Friday, 6 August 2010 by bbbeard.

Continuing the documentation of the determinism thread… BBB wrote:

Well, by all means, take me up on my challenge — formulate a principle of determinism and let’s have at it. You seem to be satisfied to voice increasingly vague arguments about determinism, but it is unclear to me what you mean by the term.

I finished the Dalai Lama’s The Universe in a Single Atom a couple of days ago. I think you might be one of the few people who might be able to address it in its proper spirit. Which is to say, there are certain people for whom any hint of mysticism is enough to validate, and others for whom any religiosity is enough to invalidate. But the Dalai Lama’s approach is quite refreshing, I think. He is willing to spend some time explaining some convoluted doctrine, and then add his own comment, such as “I have never understood why this view was reasonable” and then explain his objections. He is a man of great kindness and humility. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this book, for me — and the thing that distinguishes him from other folks like Fritjof Capra — is that over many decades he has moved in what you would call elevated circles, and been able to cultivate friendships with some of the most insightful people in science and philosophy in the twentieth century. Without a hint of self-importance, he discusses his sustained relationships with people like David Bohm, Carl von Weizsacker, and Karl Popper. His international connections have opened doors to people like Richard Davidson, Anne Harrington, Paul Davies — and Eric Lander.

So anyway, here’s some of what the Dalai Lama relates concerning the free-will / determinism antinomy:

At a two-day retreat on the epistemological issues pertaining to the foundations of quantum mechanics and Buddhist Middle Way philosophy at Innsbruck, where Anton Zeilinger, Arthur Zajonc, and I met for a dialogue, Anton told me that a well-known colleague of his once remarked that most quantum physicists relate to their field in a schizophrenic manner. When they are in the laboratory and play around with things, they are realists. They talk about photons and electrons going here and there. However, the moment you switch into philosophical discussion and ask them about the foundations of quantum mechanics, most would say that nothing really exists without the apparatus defining it.

Somewhat parallel problems arose in Buddhist philosophy in relation to the disparity between our commonsense view of the world and the perspective suggested by Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness. Nagarjuna invoked the notion of two truths, the “conventional” and the “ultimate,” relating respectively to the everyday world of experience and to things and events in their ultimate mode of being, that is, on the level of emptiness. On the conventional level, we can speak of a pluralistic world of things and events with distinct identity and causation. This is the realm where we can also expect the laws of cause and effect, and the laws of logic — such as the principles of identity, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle  — to operate without violation. This world of empirical experience is not an illusion, nor is it unreal. It is real in that we experience it. A grain of barley does produce a barley sprout, which can eventually yield a barley crop. Taking a poison can cause one’s death and, similarly, taking a medication can cure an illness. However, from the perspective of the ultimate truth, things and events do not possess discrete, independent realities. Their ultimate ontological status is “empty” in that nothing possesses any kind of essence or intrinsic being….

Here I find it helpful to reflect on a critical distinction drawn by Chandrakirti (seventh century C.E.) in relation to the domains of discourse that pertain to the conventional and the ultimate truths of things. Chandrakirti argues that, when formulating one’s understanding of reality, one must be sensitive to the scope and parameters of the specific mode of inquiry. For example, he argues that to reject distinct identity, causation, and origination within the everyday world, as some interpreters of the philosophy of emptiness had suggested, simply because these notions are untenable from the perspective of ultimate reality, constitutes a methodological error….

In essence, Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti are suggesting this: when we relate to the empirical world of experience, so long as we do not invest things with independent, intrinsic existence, notions of causation, identity, and difference, and the principles of logic will continue to remain tenable. However, their validity is limited to the relative framework of conventional truth. Seeking to ground notions such as identity, existence, and causation in an objective, independent existence is transgressing the bounds of logic, language, and convention. We do not need to postulate the objective, independent existence of things, since we can accord robust, nonarbitrary reality to things and events that not only support everyday functions but also provide a firm basis for ethics and spiritual activity. The world, according to the philosophy of emptiness, is constituted by web of dependently originating and interconnected realities, within which dependently originated causes give rise to dependently originated consequences according to dependently originating laws of causality. What we do and think in our own lives, then, becomes of extreme importance as it affects everything we’re connected to.

So it would appear that this coming-to-terms would be sufficiently dualistic to satisfy your yen. The Dalai Lama has a good deal more to say about this subject and its relation to modern science, but I advise you read the book.

