Paradocracy

The Kaeparnick craze and other viral movements haven't merely pressured people into becoming simpler caricatures of their prior selves, but they have manifestly exposed people for how foolish and uninformed they've been all along.  In his final year in the NFL, Kaepernick ranked 17th in passer rating and 34th the year before that.  He played through an entire season in only two of his six years in the league, and his best full-season performance ranks far outside of the NFL's top-250 single-season passing performances in the league's history.  For reference, the oft-criticized Tony Romo posted a career passer rating of 97.1, as compared to Kaepernick's 88.9.  Romo's passer rating dipped below 90 for only one season of the eleven seasons he played, whereas Kaepernick failed to eclipse the 90 mark on three of his six seasons, a full 50 percent of his time in the NFL.  In fact, Kaepernick accomplished this feat only once if we are to discard those other...

The information technology era has combined with a generation armed with fancy words and concepts they don’t completely understand to equip a great many with smart-sounding statements, which ultimately fail the more rigorous test of logic, and a wide audience to receive and celebrate their every utterance.  So while increasing numbers enjoy the wide-reaching channels of media once employed exclusively by professionals, they exist no differently than the trick-or-treaters on Halloween who do their best to look the part.   One key distinction here is that the former may make a more compelling case by glossing over complex concepts with smart-sounding words or pseudo-scientific explanation, without anyone in the audience noticing the difference.  And while the trick-or-treaters eventually return to their regular attire and reveal their true colors, the con artist continues his charade until he returns home for the night, where he’s either miraculously...

One of the great economic fallacies of the day has been the calculus which intends to track the amount of money spent as some grand testament to the wellbeing of an economy, or which intends to ennoble it as some grand savior, as if that solitary figure bears any relevance at all to the desired outcomes of the economy.  This myth operates hand in hand with the belief that civilizations can spend and print their way to prosperity .  Both myths fail to remain true to the modifying characteristics of free economies and money.  If the purpose of an economy is to enable the realization of wants through the facilitation of trade between mutually-interested producers, and to — as a byproduct — incrementally improve the population’s standard of living, then the metrics must center around the appreciation of the population’s standard of living and the mutual satisfaction of wants, not around the nebulous volumes of spending.  Taken in bare form, spending is completely...

In an article posted on the Politifact webpage, one decisive claim exposes the website as a complete fraud. The reader can find this dubious claim in the organization's article regarding California's taxes, in which the editorial nitpicks Travis Allen, a Republican member of the California State Assembly, for his unequivocal remarks characterizing California's taxes as ranking "among the highest in the nation." Despite the apparent concession that Allen's statement is mostly true , the writer of the piece then misleadingly concludes: "Notably, [California] does not have one of the nation’s highest property tax rates, at 36th highest." The only type of academic who could posit this claim is one who intends to focus the conversation on meaningless rates and doesn't understand how common $10,000-per-year property taxes are in the most populous parts of the state: the San Francisco Bay Area and the Southland. First, the artificially-high c...

The welfare state in the United States has accounted for an unfathomable measure of destruction across both the observable map of this country and the psychological profile of its inhabitants.  The intersection between those two phenomena can be most aptly evaluated through an examination of the welfare state's influence in the composition of the household unit, a contemporary relic of a time gone by. While the average child in the United States today is 18 percent less likely to grow up in a two-parent household, as compared to 1960, the case for the average black child is even more discouraging: in 1960, roughly 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent households; today, nearly sixty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent households. The emergence of this trend is due not to the increased viability of single-parent households by means of self-sufficiency and the development of female independence. ...

Leftist “logic” tends to operate from the premise of fallacy and from an undying enthusiasm for character assassination.  From false attributions to false dilemmas or pure ad hominem attacks, the common leftist will stop at nothing to place a threatening idea and its presenter into a coffin, sometimes literally.  In the case of a threatening presenter, the insecure leftist always reserves a full arsenal capable of swiftly eliminating the threat with a quick and simple knee-jerk quip about the credibility (or personality) of said threat.  For instance, if you’re poor or middle-class, the common leftist will contend that you’re clearly not good enough to make more money, and therefore your ideas must be just as worthless.  If you’re wealthy, your ideas are innately clouded by avarice and an inherent inability to relate to poorer people and the subject matter under consideration.  If you don’t have a degree or a title next to your name, you lack the cre...

Many economists model economic growth as if they were evaluating their own conversations with the person across from them, fully unaware that they are staring into a mirror and admiring the manipulated projection of what they had hoped to see. In still further cases, they appear to broadly model economic, fiscal and monetary policies as if they are learning to drive by strictly studying the movements of everything in the rear-view mirror. Of course, this method would largely serve to distract from the guiding principles of driving and the useful rules for effective navigation, yet if left exclusively to this perspective it would hardly be surprising for the surveyor to desperately formulate a contrived theory about the relationships between the behaviors of everything behind the driver and how he or she in turn maneuvers the vehicle. Of course, this theory would be aptly described as utterly incomplete, if not patently worthless, by anyone who’s ever personally driven a car, ta...

The transformation of the American economy is largely due to the debasement of common currency or legal tender, the disincentives which have followed to discourage savings, and the dramatic changes to the composition and complexion of investment, the largest of which can be aptly characterized as (direct or indirect) government spending at the real yet unseen expense of business investment.  Whereas direct government spending once constituted a mere 3 percent of American economic activity at the turn of the twentieth century, it has ballooned to greater than 40 percent of that pie today.  Notwithstanding the rear view mirror economists who attribute growth to spending, purchasing power and meaningful enhancements to the average standard of living follow from changes to marginal (and utile) productivity, not just to the vivacious velocity of money.  Of course, the identifiable factors which have been popularly lauded for driving nominal economic growth in the new Ame...

Today, I witnessed a conversation between YouTube commenters which inspired me to shed some light on myopic deduction practices and failures of economics.  The original commenter posted the following remarks: “I’m a fan of the GT350R. I can’t wait to buy one. I’ll wait until California adds one more dollar per gallon to gas. Hopefully that would bring down the price.”  This individual commits the common fallacy of focusing on one feature of the picture while neglecting to appreciate the whole thing.  In an environment of rising fuel prices, the transportation and production costs will scale upward, leaving new production to clear markets at increasingly higher prices or otherwise clear at lower prices with inferior quality.  If the original poster intends to purchase a used GT350R, as opposed to the implied new purchase, then he needn't exclusively wait for higher fuel prices to mitigate demand, as the average (non-collectible) vehicle will invariably depre...