This has been edited in the light of a comment.
It isn't possible to believe Pareto improvements- i.e situations where a guy can report being made better off without anyone else reporting being made worse off- are desirable without also believing all agents are sovereign over at least one choice affecting themselves- i.e. a Paretian Illiberal, of the Amartya Sen type, is impossible. Assuming unrestricted domain, this becomes trivially true by introducing a notion of doxastic self-ownership- for e.g. by valorising the preference to have one's own preferences.
Suppose a Paretian Liberal is impossible- in other words, Amartya Sen isn't a shithead- then it would be the case that a particular sort of rational being would
1) not prefer to have his own preferences and, worse still,
2) voluntarily subscribe to his own logical impossibility.
However, to do so isn't a Pareto improvement because the said Liberal could always chose to believe Sen is a shithead and thus be rescued from the fate of being logically impossible in a manner that makes no one else worse off- provided Sen is either himself a Paretian Liberal (in which case he either disproves his own existence or, and this result holds even if he isn't a Paretian Liberal, that he has hit upon an Acceptation for 'Paretian Liberal' which is wholly meaningless and thus he is talking shit and has shit for brains- which is why he is a shit-head) or else has a meta-preference not to be a shithead (in which case he can mend his ways) or else is too fucking stupid to ever grasp that he's a total shithead, in which case his feelings in this regard can't be hurt.
Truly unrestricted domain with 'nosey preferences' (i.e. which feature impredicativity) means we have an uncountable infinity of pair-wise choices which can't be well founded and so Sen's proof fails immediately. But this is scarcely a surprise. Impredicativity will do that to you.
Suppose I have a choice to either eat or not eat this biscuit. Permit me to have meta-preferences- i.e. introduce impredicativity. I now can prefer to eat but prefer to prefer not to eat this biscuit (i.e. prefer to have ascetic preferences) or prefer to prefer to prefer to eat this biscuit (i.e. prefer to depass my ascetic preferences by reason of its sublation by a more refined notion of atraraxia) and so on and so fort. What is the upshot? Unrestricted domain with impredicativity of the type Sen stupidly imports (being insensitive to Arrow's Tarskian training) gives us something immediately bigger by a Godelian argument than its own acceptation (i.e. Unrestricted Domain can't mean whatever it was supposed to, thus no modal fixed points are available) and so, by Ackermann's Reflection principle, everything just got apophatic and nothing is well founded. But this isn't some wonderful new insight. It is simply childish.
A more serious reason to spurn Sen-tentious shitheadedness arises out of the manner in which 'Just So' representative individual type theories are wholly misleading.
Alan Kirman, explaining why mainstream Econ has fucked up so badly in recent years, explodes 'representative agent' models and asks us to shift our attention to Organisation, as opposed to Efficiency, as central to Social Science.
Kirman- a good guy who was once a Geography teacher- explains what is salient for Significs is that Impredicativity or Reflexivity does arise in Econ- which is why we can meaningfully speak of a Paretian Liberal- but this notion is only captured by interactions of an Organizational, i.e. second order, not Transactional, type. As a matter of fact, not theory, the Paretian Liberal does exist in all countries with the Rule of Law. Sen may say- boo to the Rule of Law, boo to Organization, boo to 'Niti'- but he can't deny that Paretian Liberalism is a better description of what obtains in Rule of Law, Democracies than his own Entitlement theory or Capabilities approach. The fact is, 'territoriality' or the 'bourgeois strategy in the hawk dove game' is evolutionarily stable and eusocial (vide Zahavi on the handicap principle) which is why it is the basis of Paretian Liberalism. True, this is not indefeasibly so but defeasibility is a good thing because, if Darwin not Dueteronomy is right, the future must always be, at least retrospectively as Popper and Dunnent and Huw Price have, albeit inadvertently, argued, not just unknown but radically unknowable. That last being, as Collingwood posthumously proves to his ageing Oakshotteian self, a distinction without a difference.
