Inflation, Rich inflation, Super-rich inflation

The USA has been printing money for over a decade, since the 2008 Financial Crisis and trillion $ bailout for the rich. But inflation has been low, according to the CPI – Consumer Price Indicator.

Here’s kind of roughly what is happening. Using about 166 million filed tax forms with the IRS:
top 1 million (<1%) (super-rich)
next 15 million (~10%) (rich)
normal 150 million (~90%).

The gov’t prints money (= fiscal stimulus spending of):
$1,000 for each of the normal > $150 billion,
$10,000 for the rich * 15 million = $150 billion,
$1,000,000 for the super-rich = $1,000 billion = 1 trillion.
Gov’t increases deficit spending by $1.3 trillion

For food & clothes & normal cars & durables & everything normal people buy, only an increase in demand of $1,000 per taxpayer means little or no inflation, excluding housing.

Everybody is trying to buy more housing in low crime, good school areas.

For the super-rich, they buy luxury houses, luxury cars, yachts, vacation homes, islands, space ships, art, jewels … and stocks.

Apple shares rose so that it became a $3 trillion company in market capitalization. Hyper-inflation of the super-rich assets. Low inflation of normal people’s assets. The rich mostly try to keep up with super-rich, but with lots less money. Few normal folk have more stocks than house equity.

Because most economists talk mostly about a “single” inflation number, they do not capture the asset hyper-inflation we’ve been seeing, while normal CP inflation remains low. Super-rich assets is where the gov’t deficit spending has been going.

The current complaints about inflation are somewhat real, but also the Fed is somewhat correct that the “temporary” supply chain disturbances, plus the Biden gov’t stopping energy production, is resulting in general price increases. But inflation is defined as a “general price increase”, so current inflation is real.

Since the problem of money printing is primarily inflation, it is a very appropriate time to complain about money printing. Still, it remains unlikely that the super-rich are competing much with the normal folk for the normal goods which are so badly affected by supply chain problems and higher gas prices. The economy can and will adapt to $4 or $5 / gal. prices for gas, and that’s more of a mere gas price increase than money printing inflation. Because most things bought include some gas price cost, all such stuff will cost more – but the stuff with lots of transportation costs will increase in price more than low transportation cost goods.

Energy cost increases can also be called inflation … it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck. But they’ll stop going up, at some point, even with continued money printing.

Affirmative Action – huh. Yeah. What is it good for? Absolutely nuthin’

Not really.

The main visible result of AA in college:
Blacks are most of the bottom of most integrated classes.

The purpose of AA is get visible results.

The REAL purpose of AA is for white college students to see most Blacks as academically inferior – but NEVER talk about what they SEE.
AA has been effective at showing White Supremacy in college – AND thought control censuring of such racist thinking.

Probably a lot of college grad rage is fueled by this cognitive dissonance.

Althouse writes a bit:

At Georgetown Law, Black students are haunted by the shadow of impostor syndrome. Shapiro reinforced this phenomenon by reducing Black women’s accomplishments to ‘small favors’ from ‘heaven.’

Dems fight – Reps try to be “above” it

There is the idea among some Dem elites that they know what’s good for Reps, for instance in how Reps should “lay low” and not fight against Biden’s SC pick when he chooses among the 7% Black Females he’s promised.

Althouse commenter JAHORE:

(D): Hey, hey! Put down that stick. Sure I hit you with it a few times, but we need to strive for comity.

(R): OK. *Puts down stick*
(D): *Picks up stick* Whack, whack, whack. Take THAT you Nazi!

https://althouse.blogspot.com/2022/01/republicans-would-be-wise-to-lay-low.html?showComment=1643389231503#c7588166126831938017

Trump doesn’t put down the stick – and he favors free speech.
Do YOU, really? want to be on the Free Speech side, with Trump?
(I support Free Speech whether or not Trump supports it.)

Most voting Reps are tired of Reps who refuse to fight the culture war against the college-educated elite which hates so much of America.

Are women better off today?

Damir at Wisdom of Crowds:

Your concept of progress here is very contingent. You can throw it in my face, and say, “Ask any woman who had been the secretary in the fifties and ask her how her daughter is doing now and point to her testimony.” And say, well, that’s progress.

I think progress is entwined with this question of justice, which is just very poorly defined.

Is Progress Real

The bracketing of progress would be stronger with better specific examples. Like an IQ 95 woman, looking to get married and raise kids. It’s certain that many of these types of women were better off in a “one-income household is enough to buy a small family house” society, like the US in the 50s.

