Chyden Finance: profit from hypocrisy

John O. Blackburn and Sam Cunningham of North Carolina Waste Awareness & Reduction Network (NC WARN) have released a new paper, “Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy,” [warning: PDF] that claims, as its title implies, that the price of solar electricity is now less than the price of nuclear power.

If true, this is great news.

Nuclear power requires large, centralized installations that are notoriously expensive to build and politically controversial. Solar, on the other hand, can be distributed, enabling individuals in remote areas to produce electricity at a reasonable cost, far removed from the power grid.

Reduce the cost of living in a remote location, and one increases the supply of affordable locales. Those wishing to escape, e.g., overarching centralized government can migrate to less developed parts of the world, where the individuals who run the local government either are uninterested in or incompetent to micromanage one’s daily life.

Once again, technology trumps political libertarianism.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

BBC News reports, “Many in the armed forces feel that too few civilians fully appreciate the drive to serve in combat.”

So, that’s why US taxpayers are paying a billion dollars per day on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s a safari to keep soldiers entertained… or a turkey shoot, considering that more than 100,000 Iraqis have been killed and another 2 million have lost their homes.

Do the math:

5,500 US soldiers have died over the past decade in the Middle East, at an average rate of around 500 per year.

By way of comparison, something on the order of 75,000 American soldiers died per year in the US Civil War, 100,000 in WWI, 100,000 in WWII, 17,000 in the Korean War, and 3,500 in the Vietnam War.

per year

Compare 500 per year to tens of thousands, and service in the Middle East looks like a relatively safe adventure, compared with previous conflicts.

That individuals are frustrated, because they are forced to stay home and defend the USA, rather than get shipped overseas to kill muzzies, looks more like my cat chasing flies than brave warriors turning back the forces of evil and making the world safe for democracy.

This war is straight out of the pages of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It would not be surprising, if a decade from now the muzzies were our allies, and we would always have been at war with Eastasia or whoever’s turn is up next.

No one doubts the pain and suffering of the wounded, the dead, and their families and friends. What is absurd is that those who are spared the risks of combat find that to be frustrating.

I’m supposed to sympathize with that kind of clinically depressive behavior, and pay for their blood-sport?!?

In no particular order:

1. The article above is about individuals who are frustrated, because they are defending the USA, and not being shipped overseas to kill muzzies. Whether that qualifies as psychotic is beyond my expertise to determine, but as a unit of citizenship in a democracy and as a taxpayer who is forced to pay for it all, I would vote against encouragining this mindset.

   Until such time as the rulers of Iraq or Afghanistan apply for US statehood, all action in those countries is invasion and not defense.

   If one wants to minimize the pain and suffering of soldiers, one would be expected to vilify, rather than glorify, the proximate cause of that pain and suffering.

   If you support our troops, then bring them home, so that people will stop trying to kill them. If, on the other hand, you support military adventures undertaken by politicians who put expensive equipment and productive men and women in harm’s way, then by all means, carry on as you have for the past decade.

2. Evil resides in us all, and not just in disenfranchised Muslims. Anyone who denies this probably never has had his or her protestations to the contrary tested.

   Take a moment to review Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, as well as the Stanford Prison Experiment that had to be shut down early, because it worked too well.

   Prejudice is so deeply ingrained that the actors who portrayed chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan characters in the original Planet of the Apes movie self-segregated during their spare time according to the species of their characters, regardless of the race or gender of the actor.

   All evil needs is the right conditions to bring it out, e.g. invasionary combat in a war based on a lie, a feeling of tribal humiliation, or participation by upper-middle-class students at an Ivy League university in a psychology experiment.

   It really is that easy.

3. The Twentieth Century was one big, dumb mistake.

   Economics — and, thus, the government policies based on economic considerations — was bastardized beginning with Marshall and ravaged by the disciples of Keynes. The neoclassical mainstream that emerged is based on a superficial reading of Newtonian physics and based on a caricature of Man that bears absolutely no relation to the living humans that it is used to model.

