the uninsured annually had 5.5 office visits, used 1.8 prescription drugs and visited an emergency room once. Almost half (46 percent) said that they “had a usual place of care,” and 61 percent said that they had “received all needed care” in the past year. About three-quarters (78 percent) who received care judged it “of high quality.” Health spending for them averaged $3,257…
when people were covered by Medicaid, many of these figures rose. The annual number of office visits went to 8.2; the number of drugs, to 2.5; the share of patients with a usual place of care, to 70 percent; the proportion receiving all needed care, to 72 percent. Preventive care also increased. The share of patients receiving screening for cholesterol moved from 27 percent for the uninsured to 42 percent; the share of women older than 50 having mammograms jumped from 29 percent to 59 percent; the share of men older than 50 getting PSA tests for prostate cancer doubled, from 21 percent to 41 percent. Spending rose to $4,429.
Unfortunately, the added care and cost didn’t much improve physical health. The study screened for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and the risk of heart attack or stroke. No major differences were detected between the uninsured and Medicaid recipients.
So: 2700 very expensive pages not only creates chaos and unemployment, but is pretty much a total waste of time.
And there’s this from the WaPo: “Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has gone, hat in hand, to health industry officials, asking them to make large financial donations.” Knowing what we know now about the administration, what happens to those who say no to her?
There’s an amusing and hysterical article at Salon about giving up burgers to save the earth or some such. And now the NYT also reports on CO2 reaching 400PPM somewhere. You know how we take this news. Yawn. We wouldn’t mind it if earth was a little warmer, not that there’s any recent evidence of that. Anyhow, here’s a thought: why not build a Kandor on earth, an enclosed environment given its own atmosphere, this one with, say, 2000PPM CO2. Let’s see what the results are. Maybe this has already been done, but we haven’t read about it. Probably pretty expensive, but surely less expensive than the things proposed by the catastrophic AGW crowd (which India, China, etc. will never implement anyhow). And you can charge admission to defray the costs.
(At BOTW, Taranto points out that non-CO2 particles are also at an alarmingly high number: 996,600PPM.)
the U.S. was little different from most other countries. In 1970, its foreign-born population was 4.7 percent. And, while most of the West has embraced mass immigration in the last half-century, America differs significantly from those developed countries, like Canada and Australia, that favor skilled migrants…the majority of U.S. foreign-born residents now come from Latin America, and more than a quarter of them – 12 million – from Mexico. A policy of “family reunification” will by definition lead to low-skilled immigrants…
any rational immigration reform that respected the interests of the American people would attempt to reorient present policy. Instead, the Gang of Eight’s bill will cement it, and accelerate it. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the U.S. by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration, with a few software designers on business visas to round out the numbers.
Thirty three million is like importing the entire population of Canada…if you’re black, look at it this way: the demographic clout it took you guys four centuries to amass can now be accomplished overnight at a stroke of Chuck Schumer’s and Lindsay Graham’s pens. And, if you belong to the 40 percent of Americans who will be encountering many of these “chain migrants” in the application line for low-skilled service jobs, isn’t it great to know that in this gangbusters economy you’re going to have to pedal even faster just to go nowhere?
Speaking of demographic clout, the main reason for not importing 33 million Canadians is that they’re supposedly a bunch of liberal pantywaists and the Republican Party would never be elected to anything ever again. But fortunately 33 million Latin Americans are, as we’ve been assured time and again by columnist Charles Krauthammer and other eminent voices, “a natural conservative constituency”
Meanwhile: Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska) says the White House has helped keep the truth about the “extraterrestrial influence that is investigating our planet” from the public…“The smoking gun of the whole issue, which is when they saw hovering space craft in Wyoming and South Dakota over the ICBM missile silos that the missiles couldn’t work,” Gravel says.
