MORE ON FEMALE IQ

A couple of days ago I made a few brief comments about findings showing that there are far more men than women in the top ranges of IQ. I also put the post up on Tongue-Tied, where I am guest-blogging at the moment. I got a lot of emails about it from "Tongue-Tied" readers and to help answer the emails I have just put up another post on "Tongue-Tied" which I also reproduce below

My post on female IQ got me a heap of emails so, although the subject is a bit off the regular track for "Tongue-Tied", I feel I should comment on the concerns that readers have expressed. In a way, the topic is VERY appropriate for "Tongue-Tied" because it is the unmentionable nature of IQ research that has enabled so many misunderstandings about the subject to flourish. So I think I should spend a bit of time in telling you what nobody else is likely to. Let me start with one well-expressed email that I received:

"As a woman, I don't have a problem with the IQ findings. I tend to believe it, as my personal experience has shown that men tend to be more analytical than women. My issue is with the way IQ is measured. My opinion is that IQ tests place a lot of emphasis on analytical abilities, but not much on "other types" of intelligence, such as creativity, multi-tasking, musical genius or whatever. For example, women tend to be a lot more perceptive than men, especially when it comes to relationships. They also can have more agility of mind; that is, they can do more than one thing at the same time, and do it well (better known as multi-tasking). Everyone has his or her own strengths, which leads me to believe that IQ tests are mostly useless. Instead, instructors/employers should be trained to identify individuals' strengths and how to capitalize on them.

Most of what the lady says is right. There are ways in which women tend to do better than men -- and multi-tasking is certainly one of those ways. What the lady does not know is that the abilities measured in IQ tests are NOT just some arbitrary selection of puzzles. The whole notion of IQ arose from an OBSERVATION: the observation that people who tend to be good at solving one sort of puzzle also tend to be good at solving lots of other seemingly unrelated puzzles. In other words, what Binet discovered in the 19th century was that problem-solving is GENERAL. There is such a thing as general problem-solving ability (often abbreviated as 'g'). So over a hundred years have gone by since Binet's discovery and most people still don't know of it! If that is not a truth that has been thoroughly tongue-tied, I don't know what one would be (actually, I can think of a couple of others but I will save them for another day). So IQ tests are simply collections of different puzzles that do in fact go together. Success on one does tend to predict success on all the rest.

And what that means is that IQ tests are VERY useful. For instance, if you are hiring for a job that requires a lot of problem-solving, you can use an IQ test to predict which applicant will be best at that job -- no matter what the problems may be in the job you are hiring for. And IQ tests are also very predictive of educational success. If you have a high IQ it is much more worthwhile to spend up big on a university education than if you have a low IQ.

As an example of how ability generalizes, take mechanical aptitude: I am very good at all sorts of academic things so lots of people would think I must be hopeless at practical things like mechanics. And it is true that any time my car needs fixing I hand the job over to an expert. But I like fixing locks. I am an amateur locksmith. Locks are just another puzzle to me. So one day, I was at a small gathering where some ladies were having trouble with the deadlock on their front door. So they took it off and opened it up. And immediately, bits and pieces went "SPROING" everywhere. They were of course completely stumped by that and did not for a moment think to ask a hopeless academic like me to help. So I said: "Maybe I can help". They looked at me with great skepticism. But in ten minutes I had it back together and all working properly. I hope they learnt something about 'g' from that episode.

Now I have just used an example above to illustrate what I am saying. But the example is NOT the proof. The proof is the gazillion times researchers have found that problem-solving generalizes. One of my other readers of my post yesterday made that mistake. She said that men got all the Nobel prizes because good education has become available to women only fairly recently. But that was not the point at all. The researchers who wrote the article in The British Journal of Psychology that I referred to yesterday relied for their conclusions on hundreds of studies with IQ tests. The bit about Nobel prize-winners was only an illustration, much like my locksmithing illustration above. Examples prove nothing by themselves. They just help you to understand how generalizations work out in practice.

Incidentally, creativity is NOT like IQ. It does not generalize much. People who are highly creative in one field are usually pretty uncreative in other fields. For instance, I am extremely good at writing articles for scientific journals. And that is a highly creative field. In that field you are creating new knowledge and understanding about something. And I have had hundreds of such articles published. But I could not write a novel for nuts! So even in the single field of writing, there can be different types of totally unrelated creativity!

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An unusual perspective on Israel's rights: “The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression — and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors — the Sinai first — Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor.”

Some uncommon-sense from Australia: "The Centre for Independent Studies, in a report into income tax levels, said there was overwhelming evidence to support deep tax cuts for high income earners because of the benefits that would bring to the economy. It follows criticism of the Government's $22 billion worth of tax cuts announced in the May budget. Average wage earners have already received a $6 a week tax cut under the package, but people on higher incomes - including those earning more than $100,000 a year - will get substantially more. But Dr Sinclair Davidson, an associate professor at RMIT University, said in a paper for the centre that there was far more scope for the Government to go further with its tax cuts. He said the Government could cut taxes further without a reduction in revenue. In fact, an economy buoyed by larger tax cuts would actually lift the amount of money flowing to the Government".

Arabs mostly marry cousins: "Just as modern medicine recognizes genetic sources of many physical illnesses, modern psychology recognizes genetic components in many psychological problems including criminality. Presumably, a region where inbreeding is rife-and reinforced through successive generations-should also have a greater frequency of such mental ailments. Though, not surprisingly, there seem to have been no studies in that regard given the delicacy of the subject, the high levels of social pathology, violence, and terrorism in the Arab world suggest that inbreeding is one of the causes."

I have just put up here the latest article by Arlene Peck. She notes how Israel's voluntary withdrawal from Gaza has won it no credit from Leftists at all. Excerpt: "Already, the rabidly anti-Semitic Los Angeles Times is publishing its ‘editorials': “Israel Leaves but Gaza is Hardly Free!" and articles decrying “...how isolated they are in Gaza now, from the outside world, (not to mention the West Bank and Jerusalem) and as subject to Israeli domination as before”.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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AN EXCELLENT ANALYSIS OF LEFTIST ACADEMICS

"Many academics are inclined to favor redistribution of income. Some economists like Krugman argue forcefully that people care more about relative position than their absolute status. I have been reluctant to accept this position as being very important, perhaps because envy is so foreign to me. I do not resent Bill Gate's billions; I wish I had them. I would be happier if Bill Gates gave them to me, but I certainly wouldn't be happier if Bill Gates lost them. In fact, I think that resenting the wellbeing of others is a pretty strong character flaw. However, at some point, one must accept the fact that many people like Paul Krugman are deeply concerned with status.....

