perversion was before the dam broke) that although they might not be a pedos or pedarasts themselves, they align with the preferences of the perverts in charge and will not cause trouble.

It is also tribal signalling. “Look, I support sexual subversion too. Even more than you. Give me status.”

****

* There are probably people, likely not many, on each side who genuinely care about pedo or racist jokes in and of themselves (yet somehow not the jokes the other side condemns). They’re being used.

** I should make note here: most of this process is not fully conscious. Almost nobody involved started thinking about how they should respond to pedophilia jokes and racist jokes from first principles; and few made their position based on thinking about how it would effect the power struggle for their tribe. Like most tribal conflict in a democratic society, people are mostly just vaguely aware that, for some reason, certain values need to be defended and certain other values, those held by others, should be attacked, so certain jokes are taboo and certain jokes are not and they need to defend the ones that aren’t from attack, while attacking the ones are. Rarely is ideological tribalism explicitly thought through and fought on tribal grounds, it is generally fought through symbols and ideas from tribalism itself but mapping near the tribes involved and their values.

The Neoliberal-Socialist Synthesis

I’ve mentioned the neoliberal-socialist synthesis a few times on Twitter and have received flack for them being incompatible, but it is the best way to describe the current economic system.

Neoliberalism promotes laissez-faire capitalism, privatization and trade without regulation, while socialism promotes state control of the market,* two things that, on the surfacem seem to be at odds.

Yet we see it everywhere. The state continually expands, with greater power over people’s lives and ever-increasing spending on a variety of state programs: health care, education, welfare, old age security, etc. Yet at the same time, free trade and the global capitalist marketplace increasingly dominate, with off-shoring, free trade agreements, and worker importation to continually destroying the ability of workers to have gainful employment at good wages.

The same people who argue for ever greater social programs argue for the free movement of workers and free trade of goods. The two-party consensus marches on, with the only difference being whether socialism or neoliberalism is emphasized more. Each potential threat to the system, whether mild like Bernie-style socialism or Trumpian nationalism, or more radical is attacked with ruthless vehemence.

To see how these commingle, we, surprisingly, look to Marx, who was often not wrong on analysis, even if his solutions were lacking:

The rule of capital and its rapid accumulation is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable.

In this analysis,** the petit bourgeousie would win against the set up a democratic system, and provide the workers with just enough state handouts to make their lowly state tolerable.

This is from where the NLS sythesis flows.

As the Last Psychatrist, wrote (then later deleted [copied here] after he mysteriously disappeared),

Do you want riots in the streets? How much does it cost to prevent LA (your choice) from catching fire? Answer: $600/month, plus Medicaid. Medicalizing social problems has the additional benefit of rendering society not responsible for those social ills. If it’s a disease, it’s nobody’s fault. Yay empiricism.

He was talking primarily about black urban neighbourhoods, who were the first to be eaten by the synthesis, but the synthesis is rapidly eating through white America.

As Nick land loves to point out, the global capitalist system, unrestrained, ruthlessly selects for efficiency. Efficiency means prioritizing lowest cost inputs, which in the case of workers means minimum possible wages, which, in a global market place means hiring borderline slave labour in the third world and replacing labour with machines.

Of course, the byproduct of this efficiency is unemployment and low wages, yet this creates two problems: If the worker’s wages are low and they can’t afford goods, who buys them? And won’t the workers rebel?

The socialist state solves both these two problems. It gives workers a tolerable standard of living and provdes them resources to fatten themselves to complacency on sugar, soy, heroin, TV, and porn, the modern bread and circuses,.

For those not sated by such, the socialist state also provides the status of being middle-class and higher qualities of sugar, soy, heroin, TV, and porn to those who work in the socialist state or in one of its many dependencies (and don’t kid yourself, an indeterminately large portion of “private” corporations subsist on the leavings of the socialist state). The “private” dependencies of the state allow those who aren’t quite comfortable with being dependent on the state a way to gain middle-class status while still being arm’s length from the state.

This is the economic cycle of our modern society. Ruthless global neoliberal capitalism churns out consumer goods efficiently while eating up and vomiting out the working and middle classes. The socialist state provides the refuse of the neoliberal system with a material standard of living just tolerable enough to prevent revolt at the alienation and soullessness of the system while having only minimal drag on efficiency (the state takes it’s ~40% tax and puts a few less arduous regulations, while leaving the system intact).

