Zi-lu said, “The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you to help him administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?”
Confucius replied, “What is necessary is to rectify names.”
“So, indeed!” said Zi-lu. “You are wide off the mark! Why must there be such rectification?”
Confucius said, “How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music will not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires, is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”
— Analects, Book XIII, Chapter 3
As Confucius taught, the rectification of names is the beginning of wisdom. What this means is that in order to effect change, one must have an understanding of the true nature of things; an understanding of the true nature of things comes from using the correct names for things. For example, you are a serf.
Now, at this point, I imagine that you have straightened your shoulders, puffed out your chest and said something to the effect of “Nonsense! I am a sovereign citizen of this republic and a free man. I own me.” If this were true, then why is it required of you to notify your lord’s magistrates when traveling outside the boundaries of his manor? And if you are granted permission to travel outside of your lord’s manor and desire to return with a buxom peasant wench to wife, while we live in such enlightened times that our masters no longer exercise droit de jambage, you still must petition your lord for the privilege of cohabitation within your cottage.
Pravo gospodina by Vasiliy Polenov, 1874.
Why do you take umbrage at the employment of such terminology? Does it not adequately describe the state of affairs (de facto)? I suspect that some of you reading this are now protesting “we just can’t have serfs traveling between manors without oversight! How do we know that some don’t mean us harm?” Well, isn’t the entire point of the feudal contract that the serfs work their liege-lord’s land in exchange for his protection from all threats?
Ok, ok! I see that my rectification of names has rankled. The present example hits too close to current fears and anxieties, and this perhaps obscures the point. So let’s turn to another feudal duty, tallage. Imagine that your lord has levied tallage upon your cottage and has sent you a notice for payment. Regardless of how well or not you have rectified names, you are aware of the consequences of not paying the tallage. First, the lord’s magistrates will send more notices for payment, and with each notice the tallage will be higher. If you still refuse to pay the tallage, the shire reeve (i.e., sheriff) will visit your cottage to demand payment. The shire reeve and his men have been deputized by their lord to take you away from your cottage and seize your property if you still refuse to pay the tallage. If you display even a modicum of resistance, the shire reeve is entitled to use as much force as necessary, up to and including deadly force, to subdue you.
Egyptian peasants seized for non-payment of taxes (Wells, 1920).
Now, you might not see anything wrong with this situation. After all, as a serf, you are well-fed and well-taken care of. All that I ask is that things are called by their true names.
The always-worthwhile Don Boudreaux made a post yesterday at Cafe Hayek, calling out Dr. Keith Ablow from Fox News.
It’s true that the pace of introducing new labor-saving techniques has magnificently quickened in the past two hundred years. This fast pace continues today. Yet still we encounter no evidence that labor-saving techniques permanently increase unemployment.
You’ll reply “This time is different!” Perhaps, but I doubt it. And I’m so confident in my prediction that I’ll put $10,000 of my own my money where my mouth is.
I will bet you $10,000, straight up, that in not one of the next 20 years will the annual U.S. labor-force participation rate, as measured by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, fall below 58.1 percent – which is the lowest rate on record at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Maybe one has to have a mathematical bent to see it thus, but if one happens to do so (and I do), that was glorious. Don Boudreaux consistently hits the right notes on a free market tune. If we have the luxury of educated Millennials with a basic grasp of capitalism and markets, however tenuous, it may well be thanks to him.
BUT.*
Galileo was convinced the tides were caused by the Earth’s rotation and solar orbit. In 2011, OPERA scientists announced they had recorded neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light; this was later corrected by plugging their GPS in properly and calibrating a clock. Edwin Hubble attempted to calculate the age of the universe and faceplanted hard enough to make people wince eighty-eight years later.
Even the greats can overlook something. I propose exactly this has happened.
Innovation and automation are not causative to permanent unemployment gains and overall economic job loss. When economic models are reliant on false scarcity, they consistently fail. Imminent starvation due to human overpopulation was overturned by the green revolution. Peal Oil fell to fracking and exploration. What we “know” about production capabilities has been revised, over and over ad infinitum.