I think academics are inclined to attack the privileges of wealth, because the existence of wealth lowers the relative status attributed to intellectual achievements. If the very pursuit of wealth can be reduced to a zero-sum struggle for status, then wealth loses some of its status. Academics gain status at the expense of businessmen and other high income professions.

Academics of all levels would see their relative status rise, if wealth is besmirched. A professor at a local community typically has a high level of educational attainment but only modest social status given their average level of income.

I think that it is no accident that many of those who are most fervent about redistributing income spend so much time bemoaning the chase for status. This chase is very real for them. As Jane Galt has observed, academics are probably more status obsessed than the typical person. The attack on wealth is one dimension of their chase for status".

More here

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Destructive British socialism: "Tony Blair's claims to have extended "social justice" were undermined last night by official figures showing the gap between rich and poor has widened by 90 pounds a week since Labour came to power. A report by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) also showed that Labour has failed to narrow the gap in achievement levels between parents from working- and middle-class families.... The report, Focus on Social Inequalities, compared average weekly incomes of families in the top 10 per cent of incomes (those now earning more than 658 pounds or more a week) with those in the lowest 10 per cent (those earning 164 pounds or less a week). It found that since the mid-1990s disposable income for both groups had risen by over a fifth. "However," it added, "these increases resulted in a rise of 119 pounds per week for those near the top of the income distribution compared with a rise of 28 pounds per week for those near the bottom. This shows that the absolute difference in the average weekly income has continued to widen."

More privatization in China: "China on Wednesday freed more than 1,300 largely state-owned companies to gradually sell shares of stock now controlled by the Communist Party government, putting nearly $270 billion worth of state assets on the trading block. This unprecedented wave of privatization is aimed at lifting domestic stock markets and furthering the country's transition toward capitalism... The move is "a huge deal," said Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Shanghai and author of the book "Exit the Dragon?," which examines China's privatization. "The state-owned shares have been an albatross around the neck of the market. This is a pretty good sign that they're serious about reform".

A corrupt bureaucracy? How amazing!: "A federal judge in Texas, calling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. a "corrupt agency with corrupt influences on it," awarded a Houston financier $72 million to cover his legal fees in a decade-long suit involving a failed savings and loan and the government's efforts to take control of a stand of endangered California redwood trees in the 1990s. The FDIC, a regulatory agency that insures deposits at banks and savings and loans, filed suit against Charles E. Hurwitz in 1995, seeking to collect more than $800 million because Hurwitz indirectly controlled a Texas S&L that failed in 1988. The FDIC, after a series of legal setbacks, dropped its suit against Hurwitz in 2002. Hurwitz then asked the U.S. District Court judge overseeing the case, Lynn N. Hughes, to order the FDIC to pay his legal expenses, arguing that the FDIC should never have brought the case in the first place".

Disgusting disrespect for brave men: "The Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the current home of hundreds of wounded veterans from the war in Iraq, has been the target of weekly anti-war demonstrations since March. The protesters hold signs that read "Maimed for Lies" and "Enlist here and die for Halliburton."" [The Left are just so full of hate that they know no decency]

Some Iraq experts think the new Iraqi constitution is great: "The Bush administration finally did something right in brokering this constitution," Galbraith exclaimed, then added: "This is the only possible deal that can bring stability. ... I do believe it might save the country."

Failure of a liberal foreign policy: "If you've ever wondered how a President Kerry foreign policy would have turned out, look no further than the state of play with the two axis states who weren't dealt with in the "Bush unilateral way" - Iran and North Korea. President Bush has been following the Democrats' multilateral route with those two. He's allowed the Europeans to take the lead in dealing with the mullahs and has been working with Asian countries in negotiating with Kim Jong Il. Both tracks have failed, but you wouldn't know that from the silence of the Democrats. After deriding President Bush for "going it alone" and "not working with our allies" against Iraq, there is little for them to say when he follows their policy and it fails".

Historian Prof. R.J. Rummel has some excellent quotes from Hitler and other Nazis showing how socialist Nazism was. I liked this one from Hitler: "In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois [capitalist] meetings. Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days. . . . And so it is not surprising that the sane and unspoiled masses shun these 'bourgeois mass meetings' as the devil shuns holy water."

There is a BIG reply to the gross claim that the US Army are "mercenaries" here

Chris Brand's news site is down again so I have put up his latest postings here

Below is a good cartoon about how the mainstream media see the world:



For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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FEMALE IQ FINDINGS: O VAST INCORRECTNESS!

"The Times" of London is a highly recommendable paper for its straight-down-the middle accounts of most things (unlike a certain New York publication). The fact that it is a Rupert Murdoch publication (think Fox News) probably has something to do with that. But I think even "The Times" was a bit courageous to print the following story (excerpt):

"A study claims that the cleverest people are much more likely to be men than women. Men are more intelligent than women by about five IQ points on average, making them better suited for "tasks of high complexity", according to the authors of a paper due to be published in the British Journal of Psychology. Genetic differences in intelligence between the sexes helped to explain why many more men than women won Nobel Prizes or became chess grandmasters, the study by Paul Irwing and Professor Richard Lynn concluded. They showed that men outnumbered women in increasing numbers as intelligence levels rise. There were twice as many with IQ scores of 125, a level typical for people with first-class degrees. When scores rose to 155, a level associated with genius, there were 5.5 men for every woman. Dr Irwing, a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University, said that he was uncomfortable with the findings. But he added that the evidence was clear despite the insistence of many academics that there were "no meaningful sex differences" in levels of intelligence".

Source

Before all my female readers delete their bookmarks to this site, let me explain. I am a psychometrician by trade so I do know a little about this. First, let me point out that British Journal of Psychology is Britain's top academic psychology journal. So it needs to be reckoned with. What it reports, however, has in fact been known to psychometricians for about 100 years. And that is that men and women have the same intelligence ON AVERAGE but the scatter of intelligence differs between the sexes. Female intelligence clusters much more closely around the average -- so there are fewer very dumb women and fewer very bright women. And that, I am afraid, is how the cookie crumbles. The geniuses tend to be men but so do the dummos. And I am sure most women have met plenty of the latter.