An open letter from the Philosophy Department of SJSU to a Harvard professor:
We believe that long-term financial considerations motivate the call for massively open online courses (MOOCs) at public universities such as ours. Unfortunately, the move to MOOCs comes at great peril to our university. We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education and, ironically for a social justice course, a case of social injustice…
what kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard? Our very diverse students gain far more when their own experience is central to the course and when they are learning from our own very diverse faculty, who bring their varied perspectives to the content of courses that bear on social justice…
having our students read a variety of texts, perhaps including your own, is far superior to having them listen to your lectures. This is especially important for a digital generation that reads far too little. If we can do something as educators we would like to increase literacy, not decrease it…the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel…
Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities. Sincerely and in solidarity, The Department of Philosophy San Jose State University
Get a load of that second paragraph. Right out of Life of Julia. BTW, here are some of the other things the faculty are up to. HT: PL
Atlantic: “New technology and a little-known energy source suggest that fossil fuels may not be finite. This would be a miracle — and a nightmare.” The article runs almost 11,000 words. There’s a lot of research, but to little avail. The author is trapped in the CAGW trap about the earth heating at a dangerous pace, despite the fact that it’s been cooling for some time, while the minuscule amount of CO2 continues to expand apace.
It’s a very odd piece, written as though by an alien visiting earth and discovering that, surprisingly, burning things makes CO2; speaking of alien, the author seems to have some detached globalist perspective, certainly not beginning at what’s best for the USA. The same can not be said of James Lewis’s piece in AT which is all about shale beating shariah. We think that’s pretty likely, as long as the worshippers of Gaia can be defeated. Strange turn of events, isn’t it, when technological and economic constraints have ceased to be a problem, but the US is trapped by its own modern pagans and their strange superstitions?
Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger…the best place to start is with a carbon tax. A phased-in carbon tax of $20 to $25 a ton could raise around $1 trillion over 10 years, as we each pay a few more dimes and quarters for every gallon of gasoline…It’s the only way to revive the country and a moribund Republican Party.
Imagine the nonsense you have to believe in order to write the words above. But then again, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” QED.
Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750…An unpublished report by the Research Council of Norway, a government-funded body, which was compiled by a team led by Terje Berntsen of the University of Oslo, uses a different method from the IPCC’s. It concludes there is a 90% probability that doubling CO₂ emissions will increase temperatures by only 1.2-2.9°C, with the most likely figure being 1.9°C. The top of the study’s range is well below the IPCC’s upper estimates of likely sensitivity. This study has not been peer-reviewed; it may be unreliable. But its projections are not unique. Work by Julia Hargreaves of the Research Institute for Global Change in Yokohama, which was published in 2012, suggests a 90% chance of the actual change being in the range of 0.5-4.0°C, with a mean of 2.3°C. This is based on the way the climate behaved about 20,000 years ago, at the peak of the last ice age, a period when carbon-dioxide concentrations leapt. Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist, got an even lower range in a study accepted for publication: 1.0-3.0°C, with a mean of 1.6°C. His calculations reanalysed work cited by the IPCC and took account of more recent temperature data. In all these calculations, the chances of climate sensitivity above 4.5°C become vanishingly small. If such estimates were right, they would require revisions to the science of climate change
Common sense seems to be clawing its way towards the surface when things like this appear in the Economist.
The 2010 mid-term elections presented one paradigm. R and D parity and I’s siding R. Exactly what you’d expect given the profound economic mismanagement of the administration. So people with long and excellent track records of predicting things electoral predicted that a decent R would win in 2012. Wrong!
R’s won the over 30′s but lost the under 30′s very badly, by 5.4 million votes. We now live in two separate countries, the oldsters and the youngsters. The oldsters were brought up in a nation that was changing from It’s a Wonderful Life and Father Knows Best but was still rooted in that basic ethos.
The young have the internet, vulgar music, political insight from Comedy Central, TV shows about someone’s 11 baby mamas, and the profound insight that something that didn’t exist 20 years ago anywhere on the planet is the civil rights issue of our time.
This is not entirely their fault. Education today is shocking in its one-sided political indoctrination. The popular media reinforce this, and trends in the culture, such as the uncriticized explosion of illegitimacy, support it. Perhaps most of all, the young have direct experience that change is good, since they have lived in an age of technological miracle after miracle that they can hold in their hands. Pretty much each and every young person — unprecedented in human history.