On the left, the Apollo space module. On the right, more processing power than the Apollo space module.
For an explanation of why this is so, we go to the oft-cited buggy whip industry. The advent of the automobile decimated this established industry, along with just about everything else related to horse-drawn transportation – once a major industry. Yet the lost of this sector resulted in a widespread economic gain. The automobile added enough real economic growth that the costs of industry sectors removed through obsolescence were still vastly outstripped by the generated economic output. In real ways, the former buggy whip makers were materially better off without their old jobs.
Innovation and machinery were behind the explosion in the clothing industry. We can now buy more clothing, for cheaper, than we could in the days when middle-class women owned four dresses plus a Sunday-best.
Subject put on her Sunday best to have picture taken. It’s a lovely hat.
Imagine what that did for closet-makers. Innovation and automation are the reason we have access to more, cheaper and a better variety of fresh produce than we did even twenty years ago.
This is what progress looks like; not the “progress” which regulates and strangulates the markets to put ordinary necessities such as eyeglasses, antibiotics, clothing and transportation out of the reach of the common man in the name of his own best interests, but the kind of progress which puts a TV in every middle-class home and a personal automobile in the driveway of even the common laborer. Notions that used to be astonishing in our grandparents’ day but were the reality for our parents, recall.
Boudreaux is correct about economic models dependent on a false scarcity that is not there. The math is sound, the economic theories well-explored, for all that the same are missed by more mainstream and “enlightened” economists. What Boudreaux misses, I theorize, are another kind of failed economic modeling: those dependent on ignoring a true scarcity.
Pensions which calculated annual rate of returns only truthfully deemed reasonable in the Magical Land of Not Gonna Happen and underfunded thereby. The housing bubble of the late Oughts can be condensed in layman’s terms to the battle between those who said they aren’t making any more land vs those who postulated there might be fewer available buyers if the price went high enough.
The assumption of growth will not be borne out in economic models reliant on ignoring true scarcity.
Our economy is adding people to the economy at a faster rate than it is removing obsolete jobs and retirees. The scarcity being overlooked is job creation. It isn’t happening fast enough.
This isn’t easy to see. Imagine the BLS is playing a great game of Find the Lady with job creation. One can examine charts and run the math with calculator, pencil and paper until one’s eyes cross. It doesn’t add up until one remembers how Find the Lady really works.
“…workers in the U.S. business sector worked virtually the same number of hours in 2013 as they had in 1998—approximately 194 billion labor hours.1 What this means is that there was ultimately no growth at all in the number of hours worked over this 15-year period.
…The most important thing we know about those 194 billion labor hours is that the mix of labor supplied to the US economy deteriorated drastically during that 15 year period owing to the sharp decline of the goods producing economy in the US and its replacement by the low productivity HES Complex (health, education and social services).
… Accordingly, there is every reason to believe that real GDP growth has been considerably lower than reported. That is, it has been more consistent with a stagnant economy that generated zero labor hour growth in the business sector; a pick-up in food stamps and disability dependency from 23 million to 60 million over the 15 year period; and which saw real household income fall from $57k to $52K or by 8%.
The circumstantial evidence has grown since Stockman wrote this in 2014.
Labor participation rate (Boudreaux’ own standards, of which I fully approve) is near 40-year lows.
Despite spending more on health care than any other country, American life expectancy decreased for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. This was attributable in part to a sharp increase in deaths of white men and women in their prime working years lacking higher education, and driven by suicide and drug abuse; deaths of despair in a demographic which once enjoyed higher employment numbers.
Correlation is not causation; I’m just sayin’.
The natural mathematical result of innovation and automation is an improvement in economic function which streamlines processes and frees capital to slosh about in the system until it is soaked up in ways not available previously. As computers got faster, they got smaller and lighter and cheaper. The average American now has at their fingertips for trifling sums what was once available only to the scientists and engineers of NASA.