Globalist neoliberalism could not exist without the socialist state, (at least not until the Landian technofuture where we’re all economically efficient biomachines), for we’d revolt against its heartless machinations. Yet, the socialist state can not exist without globalist neoliberalism churning out untold quantities of goods and services as efficiently possible to take their cut to dish out bribes and placate those who may rebel against their economic slavery to the socialist state. The symbiosis of Moloch.

We do not have the worst of each system, for if we did, we would notice, perhaps resist. Instead we have reached a symbiotic equilibrium of minimal tolerance. We eat our sugar and watch our TV, discontent, alienated, isolated, yet ignorably so.

As I’ve said repeatedly, likely the only reason the US isn’t a charnel house due to the rebellion of listless young men who’re unemployed, drugged up, sexually frustrated, and socially isolated, is likely due to porn and video games which keep them barely sated.

The neoliberal-socialist synthesis provides.

*****

* Yes, I know, some socialists, diehard marxists, and anarcho-socialists theorize that socialism will end up with the withering of the state, but socialist theory aside, in practice every attempt at socialism, communism, and social democracy increases the power of the state, and every socialist and communist I’ve seen in the wild promotes measures to increase the state’s power over the economy.

Stateless socialism is an impossibility, as the political redistribution of resources requires a state apparatus.

** Interestingly, reading that speech, does it not seem vaguely prophetic. Don’t the petit bourgousie and their interests seem vaguely reminiscent of the current ruling cultural elites who espouse the neoliberal-socialist viewpoint? Doesn’t the system and working Marx described seem to be similar to the system we have currently?

Against Peer Review

Peer review is often, incorrectly, used as a gold standard by which the legitimacy of scientific studies are measure, but peer review itself provides minimal value towards establishing the veracity of a study’s findings.

The essence of science is systematically and empirically testing hypotheses of observable, repeateable, natural phenomena.

The legitimacy of any particular scientific finding is whether the application of the methods used in the study will result in similar findings upon repetition. If a study can be replicated, the study’s findings are verified.

Peer review does not replicate studies, so it does not speak to the veracity of scientific findings; it does not effect the legitimacy of a study’s findings.

Peer review does have it uses, as a review of methodology and a post-study review of the analysis of the findings, but not as a verification of the study itself. Peer review can be useful for ascertaining whether the methodology of a study actually is measuring what it purports to measure and whether the analysis of the findings are legitimate, but the value of both of these assumes the findings are verified.

You will then notice that peer review in practice occurs at improper times for both of these. For a methodological review, methodology should be fully set in place before the experiment is carried out, as any change in methodology will effect the findings and outputs. Methodological peer review should occur before an experiment begins. Analysis should occur after an experiment is verified, as analyzing false findings just leads to false analyses. Because of this analytical peer review should only occur after findings have already been verified.

Yet peer review as practiced occurs after an experiment has been carried out, but before an experiment is verified, the worst of both worlds. It is useless for critiqing methodology, short of rejecting the study completely, as post-experiment revisions to methodology are anti-scientific. It is also useless for critiquing analyses because it is unknown if the findings being analyzed are of any actual value. It accomplishes nothing besides providing a false sense of legitimacy.

On top of this, peer review acts as a filter for what is novel, important, and, most importantly, relevant. This filter is anti-scientific. A study finding nothing useful, may not be as practically relevant as a a study finding something novel, important, and relevant, but it is as methodologically relevant. You can not filter out the studies finding “nothing” and filter in only studies finding “something”, and expect to have an accurate view of the world.

For illustration, if 10 studies are done on the same aspect of Topic X, and 9 find nothing novel, important, or relevant about that aspect of X, and 1 study finds something very novel, important, and relevant, that 1 study may pass review and be published, while the other 9 studies will not, providing a very biased view of Topic X.

As bad, this incentivizes scientists to do studies that are novel, important, and relevant, instead of studies that aren’t. Publish or perish. This creates some very obvious perverse incentives and pre-filtering effects scientific studies.

Peer review is likely, in practice, a negative on science as it creates a false sense of legitimacy which does not exist due to the lack of replication and verification. By being a gold standard, peer review gives legitimacy to a study which it has not earned. Implying a study meets the standard of being scientific, when none of its findings have actually been scientifically verified, is absurd, especially when peer review is the norm, but replication isn’t.