So America’s young voters have grown up in Utopia, and they believe, by a wide margin, that they are the cat’s pajamas. It’s understandable that politicians would want to chase after these youngsters and create clever phases and positions to accommodate them, but it’s a fool’s errand. Reality will catch up to the know-nothings soon enough. Age has a way of doing that, and so does the unsustainable debt that the country is taking on.
What’s unknowable at this point are a few things. Just how many will wise up? Just how many will realize they’ve been lied to by politicians and the media about nonsense like catastrophic climate change, gender sameness, government benevolence and spending, and so forth? What catastrophes will happen due to the ruinous policies of the government, or due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control? And how will the children of these young see the world?
Our advice to those wanting to chase after the fashion of the day is to stop. Stick with first principles. They have a way of coming back, and we shouldn’t underestimate that the America of 50-100 years ago, superior in most cultural ways to today, is instantly available to anyone who wants to learn about it.
Levi currently spends about $140,000 a year on insurance premiums to cover 25 managerial staff at his business, Consolidated Management, which runs cafeterias at schools, offices and jails. Under the new law, he will have to offer insurance to all of his 102 full-time employees starting in January. Assuming all of them take the coverage, Mr. Levi says the cost of premiums could exceed $500,000. “I’ve never made a profit in any year of the company that has surpassed that amount,” says Mr. Levi, 62 years old. “I don’t make enough money.” He says it makes more sense to drop insurance entirely and pay a penalty of about $144,000…
Epstein, owner of Firstaff Nursing Services Inc. in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., has similar plans. He intends to stop offering health insurance benefits at his home health-care company. Mr. Epstein, 52, employs about 250 workers and currently provides health insurance to his 20 office personnel. If he were to start covering the 100 or so nurses and nursing assistants that work full time, his annual health-insurance costs would jump to roughly $600,000 from the current $100,000, he says. Even if he takes the penalty option, he estimates he would have to pay about $240,000—a cost he doesn’t think his business could absorb. To compensate, he plans to cut the number of hours his nurses and nursing assistants work so they will be considered part-time under the law. He says he will hire more part-timers to ensure patients receive the same level of care. “We’re going to do everything we can in order to stay in business,” he says.
So more and more people are going to have the Page 21 problem. Total disaster.
The chart above is from a U.S. Army Reserve Equal Opportunity training brief. Since Catholics are 20% of active-duty military, it appears that there is a large cabal of extremists within the military. The training documents credit the Southern Poverty Law Center as a source, so the content of the presentation should come as no surprise. Steyn has more.
Politics is downstream from culture and culture is downstream from religion. Today we have bizarre religions, as Chesterton predicted. You have the religious nuts who think that earth is headed for catastrophe because of a 0.0001 change in the amount of CO2 in the air (though that religion is teetering). And no one is more religious than an ardent atheist. No wonder things are so screwed up today.
Something good in the NYT. And, speaking of the Times, there’s a very long piece about a comedian in Egypt. Ah, “to be in Tahrir Square tonight, to feel the energy and pride of a people taking back the keys to their country and their future from a tired old dictator, was a privilege.” Not so much apparently. Finally, the way society is falling apart, we can expect much more of this in the future. Ugh!
a nationwide plan to help wildlife adapt to threats from climate change. Developed along with state and tribal authorities, the strategy seeks to preserve species as global warming alters their historical habitats and, in many cases, forces them to migrate across state and tribal borders. Over the next five years, the plan establishes priorities for what will probably be a decades-long effort. One key proposal is to create wildlife “corridors” that would let animals and plants move to new habitats. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Daniel M. Ashe said such routes could be made through easements and could total “much more than 1 million acres.” The plan does not provide an estimate of the cost…
efforts have already begun to protect wildlife. The lesser prairie chicken in the Great Plains, for instance, also faces threats from mining, oil production, farming and ranching. Climate change models estimate that the chicken’s habitat could undergo a 5-degree Fahrenheit rise in temperature and a drop in precipitation by 2060. The federal government already pays ranchers and farmers to remove land from production to create wildlife refuges. If native prairie were restored to 10% of that land, according to one analysis, that could offset the prairie chicken’s projected population decline…
The effects of climate change are already apparent, the plan notes. Oyster larvae are struggling off the Northwest coast. In the Atlantic, fish are migrating north and into deeper waters. Geese and ducks do not fly as far south. In the West, bark beetles destroy pines because winters are not cold enough to kill infestations. The plan, called the National Fish, Wildlife and Plants Climate Adaptation Strategy, does not prioritize species to target, although “the polar bear is the poster child” of wildlife threatened by global warming, Ashe said
Author and polar bear expert Zac Unger: “everybody agrees that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 polar bears alive today. Here’s another thing almost everyone agrees on: That number is a whole lot bigger than it was 40 years ago.” Reality doesn’t matter! Computer projections matter! Say, wasn’t this how mortgage securities started having a little problem in 2007?