Update:

For those who want to look at the male/female ability question more closely, there is an exhaustive (and exhausting) coverage of the question here -- and that's just covering the mathematical ability component of IQ.


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What utter unscientific garbage! "A medical student who has worked for an abortion rights group and the director of a clinic that provides abortions were among authors of a report on the highly charged issue of fetal pain published Wednesday. The report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, concluded that fetuses probably don't feel pain until around the seventh month of pregnancy". Premmie babies born long before that stage are complete human beings!

Dr Weevil has a nice put-down of that vast ego known as Brian Leiter. In case anybody misses it, the curculionidaceous one (Weevil) heads his post "Hybris in action". "Hybris" (more usually rendered in English as "hubris") is ancient Greek for "overweening pride" or "the pride that comes before a fall" -- pretty apt for Leiter. Keith Burgess-Jackson generally describes Leiter more simply -- as "nuts". Both descriptions have much truth in them.

Bush gives in (maybe) to pressure over illegal migrants: "The Bush administration has signalled a big policy reversal on illegal immigration, telling a worried public that it is "rightly distressed" about the nation's porous borders. The homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, made what amounted to a U-turn on immigration policy after months of rising pressure from congressmen and law enforcement officials.... Announcing a series of measures, Mr Chertoff said he would build camps for illegal migrants, speed up deportations by providing more judges and lawyers and raise the number of officers tracking down fugitives ignoring expulsion orders.... Most polls indicate that more than 80 per cent of Americans believe border protection is too lax.... The American immigration system is close to collapse. This year, the federal authorities have caught almost 500,000 illegal migrants, with 142,000 from countries other than Mexico. That has forced officials to release many before they reach deportation hearings.

Vast British muddle: "Islamic extremists boasted of how they would never be thrown out of Britain yesterday as a promised crackdown by the Government turned into a shambles. The hardliners taunted Home Secretary Charles Clarke after he promised action 'within days' to start deporting dozens of foreign preachers of hate living in the UK... Al-Siri's defiance came as Mr Clarke's plans were attacked by leading lawyers and moderate Muslims. They warned the deportations policy would breach international law, create massive confusion and turn Muslims against the Government.... Mr Clarke said the measures were necessary to counter the 'real and significant' terrorist threat facing the country after the suicide bombings in London on July 7. But legal experts said that, under human rights laws, he could not send anybody back to countries where they could face torture or death.... The deportations are likely to be tested in the Court of Appeal, House of Lords and, ultimately, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in a process lasting up to three years. Ten extremists rounded up by officials ten days ago have already lodged appeals."

What Israel needs to do: "Anyone who thinks that more Israeli concessions comprise the magic way to peace should look carefully at the experience of the past 12 years... We agree with Mr. Sharon's argument that the defense resources spent on protecting outlying Gaza settlements could be better allocated to protect the country against terrorism. Israel should adopt a policy of relentless and massive deterrence, guaranteeing that Gaza-based terrorists will be hit very hard every time they fire rockets into Israel. For such a deterrence policy to work, it is essential that Washington support Israel when it defends itself against terror."

I am a bit slow off the mark on this story but note this offensive NYT article from a so-called historian: "The United States now has a mercenary army. To be sure, our soldiers are hired from within the citizenry, unlike the hated Hessians whom George III recruited to fight against the American Revolutionaries. But like those Hessians, today's volunteers sign up for some mighty dangerous work largely for wages and benefits". And see the article thoroughly taken apart by someone who DOES know his history.

A heartening story here of how the blogosphere helped at least one member of the U.S. military.

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with a big selection of blogospheric reading.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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SCREEN POLITICIANS FOR PSYCHOPATHY?

In business, results count so I doubt that many successful businesses are headed by psychopaths. Psychopaths generally get found out pretty quickly so would not last long in a stable business. In politics, however, judgments of success or failure are much more arbitrary and I have no doubt that Bill Clinton and John Kerry would have been filtrered out of politics if they had had to pass a test for psychopathy. There are a few interesting excerpts from an article on the topic below:

Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters.. Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow. "These are callous, cold-blooded individuals," Hare said. "They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse." He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said. Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. "Why wouldn't we want to screen them?" he asked. "We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?"

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It's a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren't just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We're worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they're lifting profits and stock prices, we're willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.

Psychopaths succeed in conventional society in large measure because few of us grasp that they are fundamentally different from ourselves. We assume that they, too, care about other people's feelings. This makes it easier for them to "play" us. Although they lack empathy, they develop an actor's expertise in evoking ours. While they don't care about us, "they have an element of emotional intelligence, of being able to see our emotions very clearly and manipulate them," says Michael Maccoby, a psychotherapist who has consulted for major corporations.

Psychopaths are typically very likable. They make us believe that they reciprocate our loyalty and friendship. When we realize that they were conning us all along, we feel betrayed and foolish. "People see sociopathy in their personal lives, and they don't have a clue that it has a label or that others have encountered it," says Martha Stout, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the author of the recent best-seller The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books, 2005). "It makes them feel crazy or alone. It goes against our intuition that a small percentage of people can be so different from the rest of us -- and so evil. Good people don't want to believe it."

Intriguingly, Babiak believes that it's extremely unlikely for an entrepreneurial founder-CEO to be a corporate psychopath because the company is an extension of his own ego -- something he promotes rather than plunders. "The psychopath has no allegiance to the company at all, just to self," Babiak says. "A psychopath is playing a short-term parasitic game."

My own research papers on psychopathy can be found here and here. Why I think Clinton and Kerry are psychopaths is spelt out here or here.

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I want every one of my readers to read this story of murdered American journalist Steven Vincent. It is a story of great love, great courage and completely discredits an arrogant Leftist academic by the name of Juan Cole. The "expert" Cole even claimed that Iraq is a Mediterranean country! If you've got an old school atlas that you don't want any more, mail it to him!