Saturday, 8 November 2014
Friday, 7 November 2014
Thomas Sowell- 'Black rednecks & White Liberals'
In the 1830's William Gladstone opposed free education for the children of recently enfranchised West Indian slaves. Meanwhile, his father was scheming to bring in Indian and Chinese 'coolies' to man the plantations. Gladstone's objection arose out of a Religious scruple- it wasn't politically practical for the Anglican Church to monopolize education for ex-slaves and thus it was better for their souls for them to have no education at all.
Had Gladstone not been such an almighty fuckwit the British Empire would have been increasingly staffed at it's factory-floor, so to speak, by educated West Indian blacks.
Incidentally, it is worth speculating as to whether the Islamic Caste system would have been ameliorated had a 'Hashbi' dynasty succeeded in holding onto power. I may mention, it was an American black who gave Gandhi his first break in Pretoria- he got him into a perfectly respectable 'white' rooming house and thus secured him a racial laissez passer in that tiny town which his Gujerati hosts couldn't have procured for him.
A British Empire manned by educated Blacks would have been a great boon for India. For one thing, this 'Aryan' nonsense would have been knocked on the head.
For another- and here I'm making a generalization from my own fond memories of my Nairobi primary School- blacks just out perform Whites and Asians. Moreover, older kids look after younger ones, smarter kids help their slower class-mates- education ceases to be about cut-throat competition and consists in fostering esprit de corps and the ability to work together.
How is it that a lot of people nowadays think Black males are less rather than more likely to do well at School?
The Economist, Thomas Sowell, who had to struggle out of poverty same as Milton Friedman and Ken Arrow and so on, has answered this question in his book 'Black rednecks & White Liberals'.
Here are a couple of extracts-
High-Performance Schools
In 1899, there were four academic public high schools in Washington, D.C.—one black and
three white. In standardized test given that year, students in the black high school averaged
higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools. Today, more than a
century later, it would be considered Utopian even to set that as a goal, much less expect it to
actually happen. Yet what happened back in 1899 was no isolated fluke. That same school
repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests in the 1930s, 1940s, and
early 1950s. Back in the 1890s, it was called the M Street School and in 1916 it was renamed
Dunbar High School.
When this information on Dunbar High School was first published in the 1970s, those few
educators who responded at all dismissed the relevance of these findings by saying that these
were "middle class" children and therefore their experience was not "relevant" to the
education of low-income minority children. Those who said this had no factual data on the
incomes or occupations of the parents of these children—and the data that existed said just the
opposite. The problem, however, was not that these dismissive educators did not have
evidence. The more fundamental problem was that they saw no need for evidence. According
to their doctrines, children who did well on standardized tests were middle class. These
children did well on such tests, so therefore they must be middle class.
It so happens that there was evidence on the occupations of the parents of the children at
this school as far back as the early 1890s. As of academic year 1892-93, of the known
occupations of these parents, there were 51 laborers, 25 messengers, 12 janitors, and one
doctor. That hardly seems middle class. Over the years, a significant black middle class did
develop in Washington and most of them may well have sent their children to the M Street
School or to Dunbar High School, as it was later called. But that is wholly different from saying
that most of the children at that school came from middle-class homes.
Why did Dunbar High School do so well?
The kids were poor. Black kids got a worse return on an Academic qualification. Economic theory says they should have had high absenteeism and dropout rates. No doubt they did. But there was another factor in play. Good teaching can itself reduce absenteeism. But good teaching is correlated to commitment and high academic standards. It appears that low returns on Black education trapped highly educated blacks in teaching- a typical 're-switching' type phenomena which confounds expectations and has revolutionary potential-
'Among those early principals (of Dunbar High School) was the first black woman to receive a college degree in the
United States—Mary Jane Patterson from Oberlin College, class of 1862. At that time, Oberlin
had different academic curriculum requirements for women and men. Latin, Greek and
mathematics were required in the "the gentlemen's course," as it was called, but not in the
curriculum for ladies. Miss Patterson, however, insisted on taking Latin, Greek, and
mathematics anyway. We can only imagine what fortitude and sense of purpose that must have
taken, at a time when no black woman had ever gotten a college degree in the entire history of
the country, and when most members of her race were still slaves in the South. Not
surprisingly, in her later 12 years as principal of the black high school in Washington during its
formative period, Mary Jane Patterson was noted for "a strong forceful personality," for
thoroughness, and for being an "indefatigable worker." Having this kind of person shaping the
standards and traditions of the school in its early years undoubtedly had something to do with
its later success. Other early principals included the first black man to graduate from Harvard,
class of 1870. Three of the school's first ten principals had graduated for Oberlin, two from
Harvard, and one each from Amherst and Dartmouth. Because of restricted academic
opportunities for blacks, Dunbar could get teachers with very high qualifications, and even had
Ph.D.s among its teachers in the 1920s. Mary Gibson Hundley pointed out, in her history of
Dunbar High School: "Federal standards providing equal salaries for all teachers, regardless of
sex or race, attracted to Washington the best trained colored college graduates from Northern
and Western colleges in the early days, and later from local colleges as well."
