Post-2008 economy & HBD, Post-Scarcity, Political Science

Like OWS, the Hong Kong protests will blow over in a few weeks. How many times is there some event and all the hacks – whose livelihoods depend on page views and clicks – proclaim it the start of a new paradigm, when in reality it’s much ado about nothing? Same for Ebola. Like swine flu and Anthrax, that will also blow over, although the doom and gloom liberals in the media will trying to scare you into believing the world is coming to an end, in an effort to milk the story for every last dime of advertising until the next media generated crisis comes along.

The left’s perception of America as a low-IQ place is wrong. They are assuming the lest intellectual aspects of America are representative of the entire country, or also known as the fallacy of composition. With few exceptions, the rest of the world is actually much dumber, which is why I’m bullish on the US market and bearish on foreign equities. A strategy that is long 70% the S&P 500 and short 30% emerging markets has a 40% better risk adjusted return than simply going long the S&P 500. Buy the dips in Facebook, Google, Mastercard, Johnson & Johnson.

To her credit, Ann Coulter is more accepting of HBD than mainstream republicans, who like liberals, parrot the same line that all social problems are due to environmental factors. As part of a broader post-2013 neoconservative resurgence, the writings of Ross Douthat also contain subtle themes of biological determinism. There are probably many mainstream republicans who secretly acknowledge the veracity of biological determinism, but are unable to voice it for fear of backlash. Look what happened to Larry Summers and Steven D. Levitt when they kicked the hornet’s nest of political correctness by expressing inconvenient truths about biology, only to have their fellow liberals turn against them.

Public acceptance interest in HBD is starting bubble to the surface, and we predict this trend will continue as wealth inequality and entitlement spending keeps rising. Not only that, but the post-2008 winner-take-all macro economic environment has forced people to accept the harsh reality that, yes, contrary to the nonsense promulgated by the leftist pop-psychology hope-peddlers, brains matter, and those who have more are succeeding (or at least have a better chance of success) in the this hyper-competitive economic environment we find ourselves in, while everyone else falls behind. People are seeking answers, and HBD at least provides an honest explanation for the economic predicament many find themselves in, or HBD offers a more accurate way of explaining the world. People become richer and more successful not so much through hard work, but by better genes. Genes determine how much mileage you get for your efforts.

Post-scarcity is a fantasy. This is obvious by how real prices for essentials from food, air travel, gasoline, daycare, healthcare and education have rapidly become more expensive in parallel with nosebleed technological progress. TVs and computers are cheaper, but by design, in order to keep total real consumption rising, everything else must keep going up faster than inflation. Of course, the common argument is that technology reduces prices, and it has, but there is a caveat.

The inflation, especially in the post-2008 economy, especially comes from the ancillary services that are required to make the broader technology useful. You have a computer which is cheap, but the internet bill goes up much faster than wages. TVs are cheap, but the cable bill has also increased rapidly. College may have gotten more affordable for some due to grants and other programs, but text books have skyrocketed. Same for the cellphone bill; heck, they will even giveaway the phone if they can lock you into a super-expensive contract. Same for insurance and pretty much everything else.

Welfare libs, in contract to neo liberals and classical liberals, think they can solve poverty and crime with a paternalistic government. Cons think they need to get the government out of the way and these problems will magically go away. Like republicans and libertarians, I support free markets, less government and less regulation. But to believe supply side economics will make biologically inferior/defective people into economically productive individuals is pipe dream. Yet, year after year, politicians on both sides of the aisle keep trying the same old stuff, repeating the same old platitudes that have been shown to not work. Fifty years later, for example, the war on poverty is still a failure with record inflation adjusted entitlement spending, and this is with republican and democratic presidents.