   Far from being benign and quaint academic foolishness, this mischief is at the root of so much trouble in the world that is a direct result of IMF and World Bank meddling based on dismal economics and that has left many individuals in the poorer countries feeling colonized, humiliated, and resentful.

4. Everything basically went to Hell, after Woodrow Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles that laid the foundations for National Socialism, and after the Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire laid the foundations for radical Islam.

   But for the Treaty of Versailles, the German people would not have borne the burden of reparations for their rulers’ military adventurism in WWI, and Adolf Hitler and his band of thugs would have been seen as cranks, as Nazis and the KKK are seen in the USA today.

   But for the Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, the Arab people would have been subsumed within a greater, pluralistic society. As it is, pockets of stupid have flags and the other trappings of statehood.

   If the Bible Belt areas of the USA were a separate country, and the government of which were corrupted by the executives of Arab, Chinese, and Russian multinational firms, fundamentalist Calvinism easy could become a civilization-threatening menace, as Baptist insurgents sabotaged infidel targets and maybe even took their fight to the doorstep of the enemy.

5. At the end of WWII, Gen. Patton wanted to march on Moscow. Granted, others who had done so were unsuccessful, but at the time and under the circumstances, it wasn’t as flagrantly ridiculous a proposition as mounting a ground war in Afghanistan.

   If Harry Truman had let Patton march on Moscow, the Cold War might have been avoided.

6. As for Christians’ having rejected the nastier bits of the Old Testament, one would have to declare the Roman Catholic Church to be outside of mainstream Christianity, given its rather bloody past and self-serving present, and one would have to rationalize away the fact that the US Air Force Academy has been overrun by evangelical Calvinists who are on record saying that they answer to a higher authority than the Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces.

   The faith of many of the guys who drop big, loud things onto the heads of the enemy tells them that they are on a mission from God to rain fire and brimstone upon Evil.

   One can sugarcoat it all one wants. Calvinism is not some benign fairy tale filled with golden unicorns, singing bunnies, and dancing rainbows. It is the creation of a witch-burning theologian from Geneva, who used the political process to gain control of the the city.

   Calvinists learn from the cradle that evil walks upon the earth and that America has been ordained by God to be a beacon and a sword to the rest of the world.

   Calvinists teach their children that God will rain death upon the infidels, Jew, Mohammedan, and Papist in equal measure.

7. If one is a fundamentalist Calvinist, one does not engage the Enemy in conversation; one smites him, takes his women, and casts his children into the wilderness.

   Discount the widespread acceptance in the USA of American Exceptionalism at your own peril. Americans are the most heavily armed cult that humanity has ever seen. Americans will pierce your national sovereignty when it suits them, be it for oil, bank records, or missile bases. Americans will imprison their own non-white, and especially their non-Christian, citizens and violate their travel rights with impunity.

   (All Americans? Of course not… just the ones in charge, whom the masses sheepishly obey.)

8. I don’t fear the Muslims. I do not fear walking through an Arab or Pakistani neighborhood in the USA at night.

   I pity them for having been painted into a corner over the past century, and for having caught the attention of the American war machine. Granted, as with an abused dog, my pity probably would not inspire gratitude — I have been insulted openly by Indonesians and Palestinians — and I accept that. To them, I look like the enemy, just as a brown-skinned convenience store owner, who wants to raise his children in peace looks like the enemy to many Americans.

   I also weary of the prattling of perennially aggrieved individuals, whether Muslim, Christian, Mexican, American Black, Feminist, or whatever. However, I do not single any particular group out for scorn; I wish that they all would shut up. Whatever it is that has them worked up, I didn’t do it!

9. Activists engage in the intellectual dishonesty of focusing on the benefits of the things that they support and the costs of the things that they oppose, rather than give a fair hearing to the costs and benefits of each.

   This quality is not unique to Muslims; fundamentalist Christians and radical Jews engage in the same kind of exercise.

   “God is on our side!” “We are The Chosen!” “A wise latina can make better legal decisions than a white male.”