50% of the marriages ended in divorce – so 50% didn’t. The kind of women in most of those that didn’t are likely the kind that were better off in the 50s than today. But that “better” combines office environment, sexist against top women, with home life expectations, housewife happy to raise kids – maybe as a (low paid?) teacher herself. If today is better for 60% of women, but worse for 40%, is it really “better”?

Well yes, by metric definition BUT not for all. For most social changes where there advances for some, there are losses for others. Status of “money making” women has gone up, of “child raising” women has gone down. Less motherhood and more wage slavism might actually mean only 30% of the high IQ women elite are better off, with 70% of the non-cultural leading women worse off.

I now think it’s about 20% of the women better off, the elite high IQ women. About 30% of the women about the same. About 50% of women worse off. One BIG step forward, for the elite, but a small step back for the less loud plurality/majority of avg & low IQ women.

Copy of Norm’s List

Good time to put my little memorial tribute to Norm Geras. This is a copy of his list of 100 books. A unique list, he explains at the end.

Jane Austen, Emma
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
Saul Bellow, Mr Sammler’s Planet
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
André Brink, A Chain of Voices
Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Fyodor, Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Fyodor, Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Marina Endicott, Good to a Fault
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels
E.M. Forster, Howards End
E.M. Forster, A Room with a View
Margaret Forster, Have the Men Had Enough?
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Tom Franklin, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
Helen Garner, The Spare Room
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cousin Phillis
Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows
Patrick Hamilton, The Slaves of Solitude
Knut Hamsun, Hunger
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Kent Haruf, Eventide
Kent Haruf, Plainsong
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton
Elizabeth Jenkins, The Tortoise and the Hare
Franz Kafka, The Castle
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
John McGahern, Amongst Women
Belinda McKeon, Solace
David Malouf, The Great World
William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows
William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Philipp Meyer, American Rust
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good
Maggie O’Farrell, After You’d Gone
Maggie O’Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
George Orwell, Animal Farm
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Charles Portis, True Grit
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time
Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Marilynne Robinson, Home
Philip Roth, The Human Stain
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Edward St Aubyn, Never Mind
José Saramago, Blindness
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kitteridge
Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
William Trevor, Love and Summer
William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Anthony Trollope, The Warden
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler, A Patchwork Planet
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Richard Yates, The Easter Parade
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
Émile Zola, Germinal

That’s it. Now, in all my experience of such book lists, this one has a unique feature. Which is that I’ve read all the books on it. Yup, every single one – 100%. That’s because I compiled the list from… the books I’ve read (choosing titles, as well, that I liked enough that I’m happy to recommend them).

I’m going to try to read these books. I might also make my own list; might not.

Norm Geras, Neo, Jews, Holocaust

I was a regular reader of Norm Geras, a reasonable Marxist Jew. Just before he died (2013), he left a great list of Best 100 books. One unlike most others.

“Racism” applies to races. Language matters, especially in insults and slanders.
While the Nazis called Jews a race, most English speakers recognize 3 or 4 race colors: White, Black, Yellow; and maybe Red (Native Americans).
Jews and Arabs and Hispanics are all “White”. Ethnic, tribal variants of White.

I like to call them all tribes, so it’s tribal murder as with Black Hutus committing genocidal murder on Black Tutsis (in 1994, with Clinton & his Jewish Dem supporters denying it was genocide until it was over).

Talking about intermarriage today, which is much higher, obscures how little intermarriage there was before WW II. DNA analysis of Y chromosomes, which are inherited directly by all sons from their fathers (unlike other combined genes), indicated (in the 80s) that over 90% of male Jews had “Abraham’s” Y chromosome. The Father of all Jews. After 3000 years, an extraordinarily low rate of intermarriage.

Recall the third daughter of Tevye (Fiddler on the Roof) Chava, being cast out for falling for a Russian Orthodox. (Wiki says a later story shows Chava leaving her husband to go back to family on the way to Israel.) My Jewish friends, all secular, explain this mostly as “being comfortable” around others like them. Which is true, but also discriminatory.

It’s a problem for US Blacks – how to be a comfortable minority among a majority, and maintain your “own GROUP identity” without discrimination. All group identities discriminate. The in-group vs the out-group.