The entire process of scientific peer review as it currently stands should be torn down and replaced by mandatory pre-experiment methodological review and mandatory post-experiment replication. Post-replication analytical review would be good, but not necessary, for proper science. Any study that completes pre-experiment methodological review should be published, at least in summary, even if it provides nothing novel, important, or relevant, as a lack of results is just as methodologically important as “real” results.

Of course, this would be more time consuming and expensive, but this is price of doing real science, rather than pretending to do science.

Post-script: Peer review for the humanities is fine, as is, as these fields are unscientific in the first place. In an unscientific field, paper, or study, a post-study review by experts is probably useful.

The Political is Personal

One of the features of the evolution to political liberalism was the replacement of ties of personal loyalty with ties of loyalty to abstract institutions and principles. Where once men swore personal oaths to lords, kings, and gods, men now swear oaths to flags, laws, and countries. The major exception being Canada, with the UK having an oath to both the Queen and to law and democracy.

The development of sovereign states following the Peace of Westphalia transferred loyalty from people, kings and lords, to the state. The development of ideology, the replacement of loyalty to people with loyalty to ideas, was another feature of liberalism. While political discussion and ideas existed prior to the French Revolution, it was only in the Age of Ideologies that loyalty to all-encompassing ideals become common-place.

At one point, the political was personal, based on ties of blood and fealty. Today non-local politics is impersonal, based on ideology and parties.

Abstract loyalty has become so commonplace, that it is hard to comprehend a political order without it, but is it necessarily good for man?

Personal loyalty gives man a sense of place, to know where he exists in hierarchy, while abstract loyalty is necessarily faceless and depersonalized. A man with personal loyalty always knows whom he serves, a man with abstract loyalty knows what he serves, but who is ever-changing.

Abstract loyalty is necessarily divisive. Once loyalty is placed upon ideology, then minor deviations of ideology lead to schism, hence, practically all ideologies being plagued by near endless infighting. If loyalty to an idea is paramount, there can be minimal toleration of those whose ideas differ, even mildly. On the other hand, personal loyalty requires only that one agrees who decides.

Abstract loyalty is a necessary precondition for liberalism and it may not be possible for liberalism to be undone without replacing abstract loyalty with personal loyalty.

****

Interestingly, in contemporary politics, personal loyalty seems to be making a modest comeback in the US in the form of Trump and, to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders.

Trump is not particularly ideological: his ideology, such as it is, is very loose, pragmatic, and undefined. We call it Trumpism because he cuts across traditional political ideologies so most labels don’t apply particularly well to him. His “conservative” critics make him out to be unprincipled, confusing ideological adherence with principles. He aligned himself against both major political parties, building his political success solely upon his own name and reputation.

Trump has built and continues to build a base of personal loyalty to himself outside the traditional abstract loyalties. He has identified himself with an Americanism set apart from traditional abstract loyalties.

I think encouraging this sort of personal political identification would help encourage restoration. American politics, being liberal politics, has always been heavily abstract with American political loyalty dedicated primarily to the Constitution and, post-bellum, the USG.

To bring about restoration, we need to develop personal loyalty in a restorer, to a king, that trumps loyalty to abstracts such as the Constitution and the USG.

The Young Man’s Dire Problem

Scott Alexander examines technological unemployment, concluding that there it is unlikely there is technological unemployment.

He notes that the number of prime age male labor force non-participators (PAMLFNPers) is increasing. He looks at this graph, and states it is not discouraged workers who are not in the labour force:

Concluding this section Scott states:

Second, Winship’s optimistic take on PAMLFPR is hard to easily refute. PAMLFNPers pretty clearly say they’re not looking for jobs, and they’re just perfectly innocuous students, retirees, etc. We have trouble believing them, especially based on their demographics. But it’s very hard to look at the increase and see a place where unemployment issues could have slipped in.

Third, PAMLFPR has been getting worse gradually since about 1960, with no sign of any recent worsening. It is hard to explain why technological unemployment would have started around that time – at least if we limit our explanations to the nature of technology alone. And it doesn’t seem to match the more sudden decline in manufacturing around 2000.

