George Gilder, that pompous poseur, has a new interview in the Jerusalem Post. It’s more self-serving nonsense and hardly worth noting, except that he does include a short summary of his position on everything.
Your life’s work has been eclectic, to put it mildly. What do the relations between men and women, supply-side economics, microchips and intelligent design have in common?
I believe that the universe is hierarchical, with creation at the top – the idea that there’s a creator and that we, at our best, act in his image. This top-down model is what all of my work has in common. I sensed that the basic flaw and failure of feminism was its gradient toward pure animal passion with no procreative purpose. In economics, I believed that it was the supply that created the demand. In my examination of computers and telecom, and subsequently biology, I saw the same thing. That’s really how I came into the intelligent design movement – through the recognition of this same structure that I’d previously examined in sexuality and economics, information theory, computer science and network theory.
I’m a religious person. So are the Darwinians religious people: They believe in an anti-religion of materialism that liberates them to pursue pleasure any way they wish. It’s the highest purpose of their existence. They thus believe in a random, futilitarian universe where – if they’re existentialists – they might imagine that occasionally a heroic human being could assert some purpose above the froth of randomness, but in general, we’re all doomed to decay and destruction. That’s pretty much the philosophy, and it’s debauched a whole century of intellect. I think we’re going to transcend it in the 21st century
In other words, he’s going to start with his cherished delusion of a hierarchical universe, and then he’s going to distort the evidence to support it. Good going, George—way to be an anti-scientist!
Feminism: there is no “gradient toward pure animal passion”. The basic objectives of feminism are equality and liberty, not wild, consequence-free rutting. I think he has confused feminism with “Girls Gone Wild.” And wait…what does his explanation have to do with a top-down hierarchy? Does he also think women should be subservient to procreative demands? This is simply incoherent, and doesn’t fit with his overarching explanation.
Economics: Gilder is a failed economic pundit. Doesn’t the fact that his theories flopped so mightily in the marketplace suggest that those theories are, well, wrong? And again, what does this have to do with hierarchies? Is he now favoring planned economies? There’s a section early in the interview which is an incredibly muddled attempt to tar “Darwinism” with Marxism, which is not only factually wrong, but wrong in principle, and just plain weird given Gilder’s love of hierarchical control.
Computer science and network theory: Gilder knows nothing about either, and has no training in the subjects. I suspect there are readers who know far more about the subject than Gilder: is network theory all about setting up strict hierarchies of top-down control?
Biology: Gilder has never taken a single course in biology. Everything he has written on the subject that I’ve read is breath-takingly ignorant—he makes it all up as he goes along.
I’m going to have to call him on that assertion that materialism makes hedonism the highest purpose of our existence: I don’t think so, and he might want to look into ID-positive pleasurianism. I also don’t believe we’re doomed to decay and destruction, as long as we’re willing to fight ignoramuses like Gilder.
It’s amazing that anyone can take a fraud like Gilder at all seriously—his true common guiding principle is to dress up incoherent old myths and conservative prejudices in his poorly understood technobabble. Putting a ranting Old Testament patriarch in a shiny cheap mylar space-costume with a Buck Rogers toy raygun in his hands doesn’t make him look contemporary and progressive—it makes him even more laughable.
Strange than an economist should favor ID. The only economic system that used ID was communism – it failed. Economics is rather a good idea of system that works well with very little planning. It sort of “evolves”.
Yes. This is why the entire Internet goes down every time the Master Control Program crashes: without the hub, the wheel cannot turn.
I don’t think “anti” means what Gilder thinks it means. It does explain how he can call himself a scientist while believing in anti-science, though.
In a certain narrow sense, I think we are; thermodynamics is a bitch. But it has few practical consequences that aren’t negotiable, as long as the fusion reactor conveniently located a mere 93 million miles away keeps running. On the small scale of one planet, in the short term of a few billion years, we can build fast enough to stay ahead of destruction.
Indeed. Isn’t one of the pre-eminent ideas in economics that of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market? The idea that seemingly random phenomena can “self-organize”? That from the apparent chaos of the market, order (price/demand equilibria) can emerge? Doesn’t ID at its base deny the vety notion of emergent order?
It’s always struck me as rather absurd that conservatives should buy into ID and defend capitalism at the same time…the two seem to me self-contradictory…
I sensed that the basic flaw and failure of feminism was its gradient toward pure animal passion with no procreative purpose
Pure animal passion with no procreative purpose is the classical complaint about MEN: what is the sex that goes to the whores?
Uhmmm…. no. Of course, it’s unclear what he means by network theory, but none of the subjects related to networks that I know of, has anything to do with top-down control.