Thomas Kuhn quotes Darwin and Max Planck on the difficulty people have in accepting a new paradigm, which we noted some time ago when thinking about the catastrophic AGW religionists who can’t bear to question their faith:
In a sense I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds…The transfer of allegiance from paradigm to paradigm is a conversion experience that cannot be forced…Darwin, in a particularly perceptive passage at the end of his Origin of Species, wrote: “Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume…, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are shocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine….but I look with confidence to the future, — to young and rising naturalists, who will be able to look at both sides of the question with impartiality.” And Max Planck, surveying his own career in his Scientific Autobiography, sadly remarked that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
So faith remains but the faithful die out. That’s kind of what’s happened today with the cultural shift on SSM. The oldsters have suddenly become dead, irrelevant to the world of the young. Something that did not exist twenty years ago and for all of preceding human history (see Iowahawk’s humorous take) is suddenly conventional wisdom among the young. They live in a parallel universe that their celebrities and media have created (see Wretchard).
What comes next? Assuming that SSM goes ahead, no doubt in short order you’ll have California textbooks pretzeling themselves to deal with terms like mothers and fathers, which might now be politically incorrect; and red state religions might be in for a rough ride. The young have stood history on its head in no time flat. But going from zero to Warp 9 and beyond had a way of working out badly for the Enterprise. So what comes after Warp 9 for the USA?
Maybe we are. When we read things about portions of the GOP rushing to embrace comprehensive immigration reform (all things with “comprehensive” in the title should be voted down) and other fashions of the moment, we wonder what just happened. And then there are issues same sex marriage, a thing that didn’t even exist twenty years ago, and is now apparently the most important issue for large portions of the electorate. The electorate has changed, we must change too!
The electorate has indeed changed. A majority of those over 30 favor the GOP, and a larger majority of those under 30 do not. But why pander to the young, who believe all sorts of rubbish? They will get older after all, and some may even grow up. Once some of them break free of the utopian bubble the media creates for them, hard realities and common sense sometimes prevail, sometimes in the strangest places. Those who are 18-30 were born from 1983 to 1995 or so. Not one of them has been drafted, and their lives have been filled with amazing technological innovations year after year. Calm down, we say. Life will catch up with them soon enough. But maybe we are missing the point.
Marcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix did not use the published dates for ocean cores, instead substituting their own dates. The validity of Marcott-Shakun re-dating will be discussed below, but first, to show that the re-dating “matters” (TM-climate science), here is a graph showing reconstructions using alkenones (31 of 73 proxies) in Marcott style, comparing the results with published dates (red) to results with Marcott-Shakun dates (black). As you see, there is a persistent decline in the alkenone reconstruction in the 20th century using published dates, but a 20th century increase using Marcott-Shakun dates. (It is taking all my will power not to make an obvious comment at this point.)