It seems that in most 20th century genocides the majority in-group has, on avg., lower IQ & success than the minority target -group, Poor Mulsim Turks (including many Kurds) against Christian Armenians (see the horrific naked Armenian Christian women murdered by crucifixion), pagan Nazis-Jews, poor Hutus-less poor Tutsis (taller, better educated), non-educated Pol Pot Cambodians-educated Cambodians (25% ***); Malays-Chinese; Russians-Ukrainian Kulaks (Holodomor); Great Leap Forward (1958) & later Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-death of Mao; tho this was mixed with political control).
Serbs in Srebrenica-Muslim & Japanese rape of Chinese Nanking (& others) were not quite less successful killings of the more successful.

So much killing for so many decades. But in the list above, not many Christian capitalist civilizations were doing the genocide. Germany was nominally Christian, tho tens of thousands of priests were sent to the death camps, along with the 6 million Jews, 3 million Gypsies, and 1 million others.

The Jews get more than twice the publicity as the Roma (Gypsy), more than 10x, maybe more than 100 times. Because the great Jewish writers are great writers; great Jewish scientists are great scientists.

Still, Jewish Zionism was a Marxist, mostly atheist movement, says Haaretz

Many rabbis opposed it at the time: “The power of the human subject replaced the power of the omnipotent God.”

Many intellectual Jews in Christian countries were either atheist, or explicitly anti-Christian. It’s understandable that Jewish anti-Christianity could grow out of centuries of Christian hatred and frequent unjust mistreatment of Jews. Just as slave hatred against slave masters is understandable. But “understanding” the increasing mutual hatred is not to condone it. [Today it seems many can only understand ideas they agree with.] The atheism of Jewish Marxists & socialists was hated by many Christian leaders. The secular intellectual success of many Jews was envied, and hated, by many almost-as-talented non-Jews.

Envy – the wish of destruction of the good fortune of the person envied.
The worst, yet very common, sinful feeling so many have.

In killing, the Holocaust was not so unique.
In the historical characteristics of killers and killed, Euro semi-Christian capitalists against Euro citizens, unique.
(1) the industrialization and bureaucratization of death,
(2) the comprehensiveness of intent & (2b) global scope
(3) spiritual murder

Whoopi is sort-of almost right: “everybody eats each other.” All groups oppose the out-group, somewhat.
Everybody has a God shaped hole in their heart – what they believe. (Even atheists; they fill it with some beliefs) This has been talked about explicitly.

Everybody has a set of group-identity holes in their heart. This hasn’t been talked about enough — what are the good group identities to have?

The line between good and evil runs thru every person’s heart. (Solzhenitsyn)

Our hearts have a constant battle between a good wolf and a bad wolf.
Which wolf wins? – asks the Indian Chief’s grandson.
The wolf that we feed.

Free will is choosing which wolf to feed.
Or what blogs we write what comments on…

Politics < Culture < Religion [< sex maybe ?]

The core problem here is that at the heart of any real political or moral reasoning, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’re left pointing at a document or set of principles and arguing by sheer faithful assertion alone: These principles we believe to be true, and we will make decisions of life-and-death import according to these moral foundations. If you disagree, sorry, we don’t have much to talk about as we simply live in different moral universes.

Antonio Garcia Martinez

He points to 7 Laws from Noah.

Another Rationalist writes along these lines, imagining two extremes of the Grey Pill vs the Hypnotoad. (Read it)

I reduce the conundrum to this. All philosophies implicitly claim that the Truth is Good. But what if the Truth is Not Good?

Is it better to believe in the Truth, or in the Good?
God is Good >> the Good is God.
How can we know the Truth about the Good if the Truth is Not Good? That’s the mystery of God / Goodness.

Any civilization that is Good “also requires some guiding mythology that helps us reduce the existential terror of being tribal primates somewhere between chimpanzees and bonobos, in a cold unfeeling cosmos. In the absence of such a mythology, I think we should expect life to get substantially worse for all of us.”

Sexual Morality might be the most important part of culture.

Kirk Durstan is talking about the 1934 book Sex and Culture by Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin

Some Edu & SAT issues – Democrat hypocrisy

Always support vouchers or tax credits.

Freddie talks about ditching the SAT.

>>Are the rest of us really obligated to divert precious government funds into institutions that do not operate under government control when the case for the superiority of those institutions is so thin and so contested? << (where the misleading but usual “public” has been replaced with the more accurate “government”)

Yes – because the failure of the schools is, mostly, a failure of the students. As you say. But what you totally fail to say is that this student failure is a failure of the parents. And a huge reason for this parental failure is laziness, er, convenience – sending the kids to the Great Babysitter local gov’t school absolves them of most responsibility over the education of their kids.