Following this section, he then goes into a section how automation seems to be driving people from middle-skill jobs to lower-skill jobs.

What Scott sees but doesn’t notice the ramifications of, is that the increase in PAMLFPR is a long-term trend as is automation.

Being a discouraged worker requires having looked for a job at some point. But if the long-term trend is there are no jobs, a young man will give up before he starts. He might want a job in some vague sense, the same way you might want a million dollars or a Ferrari, but he knows it’s not going to happen, so he doesn’t try in the first place.

This is where the PAMLFPR’s come from.

Scott asked why technological unemployment started around 1960, but if we compare the manufacturing employment it begins to decline about 1950 or so (ignoring the WW2 bump). It leads the increase in PAMLFPR’s by about 10 years, which is more or less what you’d expect, given that young men take some time to adapt to new market conditions. (Scott points out: “87% [of manufacturing unemployment] is due to increasing productivity/automation”).

As you can see, with a bit of an expected lead time, manufacturing employment and the increase in PAMLFPR’s (ie. decrease in employed PAM’s) are pretty heavily correlated. Manufacturing employment as a percentage of employment declined from 30% to 10%, while PAM employment declined from about 97% to 88%. A 20-point decline in manufacturing employment is met by a 9-point decline in PAM employment.

This is what you’d expect from technological unemployment, given that many men will find lesser jobs elsewhere, instead of dropping out entirely.

In this long-term trend, many are going to drop out preemptively. They won’t be discouraged, because they never would have been “encouraged” in the first place. Technological employment won’t show up on these charts, because it is long-term, generational, and permanent, while these charts examine “normal” economic processes.

Scott also asks, “Why didn’t previous eras of improving automation result in job loss?” Economists say that past technological advancements increasing productivity had not historically reduced employment. So why is it doing so now?

The answer is simple. Previous technological advances required humans to make them. Agriculture advances: fewer farmers, but farmers become buggy makers. Ford makes the Model T: fewer buggies, but buggy makers becomes car assemblers. Robots are invented: fewer car assemblers, but car assemblers become machine assemblers. But at this stage the pattern changes. Machines start assembling other machines.

Machines assembling machines is a fundamental change in the way the economy works. Other technological advances required human workers to implement them and build the new technologies, but when robots make robots, there is minimal need for humans, the robots are replacing them permanently.

Of course, this is not happening all at once, and that’s why the charts are a decline not straight drop, but this technological shift is fundamentally different and is permanent (barring industrial collapse). What happened in previous eras is irrelevant.

There are other related reasons of “why now?”: prosperity, entertainment, and the decline in marriage and fertility.

We are prosperous enough that practically everybody has their basic needs met. Unless you are mentally ill, a drunkard, or a druggy, you’re almost guaranteed a roof over your head. Our poor people are fat, so no one’s going without food. Entertainment is cheap: for $100 you can get internet, Netflix, and a video game or two each month. In the past a young man had to work or starve; now, with a few roomies, or an indulgent parent or girlfriend, a young man can live very comfortably with nothing more than a small disability cheque and/or the occasional side hustle.

One former discouragement of being unemployed is the boredom of having nothing to do. Now, one $60 video game can provide hundreds of hours of entertainment, $7 gets you Netflix, and $50 internet access provides unlimited entertainment if you don’t mind pirating.

inally, and probably most importantly, men work primarily to take care of their families. It doesn’t take much for a man to provide a comfortable life for himself: a cheap, shared apartment or mother’s basement, tendies and ramen, and an Xbox. That doesn’t cost very much. Men only really need real money if they’re taking care of their family. With the average age of marriage being 30+, declining marriage rates (25% of millenials won’t marry, period), and declining fertility, a significant portion of young men will never have to shoulder family responsibility, and those that do won’t until much later in life. If he’s not supporting a family, he doesn’t really need to be employed.

So, let’s take a look at a low-skilled 22-year-old male looking at his future, here’s what he faces: medium-status jobs are an impossibility, his dad’s job at Ford will replaced by a machine when he’s forcibly retired at 55 and the job is never coming back. He’ll probably never get married; if he gets your girlfriend pregnant, odds are they’ll break-up anyway and she’ll be supported by the welfare state. He could get a job at McDonald’s but half his pay will go to child support, so it doesn’t really seem worth it. If his parents let him stay in their basement and feeds him, the occasional under-the-table job, a small disability cheque, and a few bucks from Patreon for a game review blog or a few Fiverr jobs get you an Xbox and enough games. If they kick him out, he lives at his buddies for some cheap under-the-table rent and maybe he gets the job at McDonald’s or maybe he just does a bit more under-the-table work or starts selling weed. If his buddy kicks him out and things get too bad, he shoots himself, adding to the ever-rising white male suicide rate.

