Posts by Stephen Judd
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Oh and for those of you who think the sub prime crisis was caused by greedy bankers, think again.
Nonsense on stilts, sage.
Nobody forced AIG to write risky insurance.
Nobody forced investment banks to buy derivatives of loans they did not write.
Nobody forced ratings agencies to overlook the quality of loan books and insurers.
Nobody forced, and in fact many people opposed, the practice of marking to market that overstated balance sheet strength.
Fanny and Freddie were not the first but among the last to fall over. Recall that the crisis started when Countrywide could not sell on the dodgy mortgages it had written. At that time it emerged that it and other lenders had been encouraging their staff to write as many loans as possible, and to overlook commonsense, to the point of firing loan officers who questioned figures applicants put on documents.
Anyway, if you were really a Mises-worshipping Austrian, like Horwitz, you wouldn't be applauding McCain's ostensible efforts to get a bailout package together. You ought to be disapproving his attempts to interfere in the end of the business cycle.
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Nina Paley is screwed because she can't get copyrights sorted for songs written and performed in the 20's. The composers and the performer are long, long dead.
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Not only will there be no domestic murders in the post-welfare world, but everyone will have a pony.
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Apropos of blunt tips on knives, supposedly Louis XIV passed a law to make table knives round tipped precisely to prevent dinner-table stabbings, which is why you haven't been able to stab your peas in polite company since the 17th century.
Apropos the "then we'd see slashings" answer, well actually it's much harder to slash fatally than to stab fatally, as every mediaeval weapons nerd knows.
Apropos PC's argument, or what I can understand of it, I agree that the war on drugs is a huge waste of resources, and we probably would see the drug-related murders disappear from our annual count of 50 or so when it stops. I don't see what effect redeploying the newly-freed police would have on the majority of the murders that are left.
As for the welfarism argument, if Peter is going to imagine the benefits of the poor not being "paid to breed", I'm going to imagine the violence of the desperate and starving which will counter it. My imaginarary facts are as good as his, I tell you.
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Bill Maher:
Now, take a look at these pictures. Here are the CEOs of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG and the Lehman Brothers. I know the first thing that jumps out about these faces is that they all happen to be white, and they all happen to be responsible for stealing. But what you have to understand is that these whites are a product of a society that made them that way. It was the neighborhoods and the schools they went to: Harvard, Yale, the Wharton School of Business. They never learned the value of doing real, actual work and the first step to fixing that is better role models, so kids growing up white today don't think the only way out of Westchester is corporate crime. Or a government handout or sailing. So I get it, the temptation is to look at McCain and vote against him because you don't see an individual, you just see another typical welfare whitey.
And it's true, he's spent his entire life shuffling from one low-paying government job to another. Well, except those years he spent in prison. Typical! And between you and me, he's not very articulate. Oh, he may have some street smarts, but he's not what you call an educated man. He freely admits he's ignorant about the economy. And apparently the only thing his white running mate knows how to do is crank out one baby after another. And now of course, her teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. Because she learns it at home! But that doesn't mean we should assume all white people are like that, just because so many of them are.
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(Also, note that the SST's graph doesn't adjust for population size, or mention the great blip when the Wanganui police computer system was replaced).
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Stephen: have a look here.
Basically, there's been a small increase in violent crime reported in the last 10 years.
However, I wouldn't take that at face value.
The most serious violent crime is murder. It's also the most indisputable and reliable statistic. Murder just doesn't go unreported.
Now see this graph from the Sensible Sentencing Trust. (They're hardly going to be biased in favour of understating crime, are they). See that the murder trend since 1990 is clearly downwards, while convictions for violent crime are steady. That doesn't make sense. Here are some theories:
- Medical science means more people survive serious injuries (I doubt it).
- The police are much more efficient at securing convictions than they used to be (I doubt it)
- People are reporting more violence to the police, resulting in more convictions (my pick). -
Correction: those figures were off the top of my head. In 2007, there were 407 road deaths and 45 murders, a ratio of about 9:1.
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Concretely, deaths by road accident outnumber homicide deaths in NZ by over 7 to 1 (around 360 car deaths and 50 murders). But I can tell you that I have been gathering statistics on news reporting in NZ for some time now, and the reporting ratio is not just reversed, but even more so. Murder is far more than seven times as prominent in our news coverage.
Every murder in NZ receives lovingly detailed coverage. Fatal car accidents do not unless there is some aspect to the case that really tugs at the heartstrings. Yet car accidents are a much more present danger to every one of us than murder.
My guess is that we have a perception of control over our risk of death in a car - I'm a safe driver, it's a safe car - whereas we imagine a stranger bursting out of nowhere to kill us. Furthermore our daily lives pretty much require driving, and if we had to think about it the way some people freak out about murder, we'd go mad with the strain.
Anyway, if our fears and outrage about causes of death were driven by a cool analysis of risk, murder would not figure.
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People want to believe that crime is on the rise
Nah, I'm not buying that.
I think we are apes, programmed at a fairly low level to watch out for leopards. In a handy shortcut, if we see an image of a leopard we are aroused (anything that looks like a leopard IS a leopard).
If the silly apes see a lot of pictures of leopards, they will not distinguish them from real leopards, and will think about them all the time, and be extremely careful in case there is a leopard about. There is an abundance of research out there showing that your brain makes irrational shortcuts which are very useful to your survival as a savannah ape, and somewhat of a hindrance in a technological environment, and this sort of fear partly stems from that.
If you have a semi-normal media diet, then unless you take the time and the trouble to investigate the odds for yourself, you would think that there's a lot of violent crime about. Maintaining a sanguine and rational view of every aspect of the world takes a lot of effort that many people don't have the energy (or the education) for, and we sensibly limit our rationality to our immediate sphere.
And the news media, particularly television exploits this. That's why we're going to see a lot of emotional porn about poor Austin Hemmings - our arousal sells ads.
I don't think people like being irrationally scared, per se, I just don't believe many people step back to evaluate their feelings against empirical evidence.