Some Charts

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. ~mathematician Blaise Pascal, 1670

Ned is getting an education in modern American pronouns in California.
Carol and I are off to Austin.

Mueller's strange statement seemed to contradict what he told Barr in front of witnesses. Jarrett said: "He refused to make a decision to charge the president in a court of law but was more than willing to indict him in the court of public opinion...His report was a non-indictment indictment. It was calumny masquerading as a report. "
There is another problem with this "not enough to indict" phrase. This phrase does not sound like exoneration --and it should. There was not enough to indict Desdemona either.

A man who was allegedly attacked by an emotional support dog on a Delta Airlines flight has filed a lawsuit against the airline and the owner of the animal.

This Assange question raises a significant Freedom of the Press question that, historically, has always been assumed--except for the occasional NYT arrogance.
Assange told former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning that WikiLeaks had originally described itself as an “intelligence agency” for the people. Assange’s decision to release 90,000 Afghanistan war-related activity reports also revealed the identities of at least 100 Afghans who were informing on the Taliban. Assange is not a journalist. He is a spy. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called WikiLeaks a “nonstate hostile intelligence service.” The fact that he gave stolen U.S. intelligence to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, China, Iran and other adversaries via a website rather than dead-drops is irrelevant. He engaged in espionage against the United States. And he has no remorse for the harm he has caused. He once called the innocent people hurt by his disclosures “collateral damage” and admitted WikiLeaks might get “blood on our hands.”
But Chelsea seems so sweet.

At Rouen on this day in 1431,  in English-controlled Normandy, Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who became the savior of France, was burned at the stake for heresy.

                         Some Charts

US farm employment tripled from about 4 million in 1840 to the peak of nearly 12 million jobs in 1910. Since the peak, there’s been a loss of about 10 million farm jobs in the US to 2 million jobs while farm employment as a share of the labor force has declined from 63% in 1840 to below 2% this century. That’s a lot of creative job destruction in the labor market for farm employment, but those lost jobs have been more than replaced by new jobs in new industries. In 1910, there were about 3 non-farm jobs for every farm job, and now there’s 80 non-farm jobs for every worker employed in agriculture.




Unmarried birth rates by race:

A hard-to-read income chart based on race. Not pretty, unless you're Asian. But it does muddy the white/male mythology.

Tesla ($TSLA) is no longer the largest US automaker by market cap.

(wsj.com) How could this be?

 

Rubio and Investing

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. -William Pitt, British prime minister (28 May 1759-1806)

Ned is coming to Pittsburgh this weekend.
Mom and I are going to Austin.

"Reason" asks how the government can keep drugs off the street if they can't stop the flow of illicit substances in prisons, sealed and militarized buildings under its total control. "This is the nature of government."

Dietrich, the obnoxious Reds first baseman, has in 12 of his last 17 hits, hit homeruns.
The last six games the Pirates lost, they have lost by 6 or more.

In the battle over Alabama's new abortion law, political action committees opposing the measure lost on Election Day even while enjoying a roughly 100-to-1 money advantage, according to disclosures compiled by FollowTheMoney.org, a website run by the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in Politics.

Instacart is one of a slew of similar apps — DoorDash, Postmates, Shipt — paying tens of thousands of workers to deliver packages, food or groceries to strangers. Similar to those who drive for ride-share apps Uber and Lyft, delivery workers can choose when to work. But they don't have to invite strangers into their cars. This draws women — often in their 40s and 50s — who now make up more than half the contractors working for major food delivery apps.

Nearly 30 million acres of U.S. farmland are held by foreign investors. That number has doubled in the past two decades, which is raising alarm bells in farming communities.(npr)

While Trump's Attorney General William Barr oversees a probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation, in which the Obama-era intelligence community has been accused of gross violations of the law - including spying and possible entrapment, fired FBI Director James Comey has been on the defensive, claiming to have "no idea what the heck" people like Barr are talking about in regards to allegations of malfeasance. 

At 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of Nepal, became the first explorers to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which at 29,035 feet above sea level is the highest point on earth. 