   When you hold up your own religion, ethnicity, gender, or nationality as morally superior to others’, it is distasteful and self-serving. It is one thing for me to admire Jewish bookishness, self-deprecation, and irony, and another for some black payaso to call for the killing of crackers and their babies.

Call shenanigans on foolishness. The Long War with Centralasia is not about winning hearts and minds. If “They hate us for our freedoms,”‘ were true, they’d be burning Hong Kong, Singaporean, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand flags, as well as American flags.

This is about something other than what politicians and mainstream media journalists tell us.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

Rasmussen Reports reports, “23% of [US] voters nationwide believe the [US] federal government today has the consent of the governed. Sixty-two percent (62%) say it does not, and 15% are not sure.”

In other words, a huge majority in the USA consists of individuals who feel disenfranchised. At that point, very little difference exists between living in one’s homeland and living in another country, where one is not allowed to vote.

Granted, things are not yet as bad in the USA as they are in Russia, where government agents have become a state unto themselves.

If you are looking for a nice place to which to relocate, here is a shopping list: http://finance.chyden.net/?p=2469.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

Mark Twain, among many others, famously quipped, “There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

The Washington Post, generally a left-leaning rag, reports, “Overall, more than a third of voters polled — 36 percent — say they have no confidence or only some confidence in the president…”

Since when does one lump those who have ’some confidence’ with those who have ‘no confidence’? Why stop there? Why not report what percentage of the population does not worship Pres. Obama as a living god?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve been pointing out that Pres. Obama betrays Sen. Obama at every turn, and that he steers consistently to the right of Pres. Bush the Younger.

However, now the left-leaning editors of The Washington Post are engaging in flagrant data manipulation… against the former community organizer, motivational speaker, and auto-hagiographer, whom they so diligently served during his presidential campaign.

Et tu, Brute?

Forget for a moment your personal tastes — for or against someone who has spent his adult life in the pursuit of power, rather than creating goods and services that others are willing to buy — and look at this thing like an anthropologist.

From the perspective of the profoundly intelligent, the world is full of morons, just as the world is full of short men from the perspective of tall women. We cannot escape the fact that we are outnumbered by the unthinking, who want us to produce so that they can tax away the fruits of our innovation, entrepreneurship, and thrift.

The greater mass of economic zombies, who metaphorically want to eat our brains, elected this payaso on transparent and ridiculous promises of white unicorns, dancing bunnies, and singing rainbows, which the agents of the fawning mainstream media repeated verbatim as holy writ.

The honeymoon is over.

The manipulation of survey results by the generally left-leaning editors of The Washington Post to make Pres. Obama look worse is particularly interesting, because it confirms Max Weber’s assessment of charisma: it is based on lies, promoted by the unproductive, and very fragile.

When charisma fails, the failure is swift and irreversible.

Last year, I suggested that Pres. Obama’s charisma will be his undoing. If he had run on race and socio-economic class, which were hugely important in the securing of his ‘historic victory’, the backlash probably would be much milder. However, he promised Hope™ and Change™, and then slapped everyone in the face by reinstalling the Clinton White House, choosing the quintessential DC insider as a running mate, and appointing a nekulturny thug as his Chief of Staff.

Things have become so bad that The One’s faithful servants of the Fourth Estate are jiggering the numbers to make Him look worse in the run-up to the midterm elections this coming November.

Pass the popcorn and don’t hog both armrests. This show is getting good.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

This is a video produced by Japanese artist, Isao Hashimoto, which depicts the 2,053 nuclear bombs detonated between 1945 and 1998.

CWE

Why are feminists still fighting last century’s war?

The work force in the USA now is majority female, including managers. Additionally, young, urban women earn more on average than their male counterparts.

Nonetheless, we still see feminists who perpetuate the myth of female victimhood.

This has gone beyond equality and degenerated into gender supremacy of particularly ugly sort, because it preys on men’s sense of good manners. On the one hand, we are to believe that feminists want equality. On other hand, feminists make their case by invoking shop-worn stereotypes of women as delicate and sensitive flowers in need of protection and care.

