Gyroscopic Investing

Benko wrote: Reminds me of those who said we were in Iraq "for the oil".

Ad Orientem wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opini ... pe=article

It's rare when I can say I agree with anything Krugman writes. But even stopped clocks are right twice a day.

MachineGhost wrote:

Ad Orientem wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/22/opini ... pe=article

It's rare when I can say I agree with anything Krugman writes. But even stopped clocks are right twice a day.

This guy still has a media mouthpiece despite being disgraced out of Princeton?  Shocking.

Ad Orientem wrote: Interesting. What is the story on Princeton? All I heard is that he is retiring at the end of the current academic year (he is in his 60's) and has agreed to take a position at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, as a professor in the Ph.D. program in economics. and will also become a distinguished scholar at the Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center. He says he wants to slow down a bit with less commuting and stay closer to New York. I gather you heard something else?

Benko wrote: The other thing that needs to be said here, is that there is a broad spectrum between:

Conquest  and [hyperbole alert]

The leftist default i.e. lets get rid of our guns, disarm, treat our enemies nice, bear our throats and they will ignore us in return.

Labeling Asian Americans as "non-Western" gives away the game completely. By "Western," Niall Ferguson is not referring to a geographic region, a political system, an economic system, or a religion. He is not even referring to a specific set of countries. He is referring to a set of people; people who have pale pinkish skin, fine wavy hair, and prominent eye ridges. By "Western," Niall Ferguson means "white people." Asian Americans may have American passports, Ferguson thinks, but civilizationally speaking they are permanent foreigners. This interpretation is basically confirmed a couple paragraphs later:
Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a “civic great awakening”?—a return to the original values of the American republic. He’s got a point.
When you admit to taking your cues from America's most prominent academic racist, you've pretty much laid your cards on the table.

This makes me sick, and not just because of the racism. It's because Ferguson's offhand exclusion of non-whites from the "Western" world is, in fact, what I believe to be the biggest threat to our civilization.

You see, I believe that the United States of America has another "killer app" in addition to the ones Ferguson lists. That killer app is meritocratic diversity. Where other countries cling to blood-and-soil tribalism, America absorbs and employs the energy and talent of a vast array of peoples. All those American Nobel Prize winners? A huge chunk are immigrants or children thereof. Ditto for Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial heroes. Our above-average fertility rates? Largely thanks to immigration.

Imagine if this were 1911, and Ferguson had instead lamented: "And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Jewish-Americans." He might have held this up as a harbinger of Western decline - after all, Jews were not at the time considered white. But he'd have been pooh-poohing the future contributions of Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman, not to mention Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, and probably a bunch of other Jewish Americans whom I don't know off the top of my head. The contribution of the Asian Americans whom Ferguson now dismisses are growing at a similar, if not faster rate.

In fact, Niall Ferguson pines for the days of Anglo-Saxon empire, but in fact, many historians believe that race-blind meritocracy is the key to all successful hegemons. Empires of the past have been successful when, like modern America, they didn't limit their talent pool to people with the right genes.......

......Basically, this is one of the laziest, sloppiest, most pernicious columns that I have ever read. I am simply physically, biologically incapable of sticking to my self-enforced blogging hiatus when something this awful crosses my screen.

Lang wrote: Abraham Lincoln once said "I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends". Five years later, some guy shot him in the back while he was watching a play.

Pointedstick wrote:

Lang wrote: Abraham Lincoln once said "I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends". Five years later, some guy shot him in the back while he was watching a play.

Ah yes, Abraham Lincoln, truly one of the great friend-makers.