Had Gladstone not been such an almighty fuckwit the British Empire would have been increasingly staffed at it's factory-floor, so to speak, by educated West Indian blacks.
Incidentally, it is worth speculating as to whether the Islamic Caste system would have been ameliorated had a 'Hashbi' dynasty succeeded in holding onto power. I may mention, it was an American black who gave Gandhi his first break in Pretoria- he got him into a perfectly respectable 'white' rooming house and thus secured him a racial laissez passer in that tiny town which his Gujerati hosts couldn't have procured for him.
A British Empire manned by educated Blacks would have been a great boon for India. For one thing, this 'Aryan' nonsense would have been knocked on the head.
For another- and here I'm making a generalization from my own fond memories of my Nairobi primary School- blacks just out perform Whites and Asians. Moreover, older kids look after younger ones, smarter kids help their slower class-mates- education ceases to be about cut-throat competition and consists in fostering esprit de corps and the ability to work together.
How is it that a lot of people nowadays think Black males are less rather than more likely to do well at School?
The Economist, Thomas Sowell, who had to struggle out of poverty same as Milton Friedman and Ken Arrow and so on, has answered this question in his book 'Black rednecks & White Liberals'.
Here are a couple of extracts-
High-Performance Schools
In 1899, there were four academic public high schools in Washington, D.C.—one black and
three white. In standardized test given that year, students in the black high school averaged
higher test scores than students in two of the three white high schools. Today, more than a
century later, it would be considered Utopian even to set that as a goal, much less expect it to
actually happen. Yet what happened back in 1899 was no isolated fluke. That same school
repeatedly equaled or exceeded national norms on standardized tests in the 1930s, 1940s, and
early 1950s. Back in the 1890s, it was called the M Street School and in 1916 it was renamed
Dunbar High School.
When this information on Dunbar High School was first published in the 1970s, those few
educators who responded at all dismissed the relevance of these findings by saying that these
were "middle class" children and therefore their experience was not "relevant" to the
education of low-income minority children. Those who said this had no factual data on the
incomes or occupations of the parents of these children—and the data that existed said just the
opposite. The problem, however, was not that these dismissive educators did not have
evidence. The more fundamental problem was that they saw no need for evidence. According
to their doctrines, children who did well on standardized tests were middle class. These
children did well on such tests, so therefore they must be middle class.
It so happens that there was evidence on the occupations of the parents of the children at
this school as far back as the early 1890s. As of academic year 1892-93, of the known
occupations of these parents, there were 51 laborers, 25 messengers, 12 janitors, and one
doctor. That hardly seems middle class. Over the years, a significant black middle class did
develop in Washington and most of them may well have sent their children to the M Street
School or to Dunbar High School, as it was later called. But that is wholly different from saying
that most of the children at that school came from middle-class homes.
Why did Dunbar High School do so well?