No, no, no, no, no. The science is settled. Oh wait. Maybe Newsweek was right in 1975 after all. Either way, the important thing to do is panic! and then spend, spend, spend! HT: PL
Among the most destructive forces of our time is the doctrine that man must be free of anything that oppresses him, and we’ve now reached absurdity, when oppression is a salted cheeseburger, a Big Gulp and a Lucky Strike! This doctrine has only two problems: (1) man is not free — human nature, in its male and female aspects, its ultimate mortality and overpowering programming for survival, is far too stern a taskmaster for that; and (2) replacing “man should be free” with “man must be free” empowers totalitarianism — which in its miniature form we call political correctness. We trace the myth of Protean Man as least as far back as Pico della Mirandola in another time of Renaissance in 1486:
Who then will not look with awe upon this our chameleon, or who, at least, will look with greater admiration on any other being? This creature, man, whom Asclepius the Athenian, by reason of this very mutability, this nature capable of transforming itself, quite rightly said was symbolized in the mysteries by the figure of Proteus. This is the source of those metamorphoses, or transformations, so celebrated among the Hebrews and among the Pythagoreans; for even the esoteric theology of the Hebrews at times transforms the holy Enoch into that angel of divinity which is sometimes called malakh-ha-shekhinah and at other times transforms other personages into divinities of other names; while the Pythagoreans transform men guilty of crimes into brutes or even, if we are to believe Empedocles, into plants; and Mohammed, imitating them, was known frequently to say that the man who deserts the divine law becomes a brute. And he was right; for it is not the bark that makes the tree, but its insensitive and unresponsive nature; nor the hide which makes the beast of burden, but its brute and sensual soul; nor the orbicular form which makes the heavens, but their harmonious order.
Finally, it is not freedom from a body, but its spiritual intelligence, which makes the angel. If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.
In modern America, the term Protean Man has been applied variously to Thomas Jefferson and J. Robert Oppenheimer. In our discussion here, we mean it in the least flattering sense, that of the chameleon, the ever adaptable and malleable man. This is always a myth that eventually disintegrates. Pico and the Renaissance Man came and went. Ryle’s Ghost in the Machine came and went. The New Soviet Man came and went. Well, they all went, but where they went were our universities — where they got tenure and are still hanging around (and, speaking of ghost and machine, you can see what they spend their days arguing about here.)
Someday a definitive psychological work will be written explaining the strangeness of the Leftism of our humanities and politics faculties at our elite universities. Never in the history of humanity have so many bright, affluent people with lifetime employment at our most pampered and revered institutions, living among the greatest wealth, convenience, freedom and license ever produced in human history, felt themselves to be so oppressed as this crowd. (We think we know one of the reasons: many of these people feel thay have never earned the ease of their lives.)
Since November of 2012 we’ve been, to a certain extent, fixated on the extent to which the young have been brainwashed into believing in utter nonsense: that good ideas are really not good ideas but the result of heteronormative white male privelege, that male and female are oppressive distinctions since we’re all the same, etc. Nuttiness. For the last century and more, we’ve been living through a new Renaissance brought about by technology. It would be well to remember that the 16th century age of progress and excess eventually produced religious and civil wars. When nuttiness is accepted as received wisdom and is treated as common sense among the elites, things can’t end well.
Last July it looked as if the Large Hadron Collider had identified the Higgs Boson. BBC says that further measurements have now confirmed this. Let’s go back to the time of the tentative identification last year. Reuters:
Scientists at Europe’s CERN research centre have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. “We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature,” CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world’s media near Geneva on Wednesday. “The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.” Two independent studies of data produced by smashing proton particles together at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider produced a convergent near-certainty on the existence of the new particle. It is unclear whether it is exactly the boson Higgs described…
Higgs, now 83, from Edinburgh University was among six theorists who in the early 1960s proposed the existence of a mechanism by which matter in the universe gained mass. Higgs himself argued that if there were an invisible field responsible for the process, it must be made up of particles. He and some of the others were at CERN to welcome news of what, to the embarrassment of many scientists, some commentators have labeled the “God particle”, for its role in turning the Big Bang into a living universe. Clearly overwhelmed, his eyes welling up, Higgs told the symposium of fellow researchers: “It is an incredible thing that it has happened in my lifetime.”
Here is a picture of the machine that looked for the boson:
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began operating in 2008 to test the validity and limitations of the Standard Model. (Among the questions: Where has all the anti-matter gone? Does the Higgs boson exist?) The collider is cooled to an operating temperature of 1.9K, which is pretty darn cold. Here are some other great pictures of this huge, awesome machine, located in Switzerland and France.