Most maddening of all is the tendency for vocal feminists to be based in the Eastern part of North America or the Northern part of Western Europe, as if their pampered, social-welfarist part of the world were representative of the world.

Granted, the author of the ‘men are rapists’ rant identifies herself as a private investigator, who probably has seen too much of the seamy side of society for her delicate constitution, and cannot handle the pressure. However, any South Floridian reading this article immediately recognizes the author as a foreigner. Even without the biographical blurb at the top, it is clear to one of us that she is a neurotic Northeasterner who apparently thinks that the universe is neatly contained between the Hudson River and the East River and that the provincial view from her tiny apartment is representative of the entire world.

Down here among our population of about 10 million at the cultural gateway that joins the Western Hemisphere’s two continents’, the majority were born outside the USA or have immigrant parents. Shakira is more emblematic of female mores and attitudes in South Florida than is the narcissistic Northeastern girl-woman who rewards persistent bad boys while complaining that all the good guys are married or gay.

There are a lot of nice Northeastern men, but they have been beaten into submission by a half-century of sanctimonious urban-feminist doublethink, and they are afraid to talk to women whom they do not know… or to hold a door open for them… or otherwise acknowledge their existence.

If you are female and lonely, you can thank vocal feminists.

My own family provides anecdotal evidence of where this madness leads. My uncle married a Peruvian, my cousin married a Jamaican, when my dad remarried it was with a Mormon, my best friend married a Dominican, and I married a Russian. When Bono sings, “A blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl,” we know precisely whereof he speaks.

At the South Florida university where I teach, many of my female students wear ‘dresses’ to class that would qualify as shirts up in America. Our university does not have any angry feminist student organizations that I am aware of; they might be here, but they are not visible. Perhaps their posters are covered by all the notices for “Shake It Like Shakira” and “Dirty Dancing” and “Teeny Bikini” Nights at the local clubs.

Far from being bitter little mice who feel threatened when an adult male looks in their general direction, the typical woman in South Florida is fully capable of saying, “No,” while her head orbits her shoulders and the whites of her eyes glow brightly. If that doesn’t work, the pistol in her purse is loaded and within easy reach.

If you are not 6′ (180 cm) tall and weigh 200 pounds (90 kg), a handgun and a concealed-carry permit go a long way toward evening the odds, and the Lady Smith has a smaller grip than a standard .357 magnum.

Florida was the first state in the USA to enact a Stand Your Ground statue, which embodies the doctrine of No Duty to Retreat, regardless of where the attack takes place, including on a public sidewalk, thereby telling women in Florida that it is OK to meet violence with violence, rather than with a petulant blog post. A bit more than one-quarter of the states in the USA have followed Florida’s lead and now have similar statutes, none in the Northeast.

The right to self-defense implies individual responsibility. In places with prohibitions against self-defense, the implication is that someone else — namely, government agents — should ensure one’s safety, and that one is a passive participant in society.

When individuals take charge of their lives, they stop feeling like prey. Rather than perpetuate the woman-qua-victim myth and meekly tolerating boorish behavior, the author of the article above should blog about her daily adventures of pepper-spraying the faces of jerks who threaten her. (If no one is actually threatening her, and she is just another chattering Manhattan neurotic, then the problem solves itself.)

If one is less confrontational than that, then one could post videos from one’s cameraphone of clowns and jokers behaving badly. Undoubtedly, the presence of the camera would minimize the bad behavior.

Either way, women the world over say a collective Thank You to North American and Western European gender supremacists.

So, keep on blogging, chickipoo. The vast majority of the world’s population is under 30 years old, and a very large proportion of the women out there are eager to go to where the housebroken men are.