The average American is also in economic decline; making less, with fewer opportunities and less mobility.
These two statements show something within the system is malfunctioning. Badly. America added just shy of 46 million people to the economy since 1998 and 0 labor hours for those people. The rising government dependence,
This is what full employment looks like. No, really.
the increasing deaths, credentialism, licensing schemes (25% of today’s workforce, up from just 5% in 1950), declining labor participation, entrepreneurship, incomes and mobility could not exist simultaneously in a rapidly-innovating free market such as economists claim we have.
One of these assumptions must be false. The math does not work. The natural formula of innovation is being subsumed and arrogated, and the numbers proving so only worsen as our population rises.
This points to jobs being removed from the economy at a faster rate than new job creation plus new population.
If my theory holds, Don Boudreaux will indeed lose his bet. Labor participation will reach 58.1 percent via mere attrition unless the innovation formula is allowed to resume it’s course. Further, if my theory holds, then at our current path the labor participation rate will not reach 66 percent (last seen in the ancient bygone days of 2008) in any of the coming two decades.
My eldest child was born in the Central Valley of California, my middle was born less than a year later in the Inland Empire region of California, and my youngest born a year and a half later in Fort Worth, Texas. In addition to these places, our family has also lived in Northern Virginia and currently reside in Houston. We have lived on a hobby farm, in an urban apartment, and in a house in the suburbs. Despite being under the age of 5, my children have visited many museums, zoos, eaten at many restaurants, have attended concerts and basketball, hockey, baseball, and football games (including the 2015 Sugar Bowl where they witnessed The Ohio State University Buckeyes beat the hell out of Alabama). Our girls swim, play golf, draw and paint, play instruments, cook, know more lyrics to songs than I do and play video games. Our children do not have regular routines that they follow. What we lack in regimentation we more than make up for in life experiences. We believe children should be seen, heard, and exposed to the world.
All of that being said, we are not “libertarian parents” as there is no such thing. If I were to describe our parenting it would be highly active and unregimented, but not libertarian. Helicopter parents, Tiger Moms, and free ranged parents can all be libertarians. Libertarianism does not ascribe an ideal parenting style. Libertarians simply believe the ideal way to raise a child is up to the individual parents and not the state. Our parenting is what works best for us and is a reflection of who we are just as other people’s parenting is a reflection of them. And as I would never chastise a Tiger Mom or a helicopter parent for having too much involvement in their children’s lives or a free ranged parent for having too little, I would expect the same from others in a free society. As our parenting style is not ideal for other families, just as others are not ideal for us.
The author, Jason Blakely, start with admitting that yes, there might be a problem:
Are American universities now spaces where democratic free expression is in decline, where insecurity, fear, and an obsessive, self-preening political correctness make open dialogue impossible? This was a view voiced by many at the start of the month, after the University of California, Berkeley, canceled a speech by the right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, when a demonstration against his appearance spun out of control. Yiannopoulos had been invited to speak by campus Republicans, but headlines the next morning were dominated by images of 100 to 150 protesters wearing black masks, hurling rocks, fireworks, and Molotov cocktails en route to doing $100,000 dollars of damage to a student center named after the great icon of pacifist civil disobedience, Martin Luther King, Jr.
But you see it’s all just part of a false narrative:
Such reports have in turn reinforced a longstanding political narrative, which seeks to demean America’s universities as ideologically narrow, morally slack, hypersensitive, and out of touch. For example, commentators like the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have argued that America’s “university system” is “genuinely corrupt” in relying on “rote appeals to … left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.”
But does this widespread portrait of universities as morally weak and anti-democratic—circulating at least since the time of Allan Bloom—really hold true? This vision of American universities is largely inadequate in at least two ways. First, it incorrectly blames increased fragility exclusively on the university system itself and, second, it relies on a reductive caricature of America’s institutions of higher learning.
And then starts with numerous hand-waving and deflections. And leaves the question unanswered: is the “conservative-identity” group merely responding in kind because of the left?