Is this 22-year-old unemployed? No. Is he a discouraged worker? No. Will he ever be a productive member of society? Probably not. Is he suffering? Maybe existentially, but not materially.

If he technologically unemployed? By any reasonable analysis he is. If his father’s job wasn’t going to be replaced by a machine, he’d probably work for Ford, be productive, and get married, but he doesn’t have that option. So, he doesn’t work, but he never shows up in any conventional economic analysis, because he has never worked and never plans to work. People dismiss technological unemployment because they didn’t measure him, but still economists wonder, where did he go?

This is the first stage of the Dire Problem. Technological unemployment is invisible, because none of the standard measures measure it and nobody important (except, maybe, Donald Trump) cares about young working-class men, but it is here nonetheless.

Abortion, Tomlinson, and Moral Midgets

A few days ago, an author by the name of Patrick S Tomlinson, posed a trolley problem, which, in a huge bout of Dunning-Krueger, he claimed eviscerates the pro-life argument.

You can read his argument in full here, but the basic gist is: if given a choice between saving a thousand frozen embryos or a 5-year-old from afire, every pro-lifer will either equivocate or choose to save the 5-year-old. Of course, many pro-lifers then responded that they would save the embryos, invalidating his point, and he showed his intellectual maturity by calling them monsters, thinking that was a reasonable argument. I personally tweeted that I would save just 1 embryo before I would save Mr. Tomlinson, thereby proving, by his own logic, that he was worth less than an embryo and should be killed, to which he reacted predictably. I tweeted some other stuff he didn’t respond to because they showed his argument to be foolish.

That was the end of it until tonight, when one Heidi asked one Lauren if she had a response. She responded, that tagged me in saying much smarter people such as myself could answer better. Being a sucker for flattery (thank you for the compliment, Lauren), I couldn’t resist responding, but decided it would be easier to do so by blog than by Twitter. So here we go.

Ben Shapiro already responded, and his response was okay. Tomlinson then proved the full heft of his intellectual integrity and honesty by then refusing to engage the argument, then blocking Shapiro. He further displayed his overwhelming philosophical openness by whining about people who pointed out flaws in his little puzzle I don’t expect this to have any impact on Tomlinson (though I plan to tweet it at him), or those ideologically blinded, morally retarded, or just plain stupid enough to agree with his little trolley trap but hopefully it will help those questioning.

Before I begin, these kinds of puzzles are often given by those with good verbal abilities to trap people. It can be hard to see the trap because their high verbal abilities conceal things; leading you into thinking incorrectly based on their hidden presuppositions. Never concede the presuppositions until you have figured out what they are. A good way to do this is to switch to equivalent terms. In this case I did so:

If a hospital was on fire would you save 1000 elderly cancer patients or a healthy child?

Therefore old cancer patients should be killed. https://t.co/ZeO4ehrIp2

— Free Northerner (@FreeNortherner) October 17, 2017

Would @stealthygeek choose to save his children or 100 Jews from a gas chamber?

He'd choose his children. Therefore he's a Nazi anti-semite https://t.co/B3gAoEeiiM

— Free Northerner (@FreeNortherner) October 17, 2017

Does @stealthygeek give all his money to @WorldVision? He spends money on plants.

Does he think plants are worth more than Africans?

— Free Northerner (@FreeNortherner) October 17, 2017

We can see when we replace the terms that there’s something wrong with the argument. Almost everybody would save their own child over 1000 strangers (and most people would look askance at someone who too readily agreed to part with their own child) or a healthy child over 1000 dying elderly people.

We can see that Tomlinson himself would rather spend money on plants and Mustang’s than on saving Africans from Malaria or starvation. By his own logic, Tomlinson himself values the life of a plant more than the life of an African. He values slightly higher acceleration over Africans. Tomlinson is a very cold, ruthless person is her not?