That first paragraph from Gilder should be reprinted in some collection of examples of how not to communicate intelligently. Gems like how he “sensed” the basic flaw of feminism, sort of like Spider Man…the use of the word gradient to sound scientific but actually mean nothing…and how in his “examination” of biology he “saw the same thing” (as what?).
It’s delightful how disconnected this man is from what it means to study something seriously and to know what one is talking about. He thinks he’s contributing to the understanding of all these incredibly complex systems; in fact, he is like a 4 year old child who, given a plastic child-sized guitar with no strings, strums along with his daddy’s band, thinking he is playing with them.
Gilder said:
Can anyone tell me in what way assembler is any more intelligible than binary strings? Both requires a guide for translating it into something we can understand. The same can to a lesser degree be said about source code written in higher level languages.
This is why the entire Internet goes down every time the Master Control Program crashes.
Wasn’t this explained to everyone’s satisfaction in The Matrix Reloaded?
OK, so he admits that the medievalists were right. That’s not surprising, in that he favors control by the few, accumulation of surplus at the top instead of it going where it is needed, and the often dissolute and libertine lifestyles that go along with such excess. I guess he sees no irony in pushing social Darwinism as he embraces IDiocy.
Let’s not forget Gilder’s past, more coherent, statement:
If he’s worth listening to at all, then we have cause to suspect that he was in fact drawn to ID because it has no content (no, it doesn’t necessarily follow from the above). That his vapid, vacuous musings do connect words together into meaningful sequences, but they never reach to anything beyond the symbolism of dollars, ideologies made to be excuses, and content-free “science” adopted only to shore up the rest of his excess and disregard for others.
Darwinians, of course, are religious persons, pursuing their lives of materialist excess (why do I continually think that he’s talking about himself and those he prostitutes his mind for?), you know, the Dalai Lama, Pope John Paul II, Teilhard de Chardin, a good many rabbis. Those sorts of wastrels and libertines. Or should we bring up the massive excesses of Francis Collins, Richard Lewontin, Dobzhansky, and Simpson? Well, he knows as much about biology and biologists as he does about religion, aside, that is, from his religion of accumulating surplus.
I’d disagree that Gilder’s altogether a failed economist, pundit, and economic adviser, however. He has some spectacular failures under his belt, but along the lines of getting all that you can and beggaring your neighbor (some capitalists do increase wealth, about all he’s done is to try to capture it through market strategies), he’s also had successes.
I think we know better why he adopted ID now, though, which is to scapegoat evolution for his own sins.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
From the aritcle:
Independent of its material embodiment?! I guess it’s just a conspiracy among the hardware makers, then, that forces me to upgrade my computer every few years.
He’s projecting the human instinct to organize into hierarchical societies onto the rest of nature. The same way that people used to look at ant or bee colonies and think they had a queen, when the “queen” is actually just a reproductive mechanism.
The weird thing is, he sounds like he thinks of himself as being on the “cutting edge”, when he’s actually supporting a medeival world view (“as on earth, so in heaven”).
I despise the bigotry that says that I am an atheist so I can pursue pleasure any way I like. I am an atheist because there is no god. I pursue pleasures in sensible ways, in ways that do not hurt me or others, not “any way [I] wish.” That bullshit line is the equivalent of a charge of blood libel on atheists, and I’ve never seen or felt it to be the least bit true. I remember when I was a teenage Christian and the focus was on showing the heathen kids that “Christians can have fun, too.” And now I see a focus on nothing else but having fun in the church. Meanwhile, I see secularists caring about the long-term sustainability of the environment and humanity. Seriously, fuck him.
“I sensed that the basic flaw and failure of feminism was its gradient toward pure animal passion with no procreative purpose”
“I sensed that the basic flaw and failure of feminism was its gradient toward pure animal passion with no procreative purpose”
Nice cheep shot on Gilder’s part there; he is saying Feminism failed because the feminists are sluts. Literally a low blow. Considering the Feminists are traditionally accused of being anti-sexual the sheer outrageousness of Gilder’s comments means he is just trolling and he found a paper foolish enough to go along with him.
It is also very important to note that Gilder’s uninformed personal opinions (“I believe, I sensed , I saw, I came…”) get published in the Jerusalem Post owned by disgusting Richard Perle. Perle is both the prince of Israel and the prince of total death and darkness. Two “pompous poseurs” with “license to fabricate.”
Gilder is a fraud. The only reason anyone bothers with him is because he is funny in a morbid and peculiar way. This is 3 stooges type slap stick comedy with some guy pretending to be an intellectual. The comedy comes from watching him repeatedly fall flat on his face.
