Constructing a more accurate version of reality
While I have spent my life living in a more liberal milieu, through personal experience and independent study I have found many truths on the right side of the political spectrum. A major purpose of this blog is to try to introduce those truths to those of more liberal mindset. A while ago I launched a search site called Counter Search which allowed people to search for a topic across a variety of…
On Reddit’s most lauded history subreddit ( /r/AskHistorians ) someone asked “What caused the dramatic rise of violent crimes and urban decay in the mid-to-late 1960s?” Crime rates in many northern and western American cities skyrocketed during the middle of the 20th century. Here is a table showing the change in homicide rates. Keep in mind, the low homicide rates of the 1910s…
It is the conventional wisdom in some circles that we need to send even more people to college. As Bill Gates wrote , “America is facing a shortage of college graduates…By 2025, two thirds of all jobs in the US will require education beyond high school.” I am very skeptical of this point of view. In a previous post , I argued that many professional jobs (architect, manager,…
It is often argued that inequality or poverty causes crime, and that only by addressing these “root causes” can we reduce crime. For example, a Bloomberg View article tells us “Want to Fight Crime? Address Economic Inequality”: Equally decisive in determining crime rates are the more invisible barriers to crime set up by social norms and social cohesion. Indeed, one of the…
Years ago, I departed my prosperous suburb for college in the big city. For the first time in my life I encountered the problems of urban decay and “inner city” crime. Why were there so many neighborhoods with boarded up houses, crumbling buildings, pervasive poverty, and shockingly high murder rates? And why was there such a sharp racial delineation, with the black neighborhoods…
There has been a growing consensus in recent years about the injustice of current drug policy. This consensus holds that: One, the United States incarcerates far too many people for drug crimes. Two, enforcement has been racially biased and a major contributor to the high incarceration rates among black men. And three, drug prohibition is a key cause of violence in underclass communities. But as I…
America’s richest drop-out, Bill Gates, writes : What many people may not realize is that America is facing a shortage of college graduates. That may not seem possible, especially for any graduate who is unemployed or underemployed. But here are the numbers: By 2025, two thirds of all jobs in the US will require education beyond high school. Gates’s opinion represents the conventional…
Like most Americans, I was raised to believe that racial segregation was bad, and that efforts to integrate schools were worthy moral crusades. The canonical story of the battles for integration is the PBS documentary series Eyes on the Prize , which I watched in public school history class. Episode 13, The Keys to the Kingdom , covers school desegregation in Boston. I have long studied education…
(For those short on attention, you can check it out now at countersearch.net . If you want an explanation of what it is and why it exists, read on.) Broadly speaking, there are only two major types of influential information sources in our modern world. One, are the prestige progressives sources – NPR, the New York Times, academic journals, the Atlantic, the Economist, the entire university…
Accusations of racism abound these days. Hollywood and the Oscars are racist. Silicon Valley is racist. The Chicago police are racist. Algorithms are racist. Google search results are racist. College students who wear mustaches and sombreros to parties are racist. A New York Times writer tells liberal white folk to admit to the racist poison they harbor inside. The proliferation of accusations has…
In a previous blog post, I denounced the overuse and misuse of the GDP and CPI indicators. Today, I condemn two additional economic indicators: manufacturing output indices and productivity indices: My criticism is simple and harsh: these indices do not convey useful, objective information about the real world. There is no reasonable way to mash together numbers with different units – such…
Earlier this year, Paul Graham wrote an apologia for the inequality produced by startups: The reason he [Mark Zuckerberg] and most other startup founders are richer than they would have been in the mid 20th century is not because of some right turn the country took during the Reagan administration, but because progress in technology has made it much easier to start a new company that grows…
The debate over the minimum wage has been very frustrating. Tedious arguments and dueling strawmen abound. Let me summarize some obvious points about the discussion, and then propose a solution that addresses the concerns of both sides. First: If you raise the minimum wage high enough, jobs will be lost. If the average wage in a city is $30 an hour, and you raise the minimum wage to $60, you would…
Last month after the Super Bowl, a liberal acquaintance complained about the “Boycott Beyonce” movement among her Facebook friends. I replied: “Well, Beyonce did give an homage to the Black Panthers. And the Black Panthers were a racist hate group, akin to a reverse image of the KKK. So if as a society, we would ostracize anyone who shows approval for the KKK, it would make sense…
I have decided to pull together a reading list of some of the better books and book-length blogs that I have read over the course of my life. My selection criteria mandated that the books must be approachable by a generally educated person, must have high signal-to-noise from cover to cover, and must be engaging reads. In a few cases I have included books that I have not yet read, but that come…
Many critiques of both Real Gross Domestic Product and The Consumer Price Index have been written. The Bureau of Labor Statisics has responded in defense of the critiques. Having evaluated the critiques and responses, I will argue for the following points: Numbers such as GDP or CPI should be treated as subjective judgements, produced by political actors subject to biases and pressure. They are…
A ruling ideology likes to divide the world into black and white. A state religion divides the world into believers and infidels . Communist ideology divides the world into socialists and imperialists . An ethno-nationalist ideology divides the world into our people and others (for example: Romans and barbarians, Chinese and barbarians, whites and coloreds). The reigning ideology of the United…
Arnold Kling worries that there has been an erosion of intellectual integrity on college campuses: I am becoming increasingly concerned that sending children to college is dangerous for their intellectual health. I am afraid that instead of being told how to think, students are being told not to think. They are being ideological role models, not intellectual role models. Had someone expressed such…
While browsing the internet, it is not uncommon to read conspiracy theories from cynics and seeming cranks. You will read statements such as: Universities are leeches designed to extract as much money from students and taxpayers as possible, in order to make life as pleasant as possible for high-level professors and administrators. They exist to benefit themselves. Universities publish an unending…
Interest rates have been a hot topic in the econo-blogosphere. Rookie blogger Ben Bernanke has written a series of posts on why rates are so low. Now Professor Scott Summer writes : Let’s start with the term ‘artificially’—what does that actually mean? OK, but how would we establish whether the equilibrium interest rate is “artificially” low or high?…