It seems to me that the kind of predictability to which you refer in physical experimentation revolves around conserved quantities. Four-momentum is always conserved. But that doesn’t place much of a constraint on things. In a two-body decay (e.g. alpha production), conservation of 4-momentum is enough to determine the alpha’s energy (but not its direction), given the initial and final masses of the nuclides. But three-body decay is different, e.g. the decay of a beta emitter into daughter nuclide, beta-minus, and antineutrino gives rise to a spectrum of energies.because the end-state energies are insufficiently determined by 4-momentum conservation. So. We know there are a handful of conserved quantities — 4-momentum, electric charge, angular momentum, baryon number, etc. but these are only sufficient to determine the end states for certain classes of reaction. So I don’t think this has anything to do with your (still unformulated) determinism.

It seems to me that your other examples are of a species I would call “contingent determinism”. That is, the outcome of some measurement, or the behavior of some object, can be forecast, provided that nothing that would change the outcome intervenes. A cynic might call this “tautological determinism”. It is one way to avoid facing the relativistic indeterminism I mentioned in the last post but it really solves nothing.

A personal anecdote addresses your question about clocks. I own a nice big Invicta wristwatch. Had you asked me last week what time it would show right now, I might have guessed “6:48 pm Central Standard Time”. But I would have been wrong, you see. Because I happened to drop my nice Invicta on the floor of the bathroom last Friday and it stopped working a few hours later. So it now shows 12:36 (right twice a day, just as predicted).

Funny thing, moral culpability. On the one hand, some folks (like Alan Dershowitz) argue for a restrictive interpretation of moral culpability. They feel that conditions like mental incapacity, or the inability to tell “right” from “wrong”, should exempt some humans from moral culpability. I would say the broader Buddhist view is that all sentient beings participate in the cycle of karma, but that moral culpability per se is a “conventional level” concept that we use to ground our system of ethics. I think a number of science fiction authors have tackled the concept of moral culpability in alien and other variant forms. Obviously Kirk thinks it is reasonable to hold Klingons and Romulans (and hortas?) to human standards of culpability. Androids and clones, of course, were dealt with in the Alien movie series and Blade Runner, speaking of Philip K. Dick.

Ironically, when #2 Son G is trying to evade responsibility for causing some foreseeable disaster, he exclaims, “It was an accident!”, i.e. the result was unintentional. Perhaps instead he should say, “It was pre-determined!” and thereby avoid culpability altogether.

BBB

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Friday, 6 August 2010 by CVM.

Following up on documenting our discussion of determinism, here is CVM’s response to the previous post:

As to dualism, that is my model, yes, even though I’d be the first to admit that it is unlikely that there is any “real” sense in which the two fundamentally different substances exist.

Never read “Einstein’s Dreams“.  I read “Time Travel and Papa Joe’s Pipe” and was turned off by his poetic conflation of memory and physics.  However, I have seen the book and was intrigued — next time it comes up I’ll take a look.

Your argument about determinism and relatively is interesting and new to me — indeed, most texts I have read have suggested that the theory of relativity is firmly deterministic, as indeed the great man himself seems to have believed, but then again, he seems to have believed quantum mechanics is deterministic too, so there you go.

However, your arguments about relativity smack a bit to me of Hume — yes, in principle I agree that the universe need not, perhaps is not, deterministic, but then again there are those pesky measurements, testing both quantum mechanics and relativity, that repeatedly agree with both theories down to the, I don’t know, trillionth decimal place or something (Feynman had some kind of analogy about the precision was as if you could measure the distance between New York and L.A. with the precision to the width of a human hair). That of course is no guarantee of future performance, but I wouldn’t bet a lot that your mileage may vary- while there may very well be influences in our absolute elsewhere, they don’t seem to have had much impact so far.

Strangely, though your arguments invoke science, they seem metaphysical to me.  The problem I put before you was that we hold humans morally accountable in a way we don’t hold other beings, yet there is not reason to believe humans are less (or in your case, more) deterministic than other beings. So what’s the difference?   The gist of your argument seems to be that since we don’t live in a deterministic universe, there is no barrier to ascribing moral responsibility. That’s got promise, but then we have to address why conscious beings are reasonably held morally responsible, but, for examples, computers are not (unless you want to go all Philip K. Dick on me).  As we have discussed, in my model at least computers behave deterministically, though you somewhat snarkily evaded this hypothesis.  How, then, about a clock?