The kids were poor. Black kids got a worse return on an Academic qualification. Economic theory says they should have had high absenteeism and dropout rates. No doubt they did. But there was another factor in play. Good teaching can itself reduce absenteeism. But good teaching is correlated to commitment and high academic standards. It appears that low returns on Black education trapped highly educated blacks in teaching- a typical 're-switching' type phenomena which confounds expectations and has revolutionary potential-
'Among those early principals (of Dunbar High School) was the first black woman to receive a college degree in the
United States—Mary Jane Patterson from Oberlin College, class of 1862. At that time, Oberlin
had different academic curriculum requirements for women and men. Latin, Greek and
mathematics were required in the "the gentlemen's course," as it was called, but not in the
curriculum for ladies. Miss Patterson, however, insisted on taking Latin, Greek, and
mathematics anyway. We can only imagine what fortitude and sense of purpose that must have
taken, at a time when no black woman had ever gotten a college degree in the entire history of
the country, and when most members of her race were still slaves in the South. Not
surprisingly, in her later 12 years as principal of the black high school in Washington during its
formative period, Mary Jane Patterson was noted for "a strong forceful personality," for
thoroughness, and for being an "indefatigable worker." Having this kind of person shaping the
standards and traditions of the school in its early years undoubtedly had something to do with
its later success. Other early principals included the first black man to graduate from Harvard,
class of 1870. Three of the school's first ten principals had graduated for Oberlin, two from
Harvard, and one each from Amherst and Dartmouth. Because of restricted academic
opportunities for blacks, Dunbar could get teachers with very high qualifications, and even had
Ph.D.s among its teachers in the 1920s. Mary Gibson Hundley pointed out, in her history of
Dunbar High School: "Federal standards providing equal salaries for all teachers, regardless of
sex or race, attracted to Washington the best trained colored college graduates from Northern
and Western colleges in the early days, and later from local colleges as well."
By the early years of the Twentieth Century, top Colleges stopped asking Dunbar students to take entrance exams. Half of all Black PhD holders, in 1970, were Dunbar alumni.
'The first black man to graduate from Annapolis came from Dunbar. The first black enlisted
man in the army to rise to become a commissioned officer also came from this same institution.
So did the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. from an American university. So did the first
black full professor at a major American university (Allison Davis at the University of Chicago).
So did the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the
first black senator elected since Reconstruction and, among other notables, the doctor who
pioneered the use of blood plasma, historian Carter G. Woodson, author and poet Sterling
Brown, and Duke Ellington, who studied music at Dunbar. During World War II, when black
military officers were rare, there were among this school's graduates "many captains and
lieutenants, nearly a score of majors, nine colonels and lieutenant colonels, and one brigadier
general."
What happened to Dunbar?
'The landmark racial desegregation case of Brown v. Board of Education initially led to a
strong resistance to school desegregation in many white communities, including that in
Washington, D.C. Ultimately a political compromise was worked out in the District of Columbia:
In order to comply with the Supreme Court decision, without having a massive shift of students,
the D.C. school officials decided to turn all public schools into neighborhood schools. By this
time, the neighborhood around Dunbar High School was rundown and there was a local saying
that children who lived near Dunbar didn't go to Dunbar. This had not affected the school's
academic standards, however, because black students from all the rest of the city went to
Dunbar.
'When Dunbar became a neighborhood school, however, the whole character of its student
body changed radically—as did the character of its teaching staff. In the past, many Dunbar
teachers continued to teach for years after they were eligible for retirement because it was
such a fulfilling experience. Now, as inadequately educated, inadequately motivated, and
disruptive students flooded into the school, teachers began retiring, some as early as 55 years
of age. Dunbar quickly became just another failing ghetto school, with all the problems that
such schools have, all across the country. Eighty-five years of achievement simply vanished into
thin air.'
By 1993, a smaller proportion of Blacks at Dunbar went to College than in 1933- at the height of the Depression.
A great victory for White Liberals indeed because, after all, only Black 'elitism' had been crushed.
Thursday, 6 November 2014
Why Will Self stopped being Jewish
He stopped being clever.
He stopped being funny.
But that's not the reason he gives for his own 'resiling' from Judaism.
In 2006, as the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were undertaking their second major incursion into Lebanon, I resigned as a Jew. I did it publicly in an article for the London Evening Standard. My resignation wasn’t a protest against Israeli aggression – why would they care about such a gesture? – but aimed, I believed, against prominent leftwing English Jews, who, despite the complete contradiction between their espoused values and the undemocratic, apartheid and territorially expansionist policies of the so-called Jewish homeland, continued vociferously to support Israel. A couple of years earlier, on Question Time, I had also challengedMelanie Phillips over her campaign to force British Muslims to take a loyalty oath, saying: if British Muslims, why not British Jews? But on that occasion, when she had accused me of being an antisemite, I was still able to play my trump card: I’m Jewish.