I apologize for being a non-expert way out of my league here, but in response to Mark Borok: Isn’t the instinct to organize into hierarchical societies found in damn near all social mammals? Goodall found it in the chimpanzees, Lorenz found it in the wolves, etc.
Gilder bloviates:
I believe Epicurus debunked the notion that materialism must lead to hedonism quite a while ago.
And even before Epicurus, did not Democritus counsel, “The great pleasures are derived from the contemplation of beautiful works”? Didn’t he advise, “Cheerfulness comes to man through moderation in enjoyment and harmony of life; excess and defect are apt to change and to produce great movements in the soul.”
In fact, ARPANET was originally designed INTENTIONALLY without a ‘top-down’ design so that the loss of a given node wouldn’t bring other nodes down.
The 7 layer model that Gilder is talking about is the OSI Model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model). The OSI model is just one way to think of the layers in your network stack working.
In reality, networks are generally designed around the DoD or TCP/IP model, which has 4 or 5 layers and maps a bit better to ‘real work’ experience.
I have no idea how he thinks this proves his point, since the layer model is mostly intended to provide abstraction guidelines. I.E. changes in one layer isn’t supposed to effect other layers. TCP shouldn’t know how IP transports data, which in turn shouldn’t know how ARP works, in turn should care about the physical cable it’s running on.
Stupid strawman and wrong. What failure? Last I heard, sexual discrimination was illegal and women can and often do go to schools, get good jobs and careers, run for political office and so on. And no thanks to the Gilders of the world.
Gilder wrote, “In economics, I believed that it was the supply that created the demand.”
Yeah. Tell that to the American automakers who have thousands of SUVs rotting in dealerships. I’m not saying that it was a good idea for the car companies to focus on building SUVs, but the belief that if ‘they build them- they will sell’ is garbage.
Gilder’s belief doesn’t make it so. Why doesn’t someone send him a modern economics book, written sometime after Jean-Baptise Say, which adds the other 3/4 of the economic cycle and includes Keynes’ insight into the impact of government spending?
Sorry. As an automotive enginer, that sentance touched a nerve.
Yes, because the 20th century was completely devoid of any sort of technological or sociological advancement. I mean the 19th century gave us the steam locomotive, the tin can, the telegraph, and the emancipation proclamation. What did the 20th century have? Nothing that’s what! Right? Who’s with me?
“Can anyone tell me in what way assembler is any more intelligible than binary strings?”
Well, that’s the thing, ASM is designed specifically so that a human programmer can competently pass instructions to the assembler to get the computer to perform the computations he wants. IDiots like Gilder constantly make analogies to things they know are “designed” to give the impression that biological things are similar. It’s intuition in the place of argument. The analogy of DNA to computer-code fails at at least two levels I can think of:
1. Cell DNA is not Turing complete. It can be formulated as a code, but it’s only function is transcription from one set of chemicals to another (that’s probably imprecise, but you get the idea).
2. DNA has no other layer of implementation beyond the cell. There are no assemblers, high-level compilers or anything analogous passing instructions to it.
“Both requires a guide for translating it into something we can understand. The same can to a lesser degree be said about source code written in higher level languages.”
Yeah, but that’s the thing. They say that primarily because they know that compilers are designed and they can get away with all sorts of innuendo. But there are serious flaws, just like when they make analogies to man-made machines that don’t reproduce or are unaffected by copying-infidelity.
Jesus Harold Christ on a titanium pogo stick, is that man a self-important, clueless blowhard. Does his over inflated ego come with a patch kit?
“there’s a creator and that we, at our best, act in his image”
2000+ years of theology, and this vague, banal, meaningless shit is the best he’s got to offer?
What, pray tell, is acting in his image?
Maybe he should stick to defining his belief system a little better before he uses it as a springboard for all his cockamamie ideas about science and biology.
Network theory encompasses more than just the internet, though this is by far the best real world example of it. NT studies the flow of information between discreet entities.
Other fields include biology and economics. Gene regulatory networks would be a good example.
What ignorance Gilder is dabbling in here is saying in effect “All graphs are trees” which is a level of idiocacy along the lines of saying “All rectangles are squares”
Yes, network theory does concern itself with the study of hierachical objects, but in general those are less interesting. NT makes no assumption of there being a root, or ‘god’ element.
Well, it did give us Gilder, Falwell, and Egnor.
But I think the complaint must be “more spiritual.” In the 19th century we got spiritualism, fundamentalist cults, social Darwinism, and Victorian social mores. You know, all good stuff. The plane, the internet (actually, George ought to appreciate the latter, since it gives him scope for blithering and contradicting himself), molecular biology, see, that’s all materialism, and more importantly, the uneducated buffoon doesn’t understand any of it.