An interesting solution might be that moral responsibility only makes sense in the context of conscious belief in free will (whether or not that belief is true, so we need not get into ontology).  That would rule out clocks, and possibly even variously incapacitated humans, but maybe not electric androids.  If one then accepts your argument against determinism (which however doesn’t explain clocks) this would neatly solve the problem.

As to a Buddhist treatment of free will, I’m all ears.  As I suggested before the dissolution of the self goes a long way toward solving the problem, and, though I agree that this a profound idea, it’s tough to put into practice.  It’s interesting however what the dissolution of the self does to the concept of free will: doesn’t make much sense then does it? I mean, what then is said to be free?

Looking forward to your further disquisition on Buddhism and moral responsibility- and also a description of your personal Buddhist praxis (e.g., meditation?).

CVM

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Sunday, 11 July 2010 by bbbeard.

About a year ago, CVM and I exchanged a series of emails on the fruitless topic of free will and determinism. It transpired that I argued that, well, determinism is inconsistent not just with quantum mechanics (as any sophomore philosopher knows), but also relativity in an inflationary universe. I thought I should post the key paragraphs for posterity.

Well, the reference to Kant at the end of my last message was not flippant. The free-will/determinism antinomy is interesting but I think lies in the same category as our intuitions that the universe is infinite and that it has an intelligent designer. Which is to say, from the standpoint of ‘pure reason’ one might make the argument that there is a contradiction between free will and determinism but in light of the nature of the universe we live in, it’s not much of a paradox.

Have you ever read Alan Lightman’s book, Einstein’s Dreams? It’s a delightful little book. He tells 30 stories describing the experience of time in different possible, or at least imaginable, universes. One of those happens to coincide with the way our universe actually is, i.e. objects moving quickly experience time dilation. What you are proposing as “that annoying apparent contradiction between determinism and free will” pertains to some universe other than the one we inhabit.

Just in case you are thinking I am getting back to quantum mechanics being the camel’s nose that enables free will to sneak back into the ontological tent, let me point out that, as I see it, relativity provides just as much of a challenge to determinism as does quantum mechanics. The reason is thus: I propose that the principle of determinism states that if the initial states of all the particles and fields composing a system can be measured precisely, the future state of the system will be determined. Set aside quantum mechanical uncertainty for the moment. This determinism principle is not consistent with relativity. As you know, special relativity dictates that there are three topologically distinct regions of spacetime associated with any point in 4-space: the absolute future, the absolute past, and the absolute elsewhere. These regions are separated by the light cones forward and back attached to the point. Now, any state that is to be “predicted” must lie in our absolute future, that is, it must be contained in the forward part of our light cone. The crucial point is this: that future state will be influenced by particles and fields that lie in our absolute elsewhere, that is, outside our current light cone.There is no way — not even in principle — to ascertain the states of those particles and fields because we have never been in contact with them before. When you look up at night and see starlight (well, you might have to leave the City), those photons were traveling on a light cone that merged with your worldline only in the instant they entered your eye, not before — until that instant you could not have accounted for their existence in calculating a deterministic future. Of course, the photons are on the light cone, but the reasoning also applies to any massive particle traveling towards you at nearly the speed of light (say, the solar neutrinos that left the sun eight minutes ago and are only now weakly interacting with your electrons). And a curious footnote to this observation is that all those massive ‘elsewhere’ particles, because of the relativity of simultaneity, could be in the future or in the past, depending on the frame of reference you choose.

So I believe relativity is at least as insurmountable an obstacle as quantum mechanics to a principle of determinism.

I challenge you to come up with a reasonable formulation of the principle of determinism that is consistent with the universe we live in. Until then, I don’t see what the problem is. We don’t live in a deterministic universe.

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Monday, 3 May 2010 by bbbeard.

BBB wrote:

About a month ago (which is like fifty years in Internet time) a number of my favorite bloggers were listing their top ten “most influential books”. I started putting a list together but I realized some of them don’t pass the serious-blogger giggle test.Would you like to take a shot at it? What ten books have most seriously shaped your world-view?

CVM wrote:

Geez, passing the giggle test, that’s a high bar! Though perhaps you and I know each other well enough to be beyond giggling.