                         Rubio and Investing

The chart below is telling. In the recession of 2010, companies went to the mattresses; they kept whatever money they had to weather the storm.  They invested nothing. Low investments mean low inventories, low research. The overall numbers show a similar direction: American companies are investing less. Either they anticipate trouble and are holding money or they are spending it somewhere to the expense of their future.
It is the latter. American companies are buying back their shares with their profits, forcing their stock price up and decreasing the overall market size. They are paying back stockholders, not investing for the future.
The non-financial business sector invests more in financial assets than in physical ones, and it returns almost all of its profits to shareholders instead of ploughing them back into the business. It’s no wonder productivity growth is so slow — innovation is being starved



This behavior has a name: shareholder primacy theory. And Sen. Rubio has some thoughts about it.
 “..shareholder primacy theory has tilted business decision-making toward delivering returns quickly and predictably to investors, rather than building long-term capabilities through investment and production.”

So far, so good. Then he says this:
“We need to get back to a point where we don't solely analyze the American economy on traditional economic measures,” he said. “GDP growth is important, but that alone doesn't tell us the full story. It has to be not just growth that we care about, but the kind of growth that creates stable jobs that allow strong families and strong communities to develop, which are the backbone of a strong economy. Our public policy should reflect that.” 

Soooo...Rubio sees the behavior of companies as contrary to their own best interests. And I'll bet he has a plan, probably starting with the garnering of cross- aisle support by agreeing with Sanders' view that there are too many deodorants. These inexperienced government wannabe business moguls always have a way to improve matters. I just worry it will take up the time they have set aside to rebuild Libya.

Four Chart

It is not, for example, Germany and England, but individuals or firms located in Germany and England, who carry on trade with one another.--Haberler

Nice weekend.
Many at UPMC today are on strike. They seem to be angry over most things.

The leftist strategy of promoting self-regard, otherness, suspicion and division is taking root in the very institutions that are meant to have the student look outside the known, enter the unknown and make it better with their presence. The National Association of Scholars has released a study indicating that “at least 75 American colleges have black-only graduation ceremonies and 43 percent of surveyed colleges offer segregated residential halls. The organization refers to this as ‘neo-segregation,’ ” Breitbart reported. 
Some colleges around the country have special LGBT student centers, graduation ceremonies, and self-segregated LGBT dorms.

A man carrying a knife in each hand and screaming “I will kill you” attacked schoolgirls waiting at a bus stop just outside Tokyo on Tuesday, killing two and injuring 16 before killing himself, officials said.

What did the English author Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), the German composer Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and the American astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker (1928-1997) have in common?
All three had ancestors in the shoe business. The surname Shoemaker is obvious. Schumann is, literally, a shoe man (German Schuh + Mann), and so is Chaucer (Middle French chausse: shoe).

Last year, 78 percent of all corn acreage had been planted by now.  This year, that number is sitting at just 49 percent. And the percentage of corn that has emerged from the ground is at a paltry 19 percent compared to 47 percent at this time last year. Last year, 53 percent of all soybean acreage had been planted by now.  This year, that number has fallen to 19 percent.

In 1949, Chinese citizens could expect to die at the age of thirty-six, and 8 in 10 could not read or write. By 2014, life expectancy had more than doubled, to seventy-six, and 95 percent are literate. In 2019, Shenzhen is a mega-city of more than ten million people, with real estate prices that rival Silicon Valley’s. In 1980 in Shenzhen, 90 out of every 100 Chinese lived on less than $2 a day. Today fewer than 3 in 100 do.

On this day in 1754, in the first engagement of the French and Indian War, a Virginia militia under 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Washington defeated a French reconnaissance party in southwestern Pennsylvania. In a surprise attack, the Virginians killed 10 French soldiers from Fort Duquesne, including the French commander, Coulon de Jumonville, and took 21 prisoners. Only one of Washington’s men was killed.

                                 Four Charts

 From 1965 through the early 1980s, government debt stood at no more than 40 percent of GDP. It rose after that until the mid-1990s, hitting 65 percent of GDP. Growth then relaxed until the start of the Great Recession in 2008. From 2008 to 2018, the share rose from roughly 70 percent to 110 percent. 

Aldi out-competes Walmart on price by 18%

From Heather Mac Donald’s City Journal article “Grievance Proxies”

Since 2000, net investment by American businesses has been as strong as it was in the years of the 1960s and 1970s only twice.

Sowell on Smith

I write to you to tell you how happy I was to be your contemporary--A letter  from a dying Turgenev to Tolstoy


Happy Memorial Day.