To recap, young urban women earn more than their male counterparts in the USA (and, one expects, throughout North America and Western Europe); women in the USA are the majority of the workforce and the managerial class; the white, middle-class, urban minority does not speak for the other 95% of humanity.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

Recently, I had an unexpected exchange with some strident feminists on Facebook. I had made the acquaintance of the individual whose post I responded to through a free-market advocate of our mutual acquaintance. I assumed from this connection and previous comments of hers that the poster believes in individual rights. If I had known what kind of collectivist nest I was wading into, I would have avoided the interaction altogether; arguing on the Internet with zealots is not my modus.

More than anything, I was taken aback by the victimhood that still warms the breast of today’s feminist. I had thought that — after a half-century of very vocal feminist activism, much of which has been memorialized in statutes — continuing to depict women as passive victims of some kind of bourgeois patriarchal hegemonistic conspiracy that deludes innocent and naive women into buying cosmetics, perfumes, provocative clothing, and overpriced haircuts had become passé.

Most offensive to anyone who realizes that US residents represent only about 5% of the humans alive today, to perpetuate the myth that US women are persecuted trivializes the suffering of women who truly are oppressed. US residents, by and large, do not kill, genitally mutilate, or sell their daughters.

With regard to gender differences among corporate CEOs and political rulers in the USA, why do fewer women than men choose to spend their careers pursuing power over others, rather than doing something productive? I do not know. I wish that more men would abandon the quasi-sociopathic quest for corporate and political power and practice useful trades instead. The dearth of power-hungry women is not evidence of repression. Women are perfectly capable of excelling at lucrative endeavors.

Occupations in which women earn more than men on average include: sales engineers (43% more), engineering managers (8% more), aerospace engineers (11% more), financial analysts (18% more), radiation therapists (11% more), and statisticians (35% more). [Click on the link above for the complete list.]

It is entirely possible that we see fewer female CEOs of multinational corporations and heads of state, because fewer women are utterly devoid of conscience than men, and thus less likely to destroy their rivals. If that were the case, then it would be something to celebrate and not bemoan.

Most maddening of all in this debate is the fact that young urban and suburban women earn more than young men in the USA today.

Granted, not everyone got the memo, and we still hear stories about men behaving badly, but the vast majority of us recognize that such behavior is unacceptable. No one of consequence is calling for a return to the days, when a woman’s place was in the home.

However, question the man-hating groupthink, and you get responses blaming men for everything from the fashion industry through popular culture to the ‘glass ceiling’. Never mind that young women have their own credit cards, are better educated, and earn more than their male counterparts these days.

Apparently, we are to believe that, e.g., Shakira does not choose to turn her back on her audience and shake her bottom provocatively, but that the bourgeois patriarchal hegemony exploits the other-gendered underclass as part of an overall conspiracy to subjugate the unprivileged… or some other fictitious nonsense wrapped in pseudo-Marxist buzzwords.

Conversations with my students provide anecdotal support for these observations. I am in South Florida, and a very large proportion of my students have close ties to Latin America and the Caribbean. My experience is that female students in my Finance classes are much more likely to seek advice on entrepreneurial matters than their male classmates. Frequently, they express the desire to be independent and self-sufficient, rather than rot in cubicles as corporate drones. Far from being exploited, they strike one as ambitious and comfortable, perhaps excessively so, with their femininity.

Will they be CEOs of major corporations? Probably not, because they choose to bypass the corporate wage-slave route that so occupies the imagination of feminist radicals. However, they also will not be spending their productive years sweating over a stove in some macho’s kitchen, barefoot with a squalling baby strapped to their backs.

If young women are starting their own businesses, then why are the founders of famous startups predominantly male? I do not know. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc., ad nauseam, did not get where they are by updating their résumés, filling out job applications, and going to job interviews. They started businesses that became wildly successful. So, why do we not see more women who are closed out of top executive positions take charge of their fates and start competing firms? Again, I do not know, but I do know that The Company Corporation does not ask for the founders’ genders before filing incorporation papers.

The most telling question is…

…Why does a higher proportion of women than of men prefer male bosses?

A December 2000 Gallup poll found that 45% of men and 50% of women prefer a male boss, and an August 2006 Gallup poll found that 34% of men and 40% of women prefer a male boss.