It’s a tough assignment, and age-dependent. There was a time that Atlas Shrugged would have made the list, but not anymore, though it is no doubt incorporated into the sensibility that makes me more appreciative of libertarianism than I would have otherwise been, and I’m the better for that. On the other hand Heinlein has remained a far more important influence on my world view, though I’m not sure which of his masterpieces I would list on my top ten (Starship Troopers maybe, or Citizen of the Galaxy, or maybe even Double Star?). Then there are a whole spate of science fiction novels: The Stars My Destination, Wrinkle in Time, the Foundation trilogy, etc. Those however would definitely not pass the giggle test. Of my favorite other novels, Pride and Prejudice is pretty near the top, as are Great Expectations, Germinal, Madame Bovary, and Swann’s Way- I’m also terribly fond of Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, Inferno, and, supremely, Don Quixote.

However, I can’t exactly say they were “influential”- I just thought they were terrifically entertaining. Don’t even get me started with theater- if I could only take one book to a desert island it would be the complete works of Shakespeare, though I would miss the Greek tragedians. There are so many other works of fiction in the category of great reads however that I tremble to winnow them down to a mere ten. (I suppose I could include the Bible among these works of fiction, in that I have spent far too much time in my adulthood analyzing the true intent of the authors of these fantastic tales, in preparation for my deconstruction of the tome, but that doesn’t really seem in the spirit of the question).

Many other works have excited me in my mature phase, including Epic of Gilgamesh and Plato’s dialogs of the last days of Socrates, but mainly because I found in them support for arguments I have already formulated about historical views of immortality. Not so much influential as adding fuel to the fire.

There are countless (well I should be careful about that) popular books that I also enjoyed tremendously, from Grammatical Man to Everything and More (David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece on transfinite analysis, though again preaching to the choir), of course Gödel Escher Bach and A Brief History of Time, to who knows how much of Asimov? And you’ve heard about some of my more recent reads. I would hesitate for any of these to make the top ten though, since they’ve all mainly just added small pieces to an over-arching world view, though probably the closest would be A Brief History of Time (hence, perhaps, my affectionate rip-off of the title for my own book-in-planning).

You’ll perhaps be flattered that I would consider Decline of the West on my personal top ten, though as with so many of my youthful infatuations I now appreciate it more for the vividness of its vision (not unlike Atlas Shrugged) than for the degree to which it accurately captures reality (with due respect of course).

In the end there is only one book that I can say significantly impacted my world view at the time (though it was preaching to the choir even then), and whose power I would say has not lessened with my increasing sophistication, but if anything I have come to appreciate even more. That would be the remarkably short and accessible The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I read in high school (I ran across it in an old used book store on a rainy Saturday as a senior, never having heard of it but something about the title attracted my attention) and from which I perhaps have never recovered.

Your turn.

BBB wrote:

A wonderful and insightful post. I think the challenge, though, is to list the top ten books that influenced you, i.e. altered your worldview, not just to list the smashing good reads that are typically too numerous to mention. The difference, I think, is important… for example, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, but other than increasing my stock of one-liners, I can’t say it changed my view of anything at all. On the other hand, The Golden Bough is tough sledding, and in the abridgement demands a significant amount of interpolation, but is fundamental.

So, in that spirit, in no particular order, I would say my short list includes

o Decline of the West — well, unlike you, I have not outgrown my youthful flirtation with cultural morphology. I still find it a useful way to organize my understanding of the flow of history and culture and our place in it.

o History of Art by A.F. Janson. I read this right after I read Spengler. More than anything else I could name, it confirmed and solidified my understanding of cultural morphology and the fundamental way that our conception of space dictates the manifestations of art and architecture in our culture. If you have drifted into Spenglerian apostasy, perhaps this is the tonic you need.

o The Golden Bough — a century ago this was required reading. In the manner of the fin-de-siècle academy, however, I’ve only read the abridged version. Still, I have not read any book that comparably puts Christianity in the larger context of (mostly pagan) religions. “Killing the god”, indeed. You can’t really understand “The Hollow Men”, or Heart of Darkness, or “Apocalypse Now”, or, for that matter, American electoral politics, without the insight that Sir Frazer offers.

o Starship Troopers — whilst my compadres were absorbing Randite libertarianism, I found Heinleinian libertarianism elementally appealing. Now this I have (sort of) outgrown, inasmuch as I endorse the idea of a mixed economy, yet I still find Heinlein’s truths hard to deflect.

o History of the Second World War by B.H. Liddell Hart. Awesome, detailed history. Prior to reading this work, WWII was a fog of unrelated proper nouns for me: Corregidor, Anzio, Vichy, Rommel, Stalingrad, Tinian…. But Hart cleared up (almost) everything and gave me a framework to understand the significance of Bastogne and Bataan. And it led to a commitment to read histories of major conflicts from the Peloponnesus to Vietnam.