The Dodgers swept the Pirates and are 35 and 18. They are in first place and look it. The Pirates look like a team that needs an intervention, which is to say, militant charity. It is hard to believe how unable the team looks. There are good examples of successful low budget teams but they must draft well and develop well. There is no evidence they can.
Their payroll was 87.8 million in 2018. This year it is 74 million. The Dodgers' is 150 million. St. Louis' is 158 million. Kansas City's is 98.

Business idea: Obsidian lapel pins to use against the Nightwalkers

The EU Parliament will be much more fragmented over the next five years with the established centrist bloc failing to gain a majority at this week’s election, early results and projections show.

Pro-EU parties will hold onto two-thirds of the seats at the EU Parliament, but their nationalist opponents have produced solid results. 2/3 is a lot.

That said, the initial results on Sunday evening suggested a strong showing for Liberal and Green parties, with euroskeptic groups in France and the U.K.holding the gains they saw in 2014. Italy’s anti-immigration Lega party was also expected to make large gains, according to exit polls.

A 'Drag Queen Story Hour' will take place for 3- to 6-year-old children at Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Hazelwood Branch, Saturday, June 1, 2019, at 1:30 PM. I don't know if little snacks will be served.

The U.N. seems to have a lot of time on its hands.
Assigning female genders to digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa is helping entrench harmful gender biases, according to a UN agency.
Research released by UNESCO claims that the often submissive and flirty responses offered by the systems to many queries – including outright abusive ones – reinforce ideas of women as subservient.
“Because the speech of most voice assistants is female, it sends a signal that women are obliging, docile and eager-to-please helpers, available at the touch of a button or with a blunt voice command like ‘hey’ or ‘OK’,” the report said.
The report suggested these mechanical voice not to be made female by default and said technology firms should explore the feasibility of developing a neutral machine gender that is neither male nor female. It added that they should program such technology to discourage gender-based insults and abusive language...
We are losing our minds. Or someone is.

On May 27, 1941, the British navy sank the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic near France. The German death toll was more than 2,000.

                                          Sowell on Smith

Capitalism is not a philosophy; the inherent freedom of the individual is a philosophy. The free market is the logical outcome of the philosophy that proclaims the freedom of the individual.

From Thomas Sowell’s 1979 paper “Adam Smith in Theory and Practice:”
Smith not only rejected the policies and practices of the mercantilists, their concept of wealth, and of the nation, he also approached the whole problem of order in the world from a different perspective. The mercantilists were part of a long tradition – still with us today – which assumes that there would be chaos in the absence of a premeditated order imposed by the wise few on the foolish many. During the centuries through which this tradition has endured, the basis for the designs of the few has ranged from the divine right of kings to the inspired ideals of revolutionaries, but the various versions of this tradition incorporate similar assumptions about human beings and about the reasoning process. Smith had very modest expectations concerning people and the power of sheer reasoning to impose itself on a complex system of changing relationships. Yet he saw no chaos in the absence of such heroic feats of the intellect and will. Human society evolved its own balances, much like the ecological systems of nature. That balance reflected the desires and experience of the many rather than the inspiration of the few. All general principles were formed from “experience and induction,” not from scholastic abstractions, “artificial definitions,” and elaborate technicalities, which were capable only of “extinguishing whatever degree of good sense there may be in any moral or metaphysical doctrine.” In short, prosperity and progress would come, not from the brilliance of an elite, but from knowledge and experience that were widely diffused. In this context, the attempt of political “leadership” to impose its schemes on the economy were both uncalled for and harmful.

Sunday/The Miracle

“The economy is a complex system, our data are imperfect and our models inevitably fail to account for all the interactions. The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists. Economics is a powerful tool, a lens for organizing one’s thinking about the complexity of the world around us. That should be enough. We should be honest about what we know, what we don’t know and what we may never know. Admitting that publicly is the first step toward respectability.”--Roberts

Chris made pasta for Max and some friends last night.
Our walk was rained out.
An amazing new hotel in Lawrenceville.

The gospel contains the famous phrase, 
"I am going to the Father;
for the Father is greater than I."
This complex phrase just drove thew Arians nuts.

Just 1% of women obtain an abortion because they became pregnant through rape, and less than 0.5% do so because of incest, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Thomas Sowell warned against believing that it “is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output.”