So, Will Self wants to get labelled an anti-semite without having the 'self hating' thing thrown into the mix.
That's really going to happen.
Monday, 3 November 2014
Ghalib's 81.12
This is a good example of a couplet which is meaningful in Urdu because we unconsciously read things like Sachal Sarmast and Suhuni Mahiwal into its mise en scene, even though this isn't warranted by elite literary taste.
In English, however, the 'melting of the gem' is not a cliche at all but transports us to back to cold class-rooms and swotting for a Scholarship.
kishtī-e ʿālam bah t̤ūfān-e taġhāful de kih haiñ
ʿālam-e āb-e gudāz-e jauhar-e afsānah ham
ʿālam-e āb-e gudāz-e jauhar-e afsānah ham
The World as Suhuni's Ark, to Abandonment we hurl
To at Arafat melt into the Gawain poet's pearl
Ninomiya Golden path general equilibria
Wikipedia says 'In economics, the Golden Rule savings rate is the rate of savings which maximizes steady state level or growth of consumption,[1] as for example in the Solow growth model. Although the concept can be found earlier in John von Neumann and Maurice Allais's works, the term is generally attributed to Edmund Phelps who wrote in 1961 that the Golden Rule "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" could be applied inter-generationally inside the model to arrive at some form of "optimum", or put simply "do unto future generations as we hope previous generations did unto us."[2]
However, by the Kirman & Koch refinement of the Sonnenschein Mantel Debreu result we know that no unique method of discriminating savings and consumption can exist except if there is
1) Rational Expectations
2) Aumann agreement based Hannan Consistency
in which case unique, but not neccessarily effectively computable equilibria exist. Call this the golden path general equilibrium. There may be a golden rule- but it is that of the Japanese Peasant Sage Ninomiya, not to mention a certain Jewish Carpenter who globalized the simple Mussar message- my spiritual needs require the satisfaction of the material needs of the other.
However, this can't be done by splitting populations into 'poor' and 'non poor'. On the contrary, it was because Ninomiya, not to mention Nund Reshi or the Nazarene, was himself poor that progress could be made.
Pity, but there it is.
However, this can't be done by splitting populations into 'poor' and 'non poor'. On the contrary, it was because Ninomiya, not to mention Nund Reshi or the Nazarene, was himself poor that progress could be made.
Pity, but there it is.
Saturday, 1 November 2014
Was Jean Paul Sartre guilty of killing Black Americans?
'A leftist intellectual is one who realizes that being an intellectual exempts him from nothing. He forsakes his privileges, or tries to, in actions. It is similar, I think, to what in the us you would call white-skin privileges. A white leftist intellectual, in America, I presume, understands that because he is white he has certain privileges which he must smash through direct action. Not to do so is to be guilty of murder of the blacks – just as much as if he actually pulled the triggers that killed, for example, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and all the other Black Panthers murdered by the police, by the system.'34'
Sartre could have gone to America to deliver some lectures. Thus he could have been 'a white leftist intellectual in America' and 'smashed his privileges' through direct action. He failed to do so even though he himself admits that this made him guilty of shooting Black Panthers. But what motivated his crime? He said his refusal to go to America was a protest against the Vietnam War which was actually started by the French (though they soon upped and ran away as is their habit) for no good reason. But a direct result of this refusal was that he himself incurred guilt for the murder of Black American activists. What then is a suitable punishment for this crazy racist killer? Should we beat him to death with baguettes?
No, sayeth your modern Mahatma. Fucker was simply lying. Drama fucking Queen behaviour.
Concentrate on pissing upon Bernard Henri Levy. Botulism alone is philosophy.
Kalabhara Sangam
Just as the inrushing sea can but drown, not dim
The rut of his chariot wheels, her last path to him
& butter is the theft, their butter-thief steals
Churning alone our charnel anneals.
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