In other words, women prefer having male bosses more than men do. If anyone is holding women down — and I am not saying that anyone is — you might want to mind those three fingers pointing back at you, ladies, when you are pointing in the general direction of the nearest man.

Most damning to the feminist faith is that 56% of men and 32% of women express no gender preference in their bosses. If anyone is the sexist here — and I am not saying that anyone is — it is not the majority of gender-blind males.

A complaint of many women from Eastern Europe and Mediterranean countries is that they feel invisible in the USA, because American men are terrified of acknowledging what is staring them in the face. Never mind that she chooses to dress that way. Men, especially white men, are guilty by assumption, and virtually no one has the courage to stand up to this doublethink.

Far from gossiping, leering, and making the kissy-face in traffic, American men are more likely to keep their mouths shut and their opinions to the themselves. And, those who do act like jerks tend to come from either the extreme low end of the socioeconomic spectrum or the aforementioned class of climbing toads who aspire to positions of power. Either way, the vast majority of us recognize that such behavior is unacceptable.

If statistical equality were the goal, then consistency would require that feminists call for more female scammers as a counterbalance to the likes of Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, and Allen Stanford and more female terrorists as a counterbalance to the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kaczynski, and Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold. (Admittedly, Amy Bishop and Aileen Wuornos have done their bit for female equality in this context.) Cult leaders, mafia bosses, street gang members, mass murderers… virtually all of them are men. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Is this suggestion absurd? Yes, of course it is. However, one must remember that, for every Einstein who has no female counterpart, there’s some dude named Buster who uses a lit match to illuminate the inside of a gasoline can, in order to see if it is empty. Men might be over-represented among Nobel Prize winners, but they also take most of the Darwin Awards.

Never mind that every dollar spent on Math for Girls is a dollar not spent on keeping boys out of gangs. As a result, few women study math, and the prison population is vastly over-represented by men.

If feminists who bark, “Equality,” are not calling for more female misfits, criminals, and outcasts at the same time that they are calling for gender parity in the halls of power, then what they really want is to be on top. Not that there is anything wrong with that. It is just that one should call a thing what it is. Anything else would be sneaky, conniving, manipulative, deceitful, and any number of other unfortunate stereotypes.

CWE

The Hill reports that the US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs has approved a bill that grants the president of the USA a kill switch on the Internet. In Washington, DC, Orwellian doublespeak, this measure strengthens US residents’ access to information.

Watch out China, Iran, and North Korea, we gaining on you!

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports “[US] House and Senate lawmakers approved far-reaching new financial rules” intended to control the financial services industry, even though only a month ago, ABC News reported that investment bank executives currently operating in the USA are making contingency plans to relocate their trading operations offshore to Switzerland and Bermuda.

In October 2009, Bloomberg reported that the institution of a ’soak the rich’ income tax in the UK coupled with heavy-handed regulations planned by the European Union “are prompting the funds to quit the British capital for somewhere more sympathetic to their hypercompetitive brand of capitalism.” Where the hedge funds go, the investment bankers follow.

Investment bankers are the very nice ladies and gentlemen who take companies public. IPOs are what keep markets growing. Markets are what drives an economy.

Where are the hedge funds, and thus the center of gravity likely to go? Switzerland, although one expects that a lot of the smart money will head in the opposite direction to Singapore.

The most tragic part in all this is that political rulers in Latin America and the Caribbean are missing the most golden of opportunities here.

But for the rampant crime, Jamaica would have been an ideal location. Similarly, Barbados, Costa Rica, and Panama are likely candidates. For the somewhat more adventurous, Colombia, Peru, or Trinidad might have been a good choice.

Alas, no viable alternatives exist in the Western Hemisphere. So, they go to Europe and Asia. Pity.

For want of a clue, the hedge funds were lost.
For want of the hedge funds, the investment banks were lost.
For want of the investment banks, the markets were lost.
For want of the markets, the economy was lost.
For want of an economy, the jobs were lost.
And, all for the want of a clue.