Have you noticed the "Flag" button that now is placed at the top right of most blogspot blogs? It is there to enable readers to "flag" a blog as "objectionable". I say more about it here

Union thuggery defeated: "Northwest Airlines' success a blow for labor MSNBC "Northwest Airlines Corp.'s success in keeping its planes flying even after its mechanics walked off the job early Saturday could embolden other companies to play hardball with their unions. While the No. 4 U.S. carrier could still hit turbulence in the coming weeks, it has so far effectively used replacement workers and third-party contractors to replace some 4,400 striking mechanics, cleaners and custodians. Its apparent success could send tremors through other unions at Northwest, its beleaguered airline rivals and even other U.S. corporations, further weakening the organized labor movement."

A big airforce restructure: "When his Cabinet tried to get Calvin Coolidge to up the budget for military aviation back in the days of open cockpits and silk scarves, the president is said to have quipped, 'Can't we just buy one airplane and have the pilots take turns?' It is a joke many in today's Air National Guard would not find funny. Under the Pentagon's plan, which its base-closing commission will vote on this week, 30 Air-Guard sites from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Houston to Portland, OR, would be closed or downsized; 29 of 88 flying units would end up with no aircraft."

Drunkablog has a good post on all the Leftist twists and turns that are going on to try to save the bacon of the lying Prof. Ward Churchill.

Ovi Magazine is out again with over 40 illustrated articles inviting you to kick back on the couch for a couple of hours with a nice cup of tea. Iran, Sami culture, Saudi Arabia, catastrophes, Cyprus, Cuba, humour, superstitious people, umbrellas, robbery, iMacs and shocking games are among the content.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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Brookes News Update

Australian economy, recession and the trade cycle : The RBA's monetary policy is something we should be deeply concerned about, especially when we use a historical perspective
The US economy in the '90s was never what it seemed under Greenspan: The Fed failed to understand what happened to the American economy in the 1990s. This is why it could not explain the impending recession. Now it is repeating the same mistakes
Liberal Government fails on labour market reform and the right throws a tantrum: Why, after more than 20 years of intellectual grandstanding, our rightwing failed dismally to persuade the great majority of Australians that effective minimum wage rates destroy jobs
Labour market reform versus unemployment: Keith Hancock, former research officer for the ACTU is another critic of market solutions who never allows economic reasoning to reveal the role unions played in creating our unemployment problem
Paul Krugman lies about social security and slimes Bush: May Paul Krugman sink like the sun in the West and fade from memory

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Plain speaking from Australia's conservative leadership: "Peter Costello is urging radical Muslim clerics to leave Australia if they do not share the nation's values ahead of today's national terrorism summit organised by the Prime Minister. As Muslim leaders gather in Canberra to discuss the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, the Treasurer has warned Australia cannot afford to be ambivalent about the teachings of extremists. John Howard has urged Islamic leaders to take a greater role inrejecting violence but he has been more restrained than the Treasurer. "If you don't like those values, then don't come here. Australia is not for you," Mr Costello said yesterday. "This is the way I look at it: Australia is a secular society, with parliamentary law, part of the Western tradition of individual rights."

An excellent speech about Leftist intellectuals: "Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, spoke to the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Iceland about the attraction which intellectuals feel for socialism and similar ideologies. He quoted Hayek's observation that intellectuals are drawn to visions and ideas, as well as to systems which accord them a greater share of influence and power. Intellectuals feel 'under-valued' by the market, in that it puts a value on them less than they think appropriate. The case Klaus put was that the 'hard' version of socialism (ie communism) might be over, but the weak versions, including social democracy, the welfare state, and the 'social model,' now posed the threat of big and patronizing government, high regulation, and large-scale income redistribution. Intellectuals are attracted to this type of thinking because it elevates their importance and the chance to impose their ideas on a world which would otherwise reject them."

What an inspiration! "Mart Laar told the Mont Pelerin Society in Reykjavik that when he became prime minister of Estonia in 1992, after it regained its indepenendence, inflation was at 1,000 percent, the economy was shrinking by 30 percent a year, unemployment stood at 30 percent, and they depended on Russia for 92 percent of their trade. His government championed property rights through privatization, introduced free trade by abolishing tariffs, and pursued tax competition via a flat tax. Guess what? They have stable growth of between 6 and 7 percent. Inflation is 2.5 percent. The budget is balanced, unemployment is low, and they have a very high level of investment.

Canada has still got a navy?? "Canada is sending its navy back to the far northern Arctic port of Churchill after a 30-year absence. The visit by two warships to the area is the latest move to challenge rival claims in the Arctic triggered by the threat of melting ice. The move follows a spat between Canada and Denmark, over an uninhabited rock called Hans Island in the eastern Arctic region. A visit there by Canada's defence minister last month angered the Danes".

Betsy Newmark has an update on the official investigation into the lying Prof. Ward Churchill. Looks like there's a chance he might eventually get the boot.

The latest from the People's Democratic Republic of Venezuela: "Chavez gave a new vote of confidence to Castro's communist government Sunday, calling it a ''revolutionary democracy'' in which the Cuban people rule. People ''have asked me how I can support Fidel if he's a dictator,'' Castro said. ''But Cuba doesn't have a dictatorship -- it's a revolutionary democracy.''... During the nearly six-hour show, Castro and Chavez talked mainly about their joint social ventures, particularly in the health sector. Cuba has sent a fifth of its doctors to work in poor communities in Venezuela, in gratitude for massive shipments of Venezuelan oil under preferential terms."

Anarchists and jihadists: "Bombs, beards and backpacks: these are the distinguishing marks, at least in the popular imagination, of the terror-mongers who either incite or carry out the explosions that periodically rock the cities of the western world. A century or so ago it was not so different: bombs, beards and fizzing fuses. The worries generated by the two waves of terror, the responses to them and some of their other characteristics are also similar. The spasm of anarchist violence that was at its most convulsive in the 1880s and 1890s was felt, if indirectly, in every continent. It claimed hundreds of lives, including those of several heads of government, aroused widespread fear and prompted quantities of new laws and restrictions. But it passed. Jihadism is certainly not a lineal descendant of anarchism: far from it. Even so, the parallels between the anarchist bombings of the 19th century and the Islamist ones of today may be instructive..."