“The economy is a complex system, our data are imperfect and our models inevitably fail to account for all the interactions. The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists. Economics is a powerful tool, a lens for organizing one’s thinking about the complexity of the world around us. That should be enough. We should be honest about what we know, what we don’t know and what we may never know. Admitting that publicly is the first step toward respectability.”--Will

"Thucydides’s Trap" occurs when a rising powerful nation demanding respect challenges an established nation, and fear on the part of the established nation leads to war. Thucydides, the Greek historian who chronicled the devastating wars between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BC., observed this about ancient Greece: “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable.” During the Peloponnesian Wars, Athens was the upstart and Sparta the existing dominant power. They were strikingly different, culturally and politically. The upstart Athens demanded respect from Sparta. Harvard professor of government Graham Allison writes: "Like so many others, Athens believed its advance to be benign. Over the half century that preceded the conflict, it had emerged as a steeple of civilization. Philosophy, drama, architecture, democracy, history, and naval prowess—Athens had it all, beyond anything previously seen under the sun…. As Athenian confidence and pride grew, so too did its demands for respect and expectations that arrangements be revised to reflect new realities of power."

                                           The Miracle

"The Miracle" is a play made from a legend. It had gone through many iterations--poems, opera and after the play became several films. The first film was silent and colorized, one of the first.
In the story, a young nun wants to leave her nunnery and runs away (with a knight.) As she slips away, the Virgin in a Virgin with Child statue in the nunnery, steps down from her alcove and takes the place of the young fleeing nun. After many symbolic adventures the young nun returns to the nunnery, broken and ashamed, carrying with her, her dead baby. She steps into her previous position and clothes, and the Virgin returns to her alcove with the dead child.
It was  written by Karl Vollmöller and directed by Max Reinhardt. The lead was played by Lady Cooper.

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The Right Honourable The Viscountess Norwich
Born	Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners 29

Some Charts

Thew reason there is so much money in politics is that there is so much politics in money.--Bernard Saltzman


PGC last night for dinner. We knew few people. When you know few people, the food has to be good. But...

A government by definition is a monopoly in certain functions. In fact, government's typical experience with enterprises is through monopolies.

Twins and Astros have a run differential of +100. Pirates are -44.
The Pirates do not have major league players. Now it's looking as if the management has no major league ambition.

Narratives: WSJ writer Spencer Jakab, writing of the 1970s’ gasoline shortages,  says they were, according to Mr. Jakab, “caused by events halfway around the world.” 
But very few people believe that. Most attribute the shortages to price controls. How could he write that? And how could the WSJ print it?

From a news report of an Al Gore speech in 2007 expecting the complete disappearance of the polar icecaps by 2013:

Former US Vice President Al Gore cited Professor Maslowski's analysis on Monday in his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

"Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007," the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC.

"So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative."

"The implication is that this is not a cycle, not just a fluctuation. The loss this year will precondition the ice for the same thing to happen again next year, only worse.

This science stuff is just too hard for him.

On May 25, 1935, at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Babe Ruth hit his 714th home run, a record for career home runs that would stand for almost 40 years. This was one of Ruth’s last games, and the last home run of his career. Ruth went four for four on the day, hitting three home runs and driving in six runs.



                                         Some Charts

Some numbers of alcohol use:

This is a difficult chart to see but is very informative. The middle class is growing into the upper class.

A “restaurant recession” is taking place in New York City. Job losses at the city’s full-service restaurants over the last year have been greater than any time since the devastating combined effects of the 2001 recession and the 9-11 terrorist attacks. Over the last year through March, the city has lost more than 7,000 restaurant jobs, a percentage decline of more than 4%. Even during the Great Recession, the biggest year-over-year decline in NYC restaurant jobs was 1.8% in April 2009, which was less than half the declines in recent months.

NBER Paper on Tariffs

Free markets are not the solution to scarcity. They are just the best solution to scarcity.--Tess Roark

Mom has really been busy. So has Liz.
Ned's back is hurt but manageable.

Theresa May said she would quit as British prime minister once her party chooses a successor, following her repeated failure to win approval for a Brexit deal almost three years after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union.

The number of households with people age 80 and over jumped 71% from 4.4 million in 1990 to 7.5 million in 2016, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies in its “Housing America’s Older Adults” report. As baby boomers age, the number of households in this group will more than double by 2037.