Identity politics places individual and group notions of selfhood at the center of politics. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued at length, the main goal of identity politics is “recognition” or validation of a given identity by others in society. I have written elsewhere about how identity politics (normally associated with American liberalism) is actually a major engine fueling the rise of Trump. The categories of left and right often distort the ways in which cultural trends, like those associated with identity politics, are far more widely shared across American life. While some left-wing groups on campus are guilty of retreating from open dialogue, a conservative-identity movement has likewise tried to buffer students from having to hear ideas that upset them.
And a summation:
Any society that routinely attacks and undermines the institutions that support its greatest minds is caught up in an act of either extravagantly naïve or profoundly sinister self-sabotage. America’s college campuses remain places of astounding diversity in which democratic exchange of the highest kind still routinely takes place. The country’s university system remains, with all its imperfections, the best school for American democracy.
If the United States is to flourish in the coming generation in the way it did in the prior century, it will need to embrace and even learn from the diversity and dialogue of its universities—not destroy them through simplistic grabs for popular power.
It’s been over two decades since I’ve been in college, and yes, there were both liberal and conservative groups on campus. But neither were rioting; that was for after the homecoming game when the student body burned sofas and overturned cars. Now that was a honored tradition!
Today one doesn’t see right-wing or moderates shaking their fists, chanting, or throwing stones in response to someone from the left visiting campus. Instead we have a “progressive” movement that not only riots when someone they don’t like visits, but also expects the universities to enforce their limited belief system. And very often they do.
Mr. Blakely fails to address the First Amendment issues and also the growing concern that higher education are hardening into leftist enclaves. If we truly want the country to flourish, then free inquiry and freedom of speech are a necessity, not an option.
Here’s an interesting article by noted American musician Charlie Daniels which is warning of the possibility for a second Civil War, over the protesting & rioting we’ve seen in recent weeks.
I find this an interesting thing to ponder. There certainly seems to be more civil unrest than there has been in my lifetime (I’m 34 years old, to give that statement some context). That’s obviously alarming, particularly with the emergence of the SJW contingent on college campuses, the bizarre radicalization of the BLM movement into some sort of neo-marxist drivel, and the recent wave of leftists who openly make the argument that freedom cannot be afforded to those who disagree with them.
On the other hand, things have been much worse in this country before, without a total societal breakdown of the type which Mr. Daniels is alluding to. In the late 60s and early 70s, a number of American cities burned. There were actual full-on race riots, anti-Vietnam War riots, anti-hippie riots, leftist bombings, all of which dwarfed the recent Berkeley fiasco. And yet, no civil war.
So my question to you, intrepid readers, is this: are we really headed towards an abyss, or is this a product of recency bias? Were the 80s & 90s actually so good, so stable, so peaceful, and so generally awesome (outside of a few well-known events, such as Waco & the Oklahoma City bombing) that it lulled us into a false sense of complacency, where any street level unrest looks far more alarming than it actually should be, given the historical context?
One of the privileges of having this site is my ability to pervert it for my own selfish ends. And I’m now taking that opportunity. This is a tribute to my Valentine, Mrs. OMWC aka SP, the person who has done all the heavy lifting to put this site together and keep our little group of friends from breaking it.
This a perfect libertarian woman. She can cook like a pro, code like two pros, and can like a pioneer farmer. She can save a life and do professional art and photography (her work has been exhibited world-wide). She can play three different musical instruments and sing. She can read Feynman, Searle, and Dennett, and thereby falsifies CP Snow. She can run spreadsheets and organizations. She loves my friends, even the difficult and complicated ones we’ve met through my commenting on Reason, and the techno-nerds whom I’ve surrounded myself with throughout my life. She’s charmed world-famous musicians into playing in our living room, and kept others from strangling me. She is an amazingly accurate shooter, just in case. She has that knack of getting people to open up to her while always leaving them with the impression that she’s on their side.