British Muslim leaders 'in denial' claim: "Britain's most powerful Islamic body is "in denial" about the prevalence of extreme views among its members, one of its founders has told the BBC. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) pledged to tackle extremism "head on" after the 7 July attacks in London. But in a BBC Panorama special, Mehbood Kantharia and other prominent British Muslims question the MCB's commitment to meeting this challenge. The MCB has branded the programme "deeply unfair" and a "witch-hunt".... Mehbood Kantharia was a member of the MCB's central working committee between 1997 and 2004, but has since left the organisation. He told Panorama: "It is my personal view that because they are in a state of denial they cannot become real, you know, sort of like, forthright, really forthright about wanting to do something about the kind of extremism that prevails."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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TUESDAY ROUNDUP

Once again I list what I think were the best posts on my various blogs in the preceding week. My three big postings of the week about happiness research are obviously the bit of writing I am most pleased about. I posted them both here and on "Blogger News". The list of all my recent postings on "Blogger News" is here. I have also combined my three postings on happiness research into a single, slightly revised, article, which you can find here or here. Other than that:

On Dissecting Leftism I note the strange birth-order theories of Frank Sulloway. Birth order can be linked to various things but Sulloway thinks it dictates our politics.

On Greenie Watch I note that methane is a far better candidate than CO2 for a gas that is altering our climate

On Political Correctness Watch I note that businesses run by women make lower profits

On Education Watch I note that only about half of this year's U.S. high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college

On Gun Watch I note that New Mexico State University's mascot, Pistol Pete, is to lose his pistol

On Socialized Medicine I note how people can be dying from superbugs in public hospitals with nobody in officialdom being very concerned.

On Leftists as Elitists I note the high life lived by Leftist intellectuals at taxpayer expense.

On Tongue Tied I explain the recent minor drama in Australia about banning the word "Mate"

On Majority Rights I note the joke that is American border control

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ELSEWHERE

The usual Leftist hypocrisy: "How DARE you imply that we hate freedom?" That's what red-faced Liberals say, even as they protest against the war for freedom in Iraq and call our President a war criminal. Liberals are such hypocrites, and I for one am sick of it.... Conservatives, on the other hand, truly love freedom - so much so that when necessary, they are willing to fight to preserve and protect it, as well as to export it around the world and extend it to other peoples less fortunate than we are".

An excellent quote from the Gipper: ""I think the so-called conservative is today what was, in the classic sense, the liberal. The classical liberal, during the Revolutionary time, was a man who wanted less power for the king and more power for the people. He wanted people to have more say in the running of their lives and he wanted protection for the God-given rights of the people. He did not believe those rights were dispensations granted by the king to the people, he believed that he was born with them. Well, that today is the conservative."

Strip the federal courts of their power: "Congress is guilty of enabling judicial activism. Just as Congress ceded far too much legislative authority to presidents throughout the 20th century, it similarly has allowed federal judges to operate wildly beyond their constitutional role. In fact, many current members of Congress apparently accept the false notion that federal court judgments are superior to congressional statutes. Unless and until Congress asserts itself by limiting federal court jurisdiction, judges will continue to act as de facto lawmakers. The congressional power to strip federal courts of jurisdiction is plainly granted in Article III, and no constitutional amendments are required. On the contrary, any constitutional amendment addressing judicial activism would only grant legitimacy to the dangerous idea that social issues are federal matters."

Meet Christopher Hitchens' other half : "For most American liberals, the name Hitchens is enough to draw blood -- to the face. But for Sunday newsreaders in Britain, it is another Hitchens who has been riling audiences with his blistering polemics: Christopher's younger brother, Peter. Winner of the Columnist of the Year at the 2005 British Press Awards, Peter Hitchens is an authentic conservative, rooted in the classic liberal values of the Enlightenment era. But he wasn't always this way. A former Marxist, Hitchens famously told his university tutor, upon being late for class, 'I am sorry -- I was trying to start the revolution.' It is from the vantage point of a former leftist that he feels he understands his opponents better than most conservatives."

France creeping in the right direction: "France's commitment to economic liberalism will be tested today when the French Government begins to assess bids for the 12 billion euro privatisation of the country's toll motorway network. Deeply held feelings of patriotism in France are sure to create clashes as pressure builds on the country to adopt the kind of free-market economics widely favoured in Britain and North America".

A good post: "I actually felt myself become a Republican today. It was around 10am, when I read the latest update of the Cindy Sheehan saga in CNN.com. I then shot over to read some blogs about it, and perused the comments in some of them, which was nothing but a long series of petty (albeit entertaining) partisan bickering. Then it happend. The good little Democrat in me tied the little noose around his neck and jumped off the stool. He just couldn’t take it anymore. Take what? The whining. The constant whining by the extreme left about the reasons for war, the incompetence of this administration, and how we’ve all been lied to, and how we should pull out of Iraq immediately, because, *gulp* our soldiers were in danger. Guess what folks….they signed up to join the Army, not the boy scouts....."

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

**************************

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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IS HAPPINESS RELATIVE?

The one finding from happiness research that seems absolutely secure is that happiness is to a large degree relative. The latest article to that effect is here. Having more of some desideratum like money than others around you do seems to matter much more than the absolute amount of that desideratum that you have. Note this quote, however, "Another survey, by Town & Country magazine, found those with more money tended to have better marriages, were happier with their friends and found their jobs more interesting."

And note that this report shows that although money in general may not buy you happiness, SOME of the expenditures that a higher income enables DO make you happier. And this article summarizes the same set of findings as: "Money can buy happiness and the best investment advice may be as simple as the sports shoe slogan: just do it. That's the conclusion drawn by researchers who set out to identify what sort of spending made people happiest. The psychologists, from Cornell University and the University of Colorado in the US, compared "experiential purchases" – things such as holidays, concerts or dining out – with "material purchases" such as clothing, beauty products, stereos or personal computers."