A great quote from Pinker: Homo sapiens is a species that lives by its wits, concocting and pooling notions of how the world works and how its members can best lead their lives. There can be no better proof of the power of ideas than the ironic influence of the political philosopher who most insisted on the power of vested interests, the man who wrote that “the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of the ruling class.” Karl Marx possessed no wealth and commanded no army, but the ideas he scribbled in the reading room of the British Museum shaped the course of the 20th century and beyond, wrenching the lives of billions.


The average white score on the 2018 SAT (1,123 out of a possible 1,600) was 177 points higher than the average black score (946), approximately a standard deviation of difference. This gap has persisted for decades. It is not explained by socioeconomic disparities.


Trade should be peace. It is the ultimate in arbitration. Trade wars are truly bizarre. The goal of each government in harming its own citizens with tariffs is to pressure the other government into stop harming its own citizens with tariffs. From a conflict viewpoint, it's more like a suicide bomber who targets his own people.

The SECURE Act was passed overwhelmingly by the House and I could find only a single mention of the one really significant change it created:  "Perhaps the most onerous is the proposed elimination of the stretch IRA rule for inherited IRAs. Instead of the beneficiary being able to stretch distributions from her inherited IRA over her remaining lifetime, the new law would require that all inherited IRAs be distributed by the end of the tenth year following the death of the IRA creator." What that does is contract down the time of distribution to heirs--and the tax period. It is a huge transfusion of taxes out of the inheritance to the government.

Net investment by the nonfinancial business sector has collapsed since 2000. The companies that use to make the products and provide the services now look more like banks, with an increasing share of profits coming from financial assets. Ford went from a company that earned its money making cars to a company that earns its money making car loans.

Here are a few of these complaints that heard on a regular basis: “Everyone should have more access to low-cost health care at low cost!” “All small businesses should be better able to find low-interest loans!” “Wages aren’t growing fast enough!” “College shouldn’t cost so much!” In view of these problems, the market must be failing, and we need the government to fix the problems.                       
Markets are desirable not because they don’t fail, but because they are better able than government to respond when they do fail.


                                          NBER Paper on Tariffs

From The National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on U.S. Prices and Welfare” by Mary Amiti (Federal Reserve Bank of New York), Stephen J. Redding (Princeton) and David Weinstein (Columbia):

Here’s the paper’s abstract (italics added):

This paper explores the impacts of the Trump administration’s trade policy on prices and welfare. Over the course of 2018, the U.S. experienced substantial increases in the prices of intermediates and final goods, dramatic changes to its supply-chain network, reductions in availability of imported varieties, and complete passthrough of the tariffs into domestic prices of imported goods. Overall, using standard economic methods, we find that the full incidence of the tariff falls on domestic consumers, with a reduction in U.S. real income of $1.4 billion per month by the end of 2018. We also see similar patterns for foreign countries who have retaliated against the U.S., which indicates that the trade war also reduced real income for other countries.

Here’s the paper’s conclusion (italics added):

Economists have long argued that there are real income losses from import protection. Using the evidence to date from the 2018 trade war, we find empirical support for these arguments. We estimate the cumulative deadweight welfare cost (reduction in real income) from the U.S. tariffs to be around $6.9 billion during the first 11 months of 2018, with an additional cost of $12.3 billion to domestic consumers and importers in the form of tariff revenue transferred to the government. The deadweight welfare costs alone reached $1.4 billion per month by November of 2018.

The trade war also caused dramatic adjustments in international supply chains, as approximately $165 billion dollars of trade ($136 billion of imports and $29 billion of exports) is lost or redirected in 23 order to avoid the tariffs. We find that the U.S. tariffs were almost completely passed through into U.S. domestic  prices, so that the entire incidence of the tariffs fell on domestic consumers and importers up to now, with no impact so far on the prices received by foreign exporters. We also find that U.S. producers responded to reduced import competition by raising their prices.

Perry's summary of the paper:  a) China has not been “paying tariffs to the USA,” b) the trade war has reduced US real income and has not been responsible for “great economic results,” c) the tariffs have had a very noticeable impact measured in billions of dollars, not a “little impact,” on product costs in the USA, and d) the burden of the tariffs been borne almost completely by the USA, not China and other foreign exporters. 