Choosing means taking some responsibility, and we need more parents to accept more responsibility over the education of their kids. There are NO magic bullets, and vouchers won’t be as great as many hope – but they’re far more likely to lead to improvement than continuing adding educational costs because of prior failures (in excessive expectations).

In New Orleans, there were many charters getting a D or F — this shows which schools have the most need for changes, and getting the charter renewed or not pushes the school admin decision makers to make better decisions. Or at least try to. Compare to full government systems where there is little pressure on F schools to improve, virtually none fear that such gov’t F schools will close, tho they should.

It was also telling that there were many N.O. parents against the closing of those schools. There’s not always full agreement on what are good or bad schools – and school choice allows more choices, and allows parents to have money/ vouchers/ resources to make those choices.

“It’s essential to point out that educational dollars are not divided remotely proportionally, whether on a per district, per school, or per student basis.”

A huge part of vouchers is to make similar $$ amounts available on a per student basis, so kids of poor folks are as economically attractive as middle class kids for the schools — the kids’ family become the customers of the school. Itself not without problems; but the parents are usually best able to choose the choice they think is best.

Increasing the status and job opportunities for non-college HS grads remains a huge and important part. It’s more likely that more vocational oriented charter schools can do that better than gov’t schools with a “college or bust” track.

The lack of good vocational HS charters seems a huge problem. [quick DDG]

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/idaho/vocational-public-schools

Only 7 schools, some 101 kids, with low math and low reading scores. Is that good or bad? If such kids do get some skills for jobs, rather than doing poor reading in “standard” gov’t schools, it could be somewhat better than nearly failing up thru graduation w/o any skills.

This ex-Libertarian (now Christian Democrat) still prefers vouchers and choices and parents more involved in their kid’s education. [Now it’s time for our 16 yo to practice piano…]

—

NYT has good video on “Liberal Hypocrisy”, but it’s mostly Democrat hypocrisy.

“My college stopped relying heavily on the SAT. Enrollment of students of color climbed.” Shawn Abbott is vice provost at Temple University and was previously the dean of admissions at New York University and the director of admissions at Stanford University.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/24/temple-university-sat-experiment-student-of-color-enrollment-climbing/

Freddie is skeptical.

I believe admissions of Blacks was increased. The SAT predicts how well they’ll do in college. I believe Temple will find out, in 4 years or less, that “Blacks are concentrated at the bottom of most classes” – which was what got some Law School professor cancelled (at Georgetown?) when she spoke about it honestly. Don’t expect Temple professors to fail to learn that lesson.

How long will it take for any college to go down in rankings after admitting more “below their prior average” level of students? Whether Temple, or Harvard, or Stanford, if all the top colleges admit more “below prior average” Blacks, they’ll all go down in some absolute sense, but not relative to each other, nor in the rankings.

Not until some other colleges, who use SATs and have college grads who are “better than Temple (/Harvard/Stanford)” grads. The new anti-woke University of Austin? Not in years, maybe in decades.

Seems to be a similar problem to money-printing by the US Fed – investors can’t stop investing in USD until or unless there is some other currency / safe asset to invest in.

Not all Eugenics

Freddie notes that “Eugenics” is a new mystical word.

One of the things I discovered early, in my little political niche, was the obsession with magic words. Leftists were forever throwing emotionally loaded terms around, like when the coffeehouse didn’t have raw sugar and they called it fascism.

He’s right that there are lots of things which are NOT eugenics, tho those who oppose those things might claim that thing is: genetic differences, or quantifying the differences, or discussing optimal policies based differences; how some virus may have different kill rates based on genes or preexisting conditions, or other public health calculations.

I think a big part of the problem here is that a lot of people using the term just literally don’t know what eugenics is. They just saw other people using it and thought it had power.

Yet the woke left are college educated (not! just credentialed ), whose higher salaries and status is supposed to come from their superior cognitive ability.

It is overuse combined with misuse that slowly sucks away the power of such mystical words: now eugenics but previously racism, Marxism, fascism, censorship, genocide. Even “male”.

There is also a violation of “truth”. Prior definition: a person with XY chromosomes was a male = a man. But now, not all men have XY chromosomes, and not all those with XY chromosomes are “men”.

Note rich co-owner of the Golden State Warriors, Chamath Palihapitiya “nobody cares about the genocide of Uyghurs” (it’s below his line of the many things he cares about).

Not every comment can be on top – not every problem can be “cared enough” about to make one change behavior.

The hard truth is that virtually none who say they oppose fascism or genocide are taking actions against China, which is currently genocidal and is far more National Socialist (=fascist) than Communist, no matter what the CCP says they are.