And money can have an indirect role too. There are here some excerpts from an anti-individual, pro-Green rant by an Australian professor that nonetheless had this good point in it: "The findings fit those of other studies that have shown people for whom "extrinsic goals" such as fame, fortune and glamour are a priority tend to experience more anxiety and depression and lower overall well-being than people oriented towards "intrinsic goals" of close relationships, self-understanding, acceptance, and contributing to the community. These results are, in turn, consistent with other research that shows materialism - the pursuit of money and possessions - breeds not happiness but dissatisfaction, depression, anxiety, anger, isolation and alienation. In short, the more materialistic we are, the poorer our quality of life." And that is where capitalism comes in. Because it makes us all richer, it enables us to concentrate more on non-material things instead of spending all our time scrabbling for a living. I have shown elsewhere that materialistic ambition is highest in poor countries and lowest in rich countries.

So we have three mutually-contradictory findings from happiness research so far: 1). Happiness is static. Nothing much alters it for long; 2). Happiness can be improved, but only at the expense of others doing less well than us; 3). Some things can make us happier in absolute terms regardless of what others do. If that does not represent strong confirmation of my previous conclusion that happiness research is still in its infancy and hence not useful for guiding policy, I don't know what would. My suspicion is that what we will eventually find is that happiness is like most other personality traits -- mostly genetically determined but with some room for environmental influences.

In the meantime, however, as this article says: "Psychologists and 'happiness researchers' are using the finding that Calcutta slum-dwellers and Masai nomads are as happy as American businessmen to argue not only that wealth doesn't necessarily make you happy, but that this shows that investment in economic growth should be replaced by social programs. The trouble is that one conclusion doesn't necessarily lead to the other." Or as Tim Worstall notes with only a touch of sarcasm: "So-called 'happiness research' has been discussed at length recently with economist and TCS contributing editor Arnold Kling writing and blogging about it, and economist Tyler Cowen responding at his blog. That exchange, and the mention of a new book on the subject piqued my interest and some further research led me to the answer: 60% marginal tax rates, that's what will make society happy."

In other words, Leftists are arguing from the findings about static happiness that "If we take your money away it won't hurt". Odd that people do seem to get really peeved if you rob or defraud them, though! And ask anybody if they would rather spend their own money or have someone else spend it instead and there is not much doubt about what the answer will be. And that's the point: What people want matters. If some arrogant git claims that he can spend my money better than I can, he deserves to be treated like the con-man he is. The fact that overall level of happiness is mainly a personality disposition or trait which remains fairly stable across a wide range of circumstances does NOT mean that people are uninterested in improving those circumstances or getting the occasional "high". But Leftists don't care what people want, of course. "We know what's best for you" is their arrogant mantra.

When Leftists argue from the relative nature of happiness, however, they have a slightly better point. There is some logic in saying that if everybody had exactly the same amount of money, nobody would be made unhappy by others having more. Leaving aside the totalitarian nature of a society that would be needed to achieve such a situation, however, it overlooks that there are heaps of ways that people envy one-another. If they did not envy the next guy for having more money they might envy him for having better looks etc. Trying to equalize people is just a battle against human nature. But Leftists have always ignored the evidence about human nature of course.

I am going to call my posts on happiness to a halt here but there are some further interesting readings here and here and here and here and here

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ELSEWHERE

Janet Napolitano, governor of Arizona, says: "There is a real emergency at the Arizona-Mexico border. Law enforcement and other county and city entities have been pleading for assistance, and I could not wait any longer for the federal government to do its job. That’s why I declared a state of emergency in Arizona last week. It allows us to allocate more state money to much-needed border enforcement. Arizona’s border with Mexico is in drastic need of federal attention, but the federal government has done little to shore it up. As a result, criminality is alive and well along the border, preying upon Arizonans as well as the people desperate to get into the United States."

We mate with people who are genetically similar: "The reason our friends seem a bit kooky, and our mates may seem strange compared to ourselves, is that opposites attract. Right? Nope. A large body of research suggests that we pick our friends, as well as our mates, because underneath it all they are very much like us. So if our friends are kooky, and our mates a bit strange, chances are we are too. And the latest study in this ongoing research takes it a little further. We can blame it at least partly on our genes. People tend to like others who have the same inheritable traits, so we often choose friends and mates who are genetically similar to ourselves. "People prefer their own kind," says J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. "Extroverts favor extroverts; traditionalists, traditionalists."

What goes around comes around: "The "Chuppies" of China are quite prepared to "Buy American." A public opinion poll of China's emerging urban middle class found that high-quality personal care toiletries and consumer electronics lead the list of most desired American products. Apparel and fashion accessories and music and videos are close behind... "These findings show the urban consumer market in China has a great potential for foreign, and especially American, exporters," said Fei-Ling Wang, International Affairs professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "It confirms there is a sizeable group of urban residents in China with considerable disposable income who are developing brand-name consciousness, becoming savvy consumers and acquiring a taste for foreign goods."

I have just put up on Leftists as Elitists a good article by Andrew Bolt about the taxpayer-funded high life of Leftist intellectuals.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

**************************

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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HAPPINESS AND MONEY -- CONTINUED

I have just put up here another article that points to fairly static overall levels of happiness despite improvements in economic circumstances. Such observations are of course entirely predictable if we regard happiness as a trait rather than a state.

The trouble is that we DON'T usually think of happiness as a trait. We see it as something that happens to us -- as a temporary state rather than as an enduring trait. We mostly seem to think of it as the sort of thing that happens inside us when we win a prize or a lottery of some sort. And we see UNhappiness as event-related too. If a man's wife leaves him that will usually make him unhappy and if his dog dies that will make him VERY unhappy. But a new love and a new dog will of course immediately restore or even improve the man's happiness. But even without a new love or a new dog, happiness levels will eventually creep back to where they were. In fact even clinical depression (where people are having suicidal thoughts) usually wears off after a couple of years. So it doesn't really matter what a shrink says or does to help a depressed person as long as he can manage to keep the patient alive for a couple of years.

So clearly there is huge conceptual confusion in all this. Perhaps the language we use to talk about the subject is inadequate. And a cross-cultural note tends to confirm that. There have for many years been international surveys done which purport to find out which countries have the happiest people. But the big difficulty that the researchers found was that happiness is not always an adequately translatable concept. Perhaps the most surprising case of that is that even a language as closely related to English as German does not have any real equivalent to our word "happiness" (nor do they have a good equivalent for our word "pink" and nor do we have anything like an adequate translation of their word "Reich"). The commonest German translation of "happiness" is "gluecklich" but that really means "lucky", and I well remember an old German Jewish man with whom I was discussing that many years ago. He told me: "gluecklich I am but happy I am not". He meant that he was lucky to have escaped Hitler but still missed much of his old life. So can we really have as a key economic variable something that is not even translatable into German?