No, because everybody does these kinds of things. Those who don’t are a cut above and end up sainted.

So what are the problems:

Action vs. Theory

The first trick the question plays is to set up an elaborate story of a burning building and a crying child. YOU CAN ONLY SAVE ONE! This story is meant to play on your emotions, to get you thinking like you are actually there. Quick, you see a crying, frightened child and a metal box, which do you save? A crying child about to die provokes a strong emotional response. Nobody in that situation would stand still for a minute and carefully ponder the ethical ramifications of saving a child or embryos, they’d just grab wailing kid that’s hogging their attention and run. He’s trying to force you into immediate emotional response, then acting like this applies to a moral-philosophical question. There is no basis for claiming a split-second decision is equivalent to a well thought-out moral philosophy of life.

Remove the story, remove the immediacy and the loaded wording and the question suddenly becomes: either one 5-year-old child or 1000 unborn children will perish. Which would it be more ethical to let die? Now the answer’s not so obvious and requires thought. I’d bet pro-life folks would be a lot more split on this.

Concentric Circles of Morality

This then touches on another matter Tomlinson has artfully concealed: Moral distance. Interpersonal morality is different the closer the person in question is to you. Anybody who neglects to feed their own child is a moral monster and almost everyone agrees they should be jailed. If a neighbour child was going without food most everyone would feed him, and we’d probably look down on or criticize someone who didn’t, but we wouldn’t call them a monster and certainly wouldn’t demand they be jailed. You can feed a child in Africa for less than your own child or your neighbour, yet most don’t give to World Vision. (Sponsor a child). Many of you won’t even click that link. This is normal, we wouldn’t even look askance at someone who doesn’t give to World Vision, let alone actively try to punish them.

This is because your moral responsibility is greater to those near you than to those farther from you (by whatever metric that distance is measured).

In Tomlinson’s story, he artfully forces the moral closeness of the crying child right in front of you compared to the sterile farness of embryos in a cold metal box. The question suddenly changes if you change the moral closeness. Would you spend $3340 to save the unborn child you’ve been trying to conceive for years, your only chance at a child, from a miscarriage, or donate $3340 to World Vision? I’m sure most pro-abortion people would suddenly find themselves valuing embryos more than 5-year-olds in that situation.

Situational, Relative, and Absolute Moral Worth

The next trick he pulls is to apply to confuse absolute, relative, and situational moral worth. He assumes into the question and the follow-up that because you would save a child about to burn to death over a thousand embryos that that is a guide to the absolute moral worth of an individual.

My little joke earlier illustrates the problem nicely: I dislike Tomlinson for being intellectually dishonest and for supporting the murder of children by the millions, so I’d save an embryo over him. Does that mean I think the embryo has some absolute moral worth more than Tomlinson? No, I just think he’s a evil dick and like embryos more than him.

There’s absolute moral worth: all lives are equally valuable before God (or before Athe if you don’t believe in God).

Then there’s relative moral worth: Anybody with a soul and an ounce of moral character would think to themselves: “my child is my child and is therefore worth more to me than an indeterminate, but very high amount of other people’s children.” Yet that doesn’t mean that in absolute sense one child is worth more than another.

Then there’s situational moral worth: Most people, including many elderly cancer patients would think to themselves: “these elderly cancer patients have lived long lives and will die soon. This healthy child will live for decades to come. We’ll save the child.” That doesn’t mean that the child is somehow absolutely more morally worthy than dying old people. It’s just the current circumstances dictate who we save.

Change the relative and situational moral worth and the question and answers change: do you save a 1000 embryos, including your dozens of you own, your only hope for children, or do you save the cruel little brat who’s laughing as he set the clinic on fire while trying to kill those embryos for fun?

Moral Worth and Killing

There is an unspoken argument Tomlinson denies making and doesn’t come right out and say, but implies heavily and is trying to make you emotionally feel without having to come out and say it because, at some, level, even Tomlinson has to know that it is utterly ridiculous. This argument, the argument that the pro-abortion argument rests on, is that if there is a difference in value between a child and a embryo, then it is alright to kill the unborn. Tomlinson, and most other abortion supporters, won’t make is that an unborn child is without value, because anybody with a shred of humanity knows there is at least some value in the unborn.

