– Half Sigma thinks elites really believe that HBD is false. I disagree. As someone else once said somewhere (I can’t remember where), all of us who believe in HBD would be super rich if only the people who "don’t believe" in HBD actually acted like they don’t believe in it. The elites may not say that they believe in HBD, but they spend their money as if they believe in it. On the other hand, sometimes elites admit they believe in HBD. For example, here’s Bruce Springsteen wishing that the US was whiter.
– A brief against democracy
– Remember, we live in an open, tolerant society.
– Interracial marriages and earnings
– Dear Dodd and Frank, Thank You.
– Half Sigma on Murray. And Chuck.
– At Auster’s:
every time there is some savage violent crime, the police chiefs and police spokesmen are all over themselves wondering what the perpetrator’s "motive" was, making the discovery of the inner workings of some savage’s mind the most important aspect of the case, the sine qua non of understanding the nature of the crime, almost as though, without that metaphysical knowledge, it hasn’t really been established that there was a crime.
– The decline and fall of the American empire.
– Reading Scott Sumner is weird. For example, 2008 wasn’t that long ago. I remember earning a negative real yield on my savings, while the Fed was lending against all sorts of new kinds of "assets" and bailing out everyone in sight (see, e.g. AIG’s counterparties). I also remember mainstream economists (and conservatives) loving every minute of it. I guess he remembers it differently.
– Is there any problem that ending the drug war won’t solve?
– Wong Chow Mein on Jeremy Lin
– I’ll probably be quiet for the rest of the week, but that should keep you busy.
Foseti 
Bruce Springsteen spoke at an anti-Prop 209 celebrity rally in California in 1996.
Re: Sumner, all your observations agree with my memory. But none of that is monetary easing, really (bailouts in particular are horrifying and sickening perversions of monetary policy).
Low interest rates are a sign that money has been tight.
Keep reading him. The penny will drop.
The only relevant critique I’ve heard of Sumner is that inflation is actually higher than what the government reports, ergo NGDP is not actually so far below trend. I claim ignorance here. I trust the government to lie as it pleases, but I don’t trust the anecdote method of inflation measurement either. Sumner often refers to TIPS spreads, which use the CPI. If the government was understating inflation via the CPI, then the TIPS spreads would have to be very high to get people to invest in them. I haven’t checked, but I believe the spreads are pretty small.
(I’m thinking I got the TIPS thing backwards, if the CPI is too low, the TIPS payout is low, so they’re not worth paying extra for.)
What if “inflation” as commonly understood just isn’t meaningful or measurable?
Samuelson On Murray
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/02/27/the_real_class_warfare_113256.html
Had never come across Wong Chow Mein before. He’s good.
You have the best “Randoms” of any blog, bar none.
Yeah, but they’re not random, they’re haphazard.
That is true. “Haphazards” just doesn’t have the same ring though.
Half Sigma thinks elites really believe that HBD is false
I think that the simplest explanation for elite support of unrestricted immigration is that they realized that falling fertility among whites in the US was bad for them, and they don’t pay the price of unrestricted immigration …
I’m really not fond of the term “Neoreactionary”.
On the anti-democracy brief…
https://twitter.com/#!/kalimkassam/status/171734810568564737
I chuckle.
I don’t have to care about ‘neoreactionary’ because I’m clearly some flavour of market anarchist. However, it gives me a lead on a good name for an archevore restaurant.
I should have thought to check here first.
re: interracial marriages.
Asian discipline with White initiative is a good mix.
I wonder how stable they are in the US.
The group is probably not big enough to have any discernable characteristics.
2.2% of marriages are between Asians and Whites.
Deduct the share of non-East-Asians (you are clearly implying East-Asians with the term “discipline”). Deduct non-breeding pairs. Adjust for lower White/Oriental fertility and for the younger ages of most such marriages (I’d presume), probably a wash.
The share of mixed White-Oriental babies being born in the USA? Maybe ~1%?
Maybe someone has harder data on this.
I have a surprising number of friends who married Asian women, so in my own personal (and generally not indicative of wider society) experience, way more than 1% of babies are mixed white-Asian.
What are mixed White/East-Asian children like, from your observations?
Exactly as you’d expect. They’ll check the white box on their college application though.
I’m wondering whether I am a mesoreactionary.
I’m an ovolactoreactionary…
Dodd Frank…
Makes me wonder if we should look again at Sharia…
If we add the cost of the bailout and increased regulation together, I wonder if it is larger than just letting the system sort itself out back in 2008.
“all of us who believe in HBD would be super rich if only the people who “don’t believe” in HBD actually acted like they don’t believe in it”
Except those in business who believe in HBD can’t act on it, because it’s illegal.
As someone else once said somewhere (I can’t remember where), all of us who believe in HBD would be super rich if only the people who “don’t believe” in HBD actually acted like they don’t believe in it.
Okay, okay, please explain this for the slow guy. If elite people actually acted like they believe in racial equality, then race realists would be rich because ____.
I can’t guess!
Olave, I can’t tell if you are being ironic.
I’ll play it straight: If the Left/Egalitarians hired critical positions per their professed political beliefs, they would be poor/broke, while those of a more discerning/meritocratic nature would clean up in their wake.
In addition, we could all move to cheap houses in the suburbs while they sent their kids to truly diverse schools.
I wasn’t being ironic. I wasn’t really thinking about hiring. The elites force everyone to hire lots of unqualified blacks and Hispanics, but I guess I see your point that if they believed that stuff they would probably hire even more, and probably be less interested in forcing the race realists to hire NAMs since they’re so perfect.
Foseti’s point is also a good one.
I was thinking too much about public policy and not enough about private behavior to get that one.
[…] I posted a disagreement with Mitt Romney’s blogging headquarters (Half Sigma, whose blogging I generally like, but I can’t resist some of his . . . excesses) a while back. Specifically, I objected to his assertion that elites don’t believe in HBD. […]