Open Minded to Death

The essence of socialism is government allocation of capital.--many


Went to the ballgame last night with Chris. Lovely night and setting. Everything but baseball. We had a great time. No one enjoys a baseball game as much as Chris. I Ubered for the first time. Expensive. Bell hit a monster homerun.

“The glass and steel skyscrapers that have contributed so much to global warming” have “no place in our city or on our Earth anymore.” This is DeBlasio at his announcing his presidential candidacy. The mayor of New York wants to outlaw New York.
Is there no satirist out there, no clear thinking observer to chronicle these ridiculous times?

The WashPo has a list of the things Trump doesn't want to do. They call this "obstruction." It is all pretty weak stuff. They must know that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-guide-to-20-inquiries-trump-and-his-allies-are-working-to-impede/2019/05/11/83114574-733a-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html?noredirect&utm_term=.ee5f69b703f0


Asylum-seeking is not a classification of immigrant, it is a defense against deportation.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he didn’t intend to soon implement a planned move to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, saying a decision would be pushed off several years.

Since 1976 there has been the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Every year, taxpayers can, by checking a box on their tax return, contribute ($1 until 1993, $3 since then) to the fund -- without increasing their tax liability. Participation peaked in 1980, when 28.7% of taxpayers checked the box.
By 2018, participation had withered to 3.9% (i.e., 96.1% "voting" against it with their pencils). John McCain in 2008 was the last major party candidate to accept taxpayer funding (and consequent spending limits).

Consequently, justice is secured by suitably punishing acts of injustice, not by rewarding justice, which is your duty. Justice is the residual (a negative virtue) that consists in what remains, or is left over, after the civil order has instituted proportional punishments for unjust actions.--Nobel laureate Verrnon Smith. Is that true?

 A new study finds that overconfident people from upper-class backgrounds succeed, even if they’re not that clever. This is a difficult problem for the "Adversity Scale." Perhaps the upgrade of disadvantaged people will not be enough; perhaps we should downgrade the advantaged. Make the physically gifted wear extra weight (a Vonnegut story), make the others eat leaded paint.
  
U.S. industrial capacity has never been larger -- it is 66% above what it was when NAFTA was ratified in 1994 and 15% above what it was when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 -- and real U.S. manufacturing is almost back to where it was in 2007, the year the recession began.
Manufacturers' output is 11% above what it was in 2001 and 45% above 1994. (These statistics are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.) U.S. exports are 85% higher than in 2001 and 200% higher than in 1994, and about 800% higher than in 1975, the last year of a U.S. trade surplus.


On this day in 2015, Ireland became the first country to legalize same-sex marriage through referendum. The referendum passed with 62% of voters (1.2 million people) voting yes. The vote attracted a large turnout, with 60.5% of eligible voters.
  
                                                  Open Minded to Death

We are a trusting people. We are willing to give strange and unreasonable ideas a chance. So we consider that we might be born with an incestuous lust for some family members and murderous hate toward others. Such an idea may be called many things but scientific is not one. So, too, behaviorism which postulates we are born as tiny, pink giggling tabla razas whose personalities are imprinted after birth by experience. This notion is not devoid of science--it is contrary to science. There are countless experiments that show it simply is not true. But we were willing to give it a chance.
These errors are not just of academic interest.  People were treated as if these ideas were reasonable. So, too, people were lobotomized. And their stomachs removed for ulcers. All these errors were made with good intent, if inaccurate science.

Our open-mindedness extends beyond bad science; the so called social sciences are rife with it. Communism saw inherent social conflict resolving inevitably to a promised land of happy workers --after the prerequisite wholesale murders--with no proof at all. Nazism claimed a racial superiority of a self-interested subset contrary to all evidence. Socialism periodically rises from the dead--after horrible periods of homicide and degradation--with claims that are only hopes, hopes that defy what we know about people and behavior.

The recent plans of  'adjusting' SAT scores on the basis of mitigating factors that might influence performance is similarly starry-eyed. This, too, has been disproved. But the idea is Behaviorism II, the silly old Skinner-ism notion that we are all born the same, literally the same, and that differentiation is provided by life experience. A negative experience will impact our performance.

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.


But people are complex. The only way our managers can manage us is if the fault is in our environment, something they can manipulate. But throwing our support behind erroneous thinking never ends well.