Instead, they say it is of lesser worth, then leap from lesser worth to morally acceptable to kill with impunity, and hope you won’t catch the leap, maybe not even catching it themselves. Tomlinson denies making this, saying he’s against abortion, but his argument right from the go is that pro-life people (ie. those wanting to restrict abortion) don’t care about the unborn but only desire to control woman (for some vague unprovided reason). His whole argument, unstated but very clear, is that the only reason to be against murdering the unborn is that you hate women and desire power over them for some unknown reason. Contra his objections, this does not seem to be imputing any value to the unborn.

Even if it is ceded that an unborn child is of lesser absolute moral value than a born child, (something I won’t cede, but that Shapiro weakly did) that does not in itself make abortion morally acceptable. If the elderly cancer patient is of lesser moral worth than the healthy child, that may morally allow me to save the child instead of the cancer patient, it does not morally allow me to shoot the old cancer patient.

To make abortion morally acceptable you have to show that it has no value (which Tomlinson rejects) or show that the difference in value is great enough that killing an unborn child for convenience is permissible while killing a born child is not. Tomlinson does not even attempt to do so, he just accuses his opponents of bad faith and hopes the emotional correlations he builds will carry this implicit argument without him having to make it.

Action vs Inaction

Following from the above: abortion is the killing of the unborn. In his story, the embryos are dying. There is a moral difference between allowing someone to die, particularly if you can’t save them or have to choose, and killing something. Allowing embryos to die makes zero logical impact on whether killing them is justified.

Utilitarianism

All the above can be linked to one major moral flaw, the philosophical hobgoblin that eats the minds of morally stunted rationalists: Utilitarianism. Look past the fancy language and big words and utilitarianism is essentially stripping away man’s humanity and reducing him to units of pleasure and pain (perfect for our inhuman modern society), then doing cold calculations on how various actions allocate units of pleasure and pain, then deciding to take the action that gives the most overall plaeasure. You can see this inhuman calculation most readily when they start talking about animals and meat-eating, and making mathematical conversions of animal pain to human pain.

Trolley problems are usually interesting because they bring up deep philosophical problems. The classic brings up the relative weight of killing the fat man by action versus allowing 5 others to die by inaction. Are people as morally responsible for inaction as for action? If not, how much difference is there? It’s these deeper issues that really get you to think. Strip away the deeper issues and a trolley problems becomes a utilitarian calculus of do you save one replaceable human unit or five replaceable human units. Five is more than one so you obviously do what is most efficient with your replaceable human units. This interchangeability is the crux upon which Tomlinson’s argument rests, yet he cloaks it behind an emotional story to prevent you from seeing it.

Tomlinson’s argument rests on the implicit assumption of utilitarian interchangeability. He assumes that if you value one life in a particular circumstance over a thousand lives in another particular circumstance, you therefore assign an objectively higher moral value to the former over the latter. If you value both embryos and children as lives worth preserving and protecting, you must therefore view them as morally exchangeable sacs of utilitarian units. One embryo for one child. One fat guy for one guy tied to a railroad track. One unit of utility for one other unit of utility. All are interchangeable. If they are not interchangeable, you must value one less than the other, they must not think them morally equivalent.

This stripping away of humanity if what Tomlinson’s argument, and many modern moral arguments, rest upon. This child is not a crying child in need of rescue from a fire pulling at your virtue, he is one unit of 70 life-years to be saved. If you do not act exactly the same to an embryo as to this unit of 70 life-years, you must place lesser absolute value on the embryo. The circumstances of the life-unit, your relation to the life-unit, your own virtue, your own emotions, none of it matters, this is the cold calculus of comparing life units.

Morality can not be removed from its circumstances. This is why Tomlinson made up that whole story to put the argument in specific moral context and circumstances to best elicit the moral response that bolstered his argument. Once he elicited that moral response, he then strips the moral context away and introduces a cold utilitarian calculus. You did not save the embryos, therefore they must be of less value.

Nobody sees this magic trick because he pulled it off deftly and we’ve been conditioned through countless abstract moral problems involving switches, trolleys, and lying to axe murderers to view morality as inhuman, contextless, calculations of utilitarian value.

Human morality can not be compared as numbers on a spreadsheet. It exists in context. After a moral decision has been placed in a specific context, it can not then be removed from that context to suddenly become an abstract, absolute, objective arbiter of moral value.