From BBC Trump dealt blow as US trade deficit jumps This was a no-brainer, but I’ll take credit for it anyway. A year ago when Trump announced his tariffs, in March 2018 I predicted that there would be no trade war and no meaningful uptick in inflation, and was right right on both counts. The… Continue reading No trade war

It’s a common misconception that markets and market trends cannot be predicted. The usual response is “markets are efficient, random, and everything is discounted” and that there therefore the past is of no use for predicting the future. But as I discuss in my rationalism and predicting series, this is not always true: A systems-based… Continue reading How systems can beat efficient markets

Vox Day put up a 2-hour audio sample of his book Jordanetics. Milo, who wrote the forward, claims that Dr. Peterson is a covert Marxist (starts at around 9:30). Because Dr. Peterson rejects the oppressor-oppressed narrative (his talks stress the importance and inevitably of what he calls ‘hierarchies of competence’), which is one of the… Continue reading Jordan Peterson is Not a Covert Marxist (response to Milo)

From Unz: Trump’s Brilliant Strategy to Dismember U.S. Dollar Hegemony This break has been building for quite some time, and was bound to occur. But who would have thought that Donald Trump would become the catalytic agent? No left-wing party, no socialist, anarchist or foreign nationalist leader anywhere in the world could have achieved what… Continue reading The end of liberal democracy and the American hegemony? hardly

Arnold responds to Scott’s post on the productivity gap, writing: He makes a valiant effort to summarize and assess the economic literature. But this is where orthodox economics is hopeless.   Productivity by definition is output divided by the amount of labor input. Let me make three points:   1. You can’t measure the numerator… Continue reading Why America is So Economically Productive

NRO (National Review Online) is a zombie publication, that, like AOL, is sustained by subscribers who forgot to cancel their subscriptions. I have never seen anyone, on twitter or elsewhere, link to or speak favorably of an NRO article. NRO’s relevance peaked during the Bush years in 2004, began its decline after the death of… Continue reading The Declining Relevance of Conservatism

AOC is very much a product of our times, as someone with no experience and no credentials who overnight can capture the public spotlight. It’s not so much that her policies and ideas are nonviable, but rather the social media outrage and partisan divisions that they exacerbate, which compounds the problem. The New Green Deal,… Continue reading Against Social Media

I keep seeing articles that are critical of modernity–be it helicopter parenting, overstimulation in children, ugly architecture, careerism, perfectionism, or excessive self-improvement–going viral, and all published within the last year. The most recent example is The Atlantic article Workism Is Making Americans Miserable, which was shared over 16 times on Reddit, which is astounding. Instead… Continue reading Workism

A bunch of people have linked to the Quillette article We Must Defend Free Thought, by Claire Lehmann, who is the editor-in-chief and founder of Quillette. The article defends Scott, the author of the popular blog Slate Star Codex and related sub-Reddit, who succumbed to peer pressure for appearing too impartial and complicit to certain… Continue reading No such thing as free speech

Warren Buffett’s 2018 shareholder letter went viral. This passage stood out: I agree. Over and over again, the pronouncements of debt crisis have proven to be wrong. Had you sold your stocks n 2010 due to the national debt being too high, you would have missed out on 200% inflation-adjusted gains in the S&P 500… Continue reading What Warren Buffett’s shareholder letter says about America