Invest accordingly.

CWE

Hernando de Soto explains the importance of extending capitalist institutions to the poorest of the poor.

Invest accordingly.

Cornell University Psychology professors Justin Kruger and David Dunning wrote in the abstract to their “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (1999, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6), pp. 1121-1134):

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. [T]his overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. [P]articipants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12^th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62^nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

In the parlance of Carlo Cippola, Kruger and Dunning are arguing that the incompetent are stupid more often than evil. That is, they benefit little from the costs and injuries that they impose on others, once we take account of opportunity costs.

For example, by creating unpleasant working environments, in which political climbers are rewarded and leaders are out-maneuvered and passed over, incompetent executives and managers disgust their most talented colleagues, who seek opportunity elsewhere. Although incompetent climbers enjoy the illusion of success, they are captains of ships of fools rather than first-among-equals.

The tragedy is when such individuals are in supervisory positions and are able to focus their blame on those who are powerless to fight back. This is one reason why libertarians and objectivists who champion corporations while lambasting governments miss the mark. Whether in big business, big government, or big religion, success favors the climber, who chooses to spend his or her efforts toward the accumulation of power over others.

Incompetence that is wrapped in political adeptness is its own undoing in the long run. After a few iterations of hiring ’safe’ subordinates followed by a round of promotions, life inside a large organization can come to feel like a scene from the documentary Idiocracy, as each layer is replaced with ’safer’ staff from the layer below.

In trades, crafts, and independent entrepreneurial endeavors, one gets one’s nose rubbed in reality on a daily basis. All the corporate politicking won’t help a plumber unclog a drain, an electrician light a building, or a shopkeeper satisfy customers. The less impersonal the institution, the more competent the individuals in it, on average.

How pathetically ironic that getting a ‘good’ job in the bowels of a large organization is perceived by many as more prestigious than striking out on one’s own, or even — forsooth! — working with one’s hands, even though mechanics, tradesmen, and entrepreneurs commonly earn substantially more than their corporate and government drone counterparts.

Matthew Crawford points out in Shop Class as Soulcraft that the word ‘idiot’ comes from the Greek meaning ‘private’, as opposed to public.

The contemporary meaning in the many languages that include variants of ‘idiot’ in their vocabularies has its roots in the notion that those who wear their private faces while performing their public roles suffer intellectual and moral deficits.

For example, when one encounters a cashier, waiter, cop, etc., one wants that individual to exhibit the behaviors that appertain to the specific role, and not to be texting friends, playing the fool, or engaging in other self-involved behaviors.

Politically climbing incompetents — corporate, government, and religious — are idiots, in that it is all about them. They’ll take calls from their children and spouses during business meetings, pontificate on their religious, political, and philosophical views at work while berating others for sharing alternative views, and conflate their personal tastes with objective epistemological necessity.

This appears to be at the root of many of the complaints about ‘kids today’, who routinely let their private lives invade their public roles. Granted, it always has been thus since the dawn of civilization, but this generation seems to be special in the widespread narcissistic self-esteem that this batch of snowflakes and little rays of sunshine has been marinated in since birth.

When the loss of privacy is not voluntary, we feel violated, as when prospective employers stick their noses into our blogs, Facebook posts, and other personal matters. In doing so, they make idiots of us.

Yes, our private details are easily available online, but that is not a license to stalk, any more than not installing metal gates over one’s windows and doors is an invitation to break and enter.

Worst of all is when some fop, who is singularly lacking in introspection, invades one’s privacy, conflates hypotheses with conclusions, and misinterprets the evidence at hand, while making decisions that influence one’s ability to earn income.

It is intriguing that the ease of access to others’ personal details coincides with the ease of pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors. In the 1950s, lifetime employment in large corporations coincided with very poor information flow; one could pull up stakes and start over someplace new. Today, one’s reputation follows one wherever one goes, and it is substantially easier to pursue independent vocations.

Large organizations are becoming the last refuge of the incompetent.

Invest accordingly.

CWE