We Are The World

Yesterday's cautionary tale of dog ownership began thus:

Perhaps the defining characteristic of humans is the drive to divide. We classify just about everything we know, or just think we know, about the world into, generally, two groups. Us and them. Catholics and Protestants.

I didn't know then that Gina Kolata would take up the theme today. Hers is not the first news report I've seen dealing with the trauma of white folk finding out they're not really. And, no surprise, much more of the white supremacist South isn't lily white than elsewhere.

The chances of having African ancestry were highest in the South, and highest of all in South Carolina, where at least 13 percent of those who said they were white had African ancestors.

Boy, that has to burn some, going down. Like chugging grain alcohol. Good on you.

And, of course, there's the other side

Among those who said they were black, genetic ancestry over all was 73.2 percent African, 0.8 percent Native American and 24 percent European. Experts say the large proportion of European DNA found in African-Americans can be traced to before the Civil War, and the rape of enslaved African women.

I wonder if the Klan will admit them. After all, they're more tainted white than whites are tainted black. Kumbaya.

Dueling Banjos

Once again, into the data fray. This time it's not just a trivial pissing contest. Now, this is a hard data field, not some social science feud over macro policy based on fudgy sampling data. It's all about super-priced heart drugs.

Not surprisingly, each side takes issue with the other's study design and data. They question each other's assumptions about the risk of heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiac events - a key figure that gets plugged into their computer simulations - and they use different thresholds for the proper value of a year's worth of "quality of life."

Well, yeah, there is a bit of social science thumb on the scale. Moreover,

There is another point of divergence in the Fonarow and Kazi studies. When they modeled cost savings from evolocumab, the former factored in productivity - the economic cost of a heart attack victim not going to work, for example. Kazi says his group's study sticks to just the medical costs saved - the hospital stay, the follow-on procedures - by avoiding a cardiac event.

One of my pet peeves with the social science use of data, the majorest, is the continued imputation of "loss of productivity" for all manner of factors. Pharma has been executing "outcomes based pricing" for a while. This is just a fancy way of saying, "my drug saves your life, so you owe me the rest of your life's earnings". I read one "estimate" that the eclipse "cost" $700 million in "lost productivity". As if public and private bureau rats not sitting at their desks for a few minutes has any impact at all. Few do anything productive, ever. A few minutes burning their corneas, on balance, prevented more London Whales from breaching than lost useful output. The one and only case of directly measurable productivity is piece work. Tender reader, you may never have heard of that. Here it is.

Hi Ho Steverino

As, I suspect, most folks have done, I took it as an article of faith that Bannon's fortune (whatever it may be) was made at Goldman. The fact that he pronounced himself a Leninist never made much sense. Nor, as mentioned in earlier missives, how he or Donald J. Quisling or any President could compel corporations to practice economic nationalism. You have to be a dictator to force corporations to behave against their near-term (aka, the CxO class's) best interest. Do I figured Donald J. Quisling wet dreams of himself as Orange Julius Caesar? But of course. Start a war. Declare martial law. Suspend Congress. Declare himself Dear Leader (he got a bit ahead of the game at that first Cabinet meeting. yuk.).

So, I let my fingers do the walking through the innterTubes, and came across this diatribe from last spring. Sounds much like what one might expect the Oracle of Delphi to say.

In 1985, Bannon was a Navy vet in his early 30s fresh out of Harvard Business School who went to work at Goldman Sachs working in M&A. He lasted there until 1990 when he left as a VP to start his own boutique M&A firm. Now, for the kids and Millennials out there, being a VP at Goldman in 1990 was even more junior than it is now and boutique M&A was the late 80s Wall Street version of a craft cocktail bar; they seemed to pop up everywhere and you definitely knew someone who knew someone who started one.

The stake in the heart:

A born-again blue-collar class warrior like Bannon cannot look back fondly on years of running models 20 hours a day in the pre-internet era only to realized that 33-year-old analysts with no prep school connections had limited futures at Goldman Sachs.

I guess Steve has feet of clay.

About That CEO Council

Bannon has been gulled into talking plainly in interviews that went live last night (here, and here. They're worth reading in total, but one point is germane here: is there really such a thing as economic nationalism?

Of course not. The CEOs quit just because they want all that globalism. They've spent decades destroying the middle classes, particularly the blue collar segment. They could have partnered with unions in the North to support the blue collar middle class, but instead went South and overseas. Nationalists, economic or otherwise?? In a pig's eye. Which brings us to the real data, finally, on their game. Here's the nut. Autos have been the vanguard of killing labor. The white collar Northern Blue states have been less impacted, in the way explained by Baumol. Whether Watson-ish machines will kill off these folks too remains to be seen. What's the end game, or the look of the world in the limit? The principle problem of rising capital in production is that unit fixed cost rises: you can't layoff a machine, you must still pay for it. So long as output remains steady or rises to the capacity of the capital, you can get away with it. But as capital's share of GDP rises, there's by definition fewer bucks to buy output; aggregate demand declines. A death spiral. Oops.

FRED data shows that GDP going to labor continues to decline. Just today, there's more reporting on the puzzlement within the Fed that inflation just won't come back.

"It would not be desirable," the minutes said, "for the current regulatory framework to be changed in ways that allowed a re-emergence of the types of risky practices that contributed to the crisis."

Good luck with that. Social Darwinism in finance is what the Right Wingnuts dream about all day and night.

The public number, U3, is increasingly viewed with suspicion, just because at under 5% we've always seen labor incomes rise in the past, but not now. There has to be a reason. And that reason is total employment as measured by U6 isn't nearly as pleasant. Wages remain stagnant. Demand remains stagnant. Growth doesn't happen. The rich get richer and the poor attack each other.

Touching Me, Touching You

So, let me get this straight, once again. Clinton lost because 77,900 more shit kickers in shit kicking counties in three states voted for Donald J. Quisling than for her. Explain to me how any Democrat could reach out and touch the votes of such deplorables? Not Dixiecrates, but real Democrats.

Second Thought for the Day, 10 August 2017

[T]hey've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power -- not with ground forces.
-- Curtis LeMay/1965

Thought for the Day, 10 August 2017

As mentioned before in these endeavors, and bears repeating today: the SOP of would be dictators is to instigate war, institute martial law, and claim all governance in the name of protecting the homeland. The shit kickers who bought Donald J. Quisling's white supremacy spiel will buy this transparent ruse. Will the rest of us?

[update]
in answer to a comment in another version of these endeavors, I offered:

Well, another few factoids to consider:

- Donald J. Quisling claims to be second only to Lincoln as President

- the White Power folks consider the Civil War to have been instigated by Lincoln

- Lincoln did institute martial law

Quisling would be doing the right thing.