One approach that might seem hopeful for researchers into the subject is to talk about "happiness state" versus "trait happiness" but from my point of view as a psychometrician, however, that seems unlikely to help. I spent 20 years measuring psychological traits and have had many papers published on that subject but I have always regarded the measurement of psychological states as too difficult for me. Why? Because what people say about their states seems to be almost the same as what they say about their traits. The best-known example of an attempt to measure both states and traits in the same field is almost certainly Spielberger's work on state/trait measurement of anxiety and I have myself worked with Spielberger's questionnaires. But I found that the questions used to index the two gave generally interchangeable results: People who described themselves as anxious "at the moment" were also highly likely to describe themselves as anxious "in general". And that is not necessarily just a measurement problem, either. It surely stands to reason that people who are anxious "in general" are also more likely to be anxious on any given occasion. That implies to me that very short-term changes in states may be detectable (e.g. the "high" someone gets on being told they have won a lottery) but the sort of medium term change economists are looking for probably is not.

Yet given that traits are by definition both stable and general behaviour tendencies and given that traits are almost always shown to be highly genetically inheritable, any consideration of traits as an economic variable is surely beside the point. Economists are looking for the results of something, i.e. a change of some sort, and something that is inherently not very susceptible to change is surely a strange place to look for change. So it seems to me that any study of happiness as an economic variable must specifically look at states or "moods" -- and that does not generally seem even to be attempted. And the tradition of mood research in psychology exemplified by Joe Forgas and others usually seems to treat moods as short-lived rather than as being the sort of long-lasting change that economists have been looking for.

So my conclusion is that happiness research is still in its infancy and attempts by economists and others to use it for political purposes are totally premature and irrelevant.

Nobody is going to take the slightest notice of that conclusion, however, so I think I will have to soldier on and continue looking at what is being said about the subject. And I think it time I noted that Leftists are not only using the static nature of happiness to justify higher taxes but they are also using it to attack freedom and variety of choice.

There was a 2004 NYT article (reprinted here) arguing that too much choice can be bad for you. Too much choice is said to be confusing, paralysing and dissatisfying. This is actually a very old idea -- one made much of in Alvin Toffler's 1971 book, Future shock -- and it is ideal fodder for Leftists who want to dictate to people. As good totalitarians have always said, they can say: "See. Choice is bad for you. WE will make all your decisions for you".

This article has some reasonable comments on that: "In a recent New York Times op-ed touting his book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, psychology professor Barry Schwartz criticized political reforms aimed at expanding choice. He argued that "for many people, increased choice can lead to a decrease in satisfaction. Too many options can result in paralysis, not liberation."... There is much to be said against this thesis. First, if choice makes us unhappy, why do so many of us stop patronizing mom-and-pop stores and rush to Wal-Mart the moment we get the chance?... Choice in the marketplace grows out of individual freedom. I want shoes. Many people are free to sell me shoes. That presents me with choices, requiring me to pay attention and to discriminate. What's the alternative? Government control aimed at limiting choice. Where's the evidence that that makes people happy?... Schwartz is a professor. If someone were to suggest that too many books, journals, and magazines crowd the shelves, that all this choice makes people unhappy, and that government could serve us better by restricting the number of choices, Schwartz and his ilk would scream like banshees".

There is of course some truth in saying that choice can be "blinding", as Toffler put it, but everything has its costs and the key question to ask is what if YOUR particular choice (of jam or anything else) were taken away? You would not like it. I myself feel irritated by the vast range of jams, mayonnaise etc that I have to go through in the supermarket to find just the one I want -- but I get REALLY irritated if my particular favourite is not among those on offer. The basic conclusion is that if we want our OWN choice of something, we have to tolerate OTHER people being given their choice too. Freedom has its costs. Nobody has ever pretended otherwise. But take that freedom away and you run into REALLY big costs -- in happiness and much else besides.

And there is the larger question of whether getting what you want makes you happy. Often it may not. As Oscar Wilde memorably wrote in his 1892 play Lady Windermere's Fan: "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it". And having choices and options may be an instance of something that people seek but which does not make them happy. But surely only someone who thinks he is a very superior being (e.g. the typical Leftist) would see that as a reason to stop giving people what they want. Who are we to sit in judgment on other people's choices and on what will make them happy? As Queen Elizabeth I asked the King of Spain centuries ago: "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?"

Whew! I think that will have to be enough from me on this subject for today but there is heaps more that I COULD comment on so I probably will in due course. For further reading in the meanwhile, Gregg Easterbrook's book on the subject is reviewed here and here. And I haven't even mentioned Martin Seligman yet. As a prophet of happiness, Seligman's surname is very apt. It means roughly "Blessed man".

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ELSEWHERE

Letter to the Left by Christopher Hitchens: "How can so many people watch this as if they were spectators, handicapping and rating the successes and failures from some imagined position of neutrality? Do they suppose that a defeat in Iraq would be a defeat only for the Bush administration? The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of 'missing' Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?"

Elephants in Academia has a comprehensive posting on the absurd attacks on GWB because he tries to keep fit. Australia's Prime Minister also has a well-known daily exercise routine but I have never heard him criticized for it. Since we are contantly told that excercise is a good thing, the attacks on GWB smack of desperation. I would have thought he was setting a good example.

I normally click on to an article by Bush-hating Jonathan Chait just to find something I can laugh at but his comment on the batty Mother Sheehan was actually rather sensible. Excerpt: "There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing. Or maybe liberals think that having served in war, or losing a loved one in war, gives you standing to oppose wars but not to support them. The trouble is, any war, no matter how justified, has a war hero or relative who opposes it." And, unlikely as it seems, there is a marvellous story about Reagan here that is very much to the point.

And, just to lighten things up a bit, a very apt cartoon from Today's Toons by Pookie:



For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

**************************

Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

Comments? Email me here (Hotmail address). If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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HAPPINESS AND MONEY

Happiness seems mainly to be a stable personality trait. We tend to be born as either happy or miserable people. And no prizes for guessing who the miserable ones are. There is a long history of evidence showing that conservatives are happier. The most recent is from Gallup: "Even when accounting for partisan differences in marital status and household income, Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats and independents to be very happy." Leftists are miserable sods, to put it plainly -- but you just have to hear their constant whining about everything in our society to know that.