o Slaughterhouse Five — well, every other Vonnegut book falls into a certain template of 60-ish alienation in one form or another, but this one was different for me. If ever asked what character out of fiction I most identify with, I always respond: “Billy Pilgrim”. Like Billy, I suffer from chronosynclastic infundibulitis. I think it must be something out of DSM IV.

o Calculus: One and Several Variables by Salas and Hille. I read many mathematics texts in my youth (and even more in my dotage). This one stands out. Even today I have a mild Pavlovian response to the sheer tactile pleasure of handing this book, with its red cloth cover and its beautiful, hand-drawn graphs.

o There is a slate of books about the “Red Scare” or “McCarthyism” — or, as I call it, “The Era of Concern About Communism” — that I read mostly in succession. The authors are a who’s who of bêtes noire for the left, largely because they document a complex and dark phase of our history the facts of which the left would prefer everyone forget. Perhaps I should list Treason by Ann Coulter as influential, inasmuch as she motivated me to find out more about this period, but the truth is I simply didn’t believe a lot of what she wrote. However, my reading since then has largely confirmed her accusations, so I forgive a lot of the outrageousness that is her hallmark. One of the most important books in this slate was The Secret World of American Communism by Klehr, Haynes, and Firsov, which — despite the crankish vibe of its title — is a thoroughly researched, well-written academic work that took full advantage of the opening of the Soviet archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This reading led to other books by Klehr and Haynes, by Horowitz, by Radosh, by Whittaker Chambers….

o Quantum Field Theory by Lewis Ryder. A beautiful but uneven book, it contains a remarkable, lucid chapter that ties together non-Abelian gauge theories with general relativity — the connection between the “connections”, as it were…. überkühl.

o The Second Creation by R.P. Crease and C.C. Mann. A history of particle physics. It convinced me to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics. And the rest is history.

And, turning it up to 11:

o Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the autobiography (thru 1977) of the current governor of California . Inspired me to believe that — even though I would never master the dip-between-chairs — I could reach any goal that I determined to set my mind to. So this also played a part in my pursuing physics.

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Thursday, 25 February 2010 by bbbeard.

Valerie Jarrett explains it all.

If the Obama administration wants to  get people feeling better, they should write more knee-slapping one-liners like that.

Still ROFLMAO….

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Tuesday, 16 February 2010 by bbbeard.

I finally got around to seeing Avatar last night. Much has been written about it, often critical of its woolly eco-mysticism, but maybe I can approach it from a slightly different perspective….

This is yet another movie that expands on the theme that “we’re all connected”. The homages to Star Wars and Dances With Wolves were blunt.  This shop-worn theme is not a bad starting point, and it took me awhile to figure out why exactly I found Cameron’s interpretation distasteful. It wasn’t just the perversion of the American Marine into heartless genocidal exterminator — that’s been done to death by Hollywood and anyone offended by that should really avoid nearly every movie touching on the military in the last forty years.

As a Buddhist, I can usually relate to the notion of interconnectedness, and when movies push this, I’m generally okay with that. But what was it about the Na’vi that was so jarring? Clearly these were no Buddhists. In fact they were hysterically hostile, unbalanced, irrational hunters and warriors. And after all the jib-jab about Eywa, it was something of a letdown to be handed a flatly mechanistic explanation for the interconnectedness of the Pandoran biome. It turns out that the explanation provided for a not-so-universal interconnectedness after all — because the “we” in “we’re all connected” pretty much excludes everything off-world. This made for a handy “us vs them” to justify the slaughter by the Na’vi of human soldiers (and of Na’vi by the humans) at the end of the movie. So for me this came across as, “yeah, sure, we’re all interconnected, but we’ve got to have a big massacre at the end because it’s Hollywood and we’re all about the box office”….

Now, there have been times when Buddhism has been perverted into supporting militarism. But by and large the record of Buddhism is pretty good. [BTW the link goes to a paper about Lewis Richardson’s Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, which studied the correlates of war. Richardson’s studies showed, among many other things, that Buddhist countries by and large generated fewer conflicts than did other religions.] But whatever you might think of the Na’vi, “pacifist” doesn’t come to mind.