“Global temperature…has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene within the past century” is not true. The coldest part of the Little Ice Age occurred about 400 years ago, during the Maunder Minimum, so right off the bat, their conclusion is flawed. They appear to be unaware of the cyclic nature of temperature change and use the low point of the 1880-1915 cool period as their starting point for assessing the rate of warming over the “past century,” rather than 1913-2013. Comparing the depth of cooling in a cool period with a warm period peak is comparing apples and oranges. It distorts the real rate, which should be measured from cool peak to cool peak or warm peak to warm peak. The 1880-1915 cool period was followed by the 1915-1945 warm period, the 1945-1977 cool period, and the 1978-1998 warm period. The rate of warming from 1913 to 2013 is about 0.7°C per century (which is about the same as the warming rate over the past 400 years as we have been thawing out of the Little Ice, long before atmospheric CO2 began to rise significantly).
The so-called elites believe in some things as ardently as the Aztecs and Incas did in now-unfashionable gods. They believe in these falsehoods for a lot of reasons, but one reason is that it confirms their being the apotheosis of human wisdom, a task made all the easier because technological progress reinforces their views that certain trends are profound and irreversible, and therefore they stand at the peak of humanity and wisdom. (The other reason is money of course.) And Oh how fashionable are their beliefs. Hubris. Pride goeth before the fall. It is stunning to watch the decline of skepticism among those whose North Star should be skepticism. This can’t end well. HT: PL
I hope that Bill McKibben and his 350.org coalition go crazy. I’m talking chain-themselves-to-the-White-House-fence-stop-traffic-at-the-Capitol kind of crazy, because I think if we all make enough noise about this, we might be able to trade a lousy Keystone pipeline for some really good systemic responses to climate change. We don’t get such an opportunity often — namely, a second-term Democratic president who is under heavy pressure to approve a pipeline to create some jobs but who also has a green base that he can’t ignore. So cue up the protests, and pay no attention to people counseling rational and mature behavior.
From the NYT to the US military, there’s no end to the number of people who fervently believe in this nutty religion. Note also that Friedman wants a Jihad of sorts.
Related: speaking of the US military, let alone jihad, here’s a candidate for chaplain of the year.
Here is the signal fact of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in over eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are more than ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $1000, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.
Mostly it is because far more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 140 years, and more than 50% of that was invented in the English-speaking world. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.
Moreover, in the years since we first wrote the paragraphs above, the following inventions and innovations have appeared on the scene: the iPhone, the iPad, YouTube, the World of Google, ubiquitous wireless, texting, twitter, tumblr, the cloud, and the entire universe of real-time, mostly inane interconnectedness
No one in America remembers what life was like without telephones, running water, indoor plumbing, cars, airplanes, central heating, or electric lights. A quote from Henry Adams is apt: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” No one in America has a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Adams was talking about.
It is even worse than that. The under-30′s who voted for coolness and more government in such large majorities (5.4 million votes or 60/40) in 2012 mostly don’t remember life without the internet or a smartphone. They have been taught that the ideas of the oldsters are pernicious rubbish coming from the heteronormative white male privilege world, and they are here to change all that. In a way it’s hard to blame them. They’re parroting what they have been told by their teachers, but more importantly, the outside world tends to confirm their foolish thinking. The last 140 or more years have been magical, at least in a technological sense. Constant improvement every generation: so why shouldn’t they believe that they are the apotheosis of America, rising up as one to do away with the reactionary views of the prior generation. What goes in technology goes in morals as well. Who needs a God if the new Samsung Galaxy is coming out in a few months. “We’re immortal and improving — the best of all possible worlds.” Look at the harm the unmoored are doing in the world.
It’s a hard time for those who come from the world of old, traditional values. But it’s not going to be made better by the oldsters pretending they now respect the New Wisdom of the young and foolish. We’d be surprised if even the current economic woes are enough to wake the kids up (though we hope!). So what will it take to break the powerful illusion that technological progress has a parallel in the advance of human nature, that near changeless thing. Cataclysms do that; wars, famines, epidemics, a breakdown in the global supply chain, etc. Let’s hope none of those things are necessary — but the young and their enablers are sitting way out on the branch of a tree, sawing like crazy.