How happy we are does NOT seem to depend strongly on external circumstances, though it does of course depend to SOME degree on what happens to us. So one person will be happy in circumstances that would make another person miserable. I know. I have observed perfectly cheerful people among the street-sleepers of Bombay. Some people are almost always happy. Some people are almost always whining. Some people just have happy natures and some do not. So looking at what it is that makes people happy is largely futile. In statisticians' terms, you are looking for variance in something that is invariant. Or, putting it another way, correlations with something that is invariant will NECESSARILY be zero. So if you are interested in running a public policy that respects other people, you need to look at what they CHOOSE, not at what makes them happy. And most people choose (for instance) more money rather than less.

And I think that this article shows beyond doubt that degree of happiness is a stable disposition: "Most people who live with serious disability or illness, such as kidney failure, appear to adapt well and maintain a healthy outlook on life, new research reports. This trend may be surprising to some -- the report also found that people without serious illnesses tended to underestimate the level of happiness in these patients. "We think it is encouraging that for at least some illnesses, life seems to (eventually) go on and that people come to experience good and even normal mood levels," study author Dr. Jason Riis of Princeton University in New Jersey told Reuters Health. "We cannot adapt to anything. But we are generally more resilient than we think," he said. In the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Riis and his colleagues note that this is not the first study to show that people can adjust to good and bad life events. For instance, a nearly 30-year old study found that paraplegics were not that much less happy than lottery winners."

And some more evidence that happiness is a personality trait: "In a boost for exam-flunkers everywhere, a study published yesterday in the British Medical Journal found the levels of satisfaction with life recorded by 550 Scottish men and women aged 84-85 were unaffected by their mental abilities, either when they were young or much later.... The study group, all born in Lothian, Scotland, in 1921, were remarkable for the fact they had all undergone tests of mental ability when they were about 11 years old, and the records had been preserved. The tests were repeated a few years ago, when they were about 79. They each ranked their happiness on a scientifically validated satisfaction scale."

In recent years, Left-leaning economists such as Ross Gittins have discovered the academic psychology literature on happiness -- and it seems to have given them some relief. The research shows, of course, that higher incomes do not automatically buy you more happiness. Any observer of Hollywood knew that long ago and I guess people have in fact known it for about 4,000 years. In 1 Timothy 6:10 St. Paul probably went a bit too far in saying that "The love of money is the root of all evil" but you get the idea. And the whole story of Job in the Old Testament runs along similar lines. But these days, "If money does not make you happier, then take it away!" is the Leftist reasoning. So that old bit of wisdom has found a new use as the latest pathetic excuse to hike taxes. There is another dummo academic (Richard Layard) reported here who points to the fact that getting richer does not necessarily make you happier and who thinks therefore that government meddling is indicated.

So why are SHOULD we worry about giving everyone higher incomes if that will not make them any happier? The simple answer: "Because almost everybody WANTS higher incomes" does not seem to have occurred to everybody yet. They seem to think that if money will not necessarily make you happy then governments should not bother with efforts to get more of it to you. But satisfaction, comfort, convenience, leisure options, security etc are not the same as happiness. The strongest external influence on how happy you are is probably your relationships with others. Given satisfaction with your relationships, you will probably remain roughly as happy through a wide range of incomes. But you will still want more of the things that money can buy if you can get them. So you will still say "Yes, please" to the possibility of more money.

There is a reply to Gittins on the economic issues here but it should also be noted that money does have SOME influence. As this article reports: "A new survey of national wellbeing has found the people happiest about their lives are those earning more than $150,000 a year. Those least happy earn less than $15,000 a year".

And this article also tends to show that there are ways in which money can buy happiness: "Two studies released yesterday shed new light on the importance of economic circumstances, and undermine earlier findings that poor people are just as happy as the rich. Money doesn't buy Happiness - or Does It? by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, at Melbourne University, shows that when wealth - not just income - is measured, the rich are indeed happier than the poor. Earlier research that focused only on income found very little difference in the reported happiness of high-income and low-income people. Mark Wooden, the study's co-author, said: "This has led some people to say money is not that important, relative to other things." However, when people's assets were taken into account - the value of their houses, cars, art works, even stamp collection - a different picture emerged."

This is a big subject so I will undoubtedly have more to say on it later. Maybe tomorrow.

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ELSEWHERE

British coverup coming apart: "A clerk at the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) was suspended last night for allegedly leaking secret documents about the Stockwell Underground shooting of an innocent man to a television station. The suspension will come as a severe blow to the credibility of the commission, which is handling its first big inquiry since it was opened 18 months ago to replace investigations by police themselves".

The Bush boom: "Why President Bush seemingly gets no credit for the strong economy is one of the enduring political mysteries of our time.... Most polls show the president’s economic approval rating around 40 percent or even less. Scott Rasmussen, who does extensive consumer and investor polling, shows that the confidence ratings of both are about 15 percent lower than in late 2003. Meanwhile, a splendid group of economic data points show clearly the effectiveness of the president’s marginal tax-rate reductions of two years ago. The tax-cut package was in large part directed at stock market and business capital formation, both hard hit a few years back. This was the correct target. Share prices have recovered about 70 percent in recent years, with a number of widely tracked indexes, like the NYSE and the S&P small- and mid-cap indexes, now trading at all-time highs. The economy itself is growing at about 4 percent per annum since the tax cuts, with business investment leading the surge".

Great progress in China: "The major reform achievement has been in privatizing state enterprises. The private sector accounts for 70% of gross domestic product. There are 200 large state companies -- basically, they are in utilities, some in heavy industries, some in resource industries. Traditionally, this is where governments have invested. China Mobil and China Telecom are huge, but these are natural monopolies. Even France and Britain had those large state companies for a long time. If you take these away, China is a private-sector economy"

Whew! I have just finished the big job of cleaning out my blogroll -- deleting links that no longer work or links that led to blogs that are no longer regularly updated. If anybody thinks I have unfairly deleted them, let me know.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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