And the strange organismic interconnection of the Pandorans seemed to me to yearn for a Spock moment: “It would appear, Captain, that the entire planet is a single organism!” at which point Kirk would conclude that a few well-placed phaser blasts would convice Eywa that it was unwise to hold a Federation shuttlecraft hostage… but I digress. There were no heroes in this movie. Sure, Jake Sully was put forth as a hero for siding with the Na’vi, but the whole assimilation thing seemed a bit too Borgish for my comfort.

And a word about the 3D technology: I hope this is not the wave of the future. As a user of monovision contact lenses, the 3D effect seemed uneven and distorted. Much of the left side of the picture was fuzzy. But now I’m resorting to pleonasm….

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Saturday, 23 January 2010 by bbbeard.

Here’s a datum: I listened to NPR for an hour yesterday on my drive home [first time in a long time, but I was curious about their take on the Scott Brown victory]. I heard the results described about twenty times by quite a few different people as “populist”, e.g. “a populist revolt”, “Brown’s populist message”, etc. I don’t recall them using the “c word” at all (conservative). Elite [sic] opinion seems to be gelling around the notion that it’s okay to think of the grave discontent with Obama as “populist”, but they still have cognitive dissonance with the notion that the revolt has any “conservative” component at all. And libertarianism, I think, is not on their radar at all….

The significance of this is two-fold: first, populism per se is neither Democrat nor Republican, and indeed many Democrat proposals for expanding government fit the definition of “populist”. This is why you still hear Democrats arguing that the election results mean that they have a mandate to push through health insurance reform as quickly as possible. So the use of “populist” [in the sense of “policies intended to help common people”] instead of “conservative” [”policies intended to promote individual liberty and initiative”] allows the Democrat conscience to pursue essentially the same anti-liberty, anti-business, anti-individual policies that they did before. This is the core calculation that is driving Obama to demonize the banks – he thinks that by repackaging his Marxism as “populist” all will be well.

Second, it helps to convince Democrats that the connection of Scott Brown to conservatism is accidental at best. Thus, they see no mandate to work with Republicans, who, after all, represent a kind of secular Satanism to them.

We shall see what this particular delusion earns them next November.

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Friday, 6 November 2009 by bbbeard.

The August unemployment numbers are out. Unemployment, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is up again, to 9.7%, the highest of the Obama Presidency.

Politically: a very bad result for Mr. Obama. Despite job losses, the unemployment rate had actually fallen slightly in July (because enough people had been discouraged from looking for work that the labor force shrank). But the August rate is even higher. The numbers are bad enough to support headlines like “Unemployment rate rises to 26-year high“.

But the “other shoe” that is waiting to drop is the crossing of the 10% threshold. It’s a psychological threshold, to be sure. But you can also be sure that financial journalists have already written their columns, obituary-style, for the sad day when we cross that line. Once we cross the threshold, a jump from 10.1% to 10.3% won’t be nearly as dramatic.

But in the meantime, “highest in 26 years” instead of “gradually falling” means that it will be hard for Mr. Obama to win the battles he will be fighting over health insurance and energy this fall. Convincing the American people we are on the right path will be difficult, and as many in Congress learned this August, those people are getting angry with their representatives’ incompetence. If he loses those battles, it would forestall the economic damage his takeovers would inflict — so in a way, this slight uptick in an ambiguous parameter may actually be good news.

Still, unemployment is a lagging indicator of economic growth. We are past the six-month point after the grand inauguration, so in some sense Obama now, or shortly, will “own” the unemployment situation. (”How’s that stimulus working out for you?”) When we look back to the Reagan administration, the last time unemployment was this high, it was several years into his Presidency before his economic policies finally reversed the malaise of the Carter years. Of course, Reagan’s policy was to cut taxes, to slow the growth of spending, and to deregulate. Obama’s policy is to raise taxes, accumulate massive debt obligations, and to nationalize major industries. We shall see whether these Bizarro-Reagan policies reverse the trend in unemployment — or magnify it.

By the way, here is Innocent Bystander’s update.

UPDATE: September numbers are out. 9.8%. Labor force shrinking. Still waiting.

UPDATE: October: 10.2%. Still rising, even with shrinking labor force.

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Wednesday, 4 November 2009 by bbbeard.

Do I detect a sense of panic at the ABC News website tonight?

Just keep saying that to yourself.

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Tuesday, 27 October 2009 by bbbeard.

From Lincoln to Carter to Caesar. Spengler would be proud.

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