The telegraph and a capacity to sell snake oil is all that a good spiritual boy like George needs to con a few folk. Everything else sucks.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
No, he got that one right. “Girls Gone Wild” is a clear example of top-down systems.
Wow! Both Phyllis Schlafly and George Gilder surfacing on this blog in the same week. I hated both of them in the seventies, when I was a rabid feminist. I’m still a feminist, by the way, just a tad more mellow. I don’t hit as often, what with my arthritis and all.
It is also very important to note that Gilder’s uninformed personal opinions (“I believe, I sensed , I saw, I came…”) get published in the Jerusalem Post owned by disgusting Richard Perle. Perle is both the prince of Israel and the prince of total death and darkness
Is it important to know one asshole from another?
The Jerusalem Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The comment about network theory is a perfect demonstration of the fallacy in all his logic. You CAN look at a network as a top-down hierarchy. But that is just one view of it; the truth is that many components of it can work autonomously, and a guiding principle in network engineering is designing the network such that failures in one part don’t bubble over to another. To quote Willy Wonka, it goes sideways and slantways and longways and backways, frontways and squareways and any other ways you can think of.
How many times have you talked to people like this who, in order to fit the world into a certain view, simply cast out (or fail to see, purposefully or subconsciously) the other variables? Truly, “poverty of imagination” is an apropos and well-suited term.
And yet again, we see from anti-feminists that it is women’s role to be the gatekeepers of sexual behavior. Men are helpless before a woman’s charms, apparently.
Gilder wrote
Would that be the same Weinberg, who in A Designer Universe? said
No reference to alternative universes, no saying that “the earth and life are astronomically improbable”. Rather he seems to be saying that the Earth and life is quite probable.
I started to write a long blogpost about the interview, but gave up – too much stupidity there.
Kristjan Wagner:
This is not true – there are people that learn to read and write assembler the same way any other programming language can be read and written. It’s just much more difficult to do for medium-sized programs, and impractical for large programs.
And in college I knew a guy who could disassemble binary (for one common architecture) almost as fast as he could type.
But that’s irrelevant – we know assembler and binary representations of computer er code were designed, because we have detailed records of that design. Furthermore, as one learns a particular assembler or binary representation of computer code, one discovers many familiar patterns which are known to occur in other human-designed products. The record of DNA’s evolution – which is reconstructed from various remains, including fossils, and also by mathematical analysis of DNA sequences – contains no hint of design.
In short – if DNA was designed, why do we not have fossils of the designer?
Spaulding said:
Lol, that was a good one. :)
And it’s Spaulding (#27) for the win!
I note in passing that Gilder manages (by hook or by crook) to confuse the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics with the “multiverse” implicit in cosmological theories of eternal inflation.
If social animals constituted a large part, or even more than a tiny fraction of a percent, of the natural world…then you might have a point. But they don’t.
I hope he slams stamp collecting too because you’re not going to make babies that way either.
natural cynic, Grazi for correcting my false statement about Perle owning the Jerusalem Post. Perle is labeled as a “director” of the J Post. Murdoch and Perle is a marriage from hell.
Yeah, that’s kind of what “social” means.
No surprise that far right Jerusalem Post prints rightwing superstitious garbage. That is what it usually does.
“Isn’t the instinct to organize into hierarchical societies found in damn near all social mammals? Goodall found it in the chimpanzees, Lorenz found it in the wolves, etc.”
I 1) didn’t want to get too wordy and 2) wanted to stress the fact of Gilder’s (and others like him) projecting that which is most familiar to him onto the universe. Being a human (insert snide remark here), he sees the universe in human terms. Just the way people always have. And presents it as some kind of original, personal insight.
Mark Chu-Carroll answers PZ’s question about network theory here.
Read and enjoy.
Oddly enough, until the widespread adoption of agriculture at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene, most human societies were likely non-hierarchical and were instead egalitarian, based on current hunter-gather societies among other evidence.
Richard Borshay Lee and other anthropologists have documented traditions among some of these cultures that have the effect of reducing material inequity or punishing ambition and ego. An example of this includes ‘insulting the meat’ of the !Kung San.
Indeed. Isn’t one of the pre-eminent ideas in economics that of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market? The idea that seemingly random phenomena can “self-organize”? That from the apparent chaos of the market, order (price/demand equilibria) can emerge? Doesn’t ID at its base deny the vety notion of emergent order?
I have a feeling that the ID people think that the invisible hand actually exists, and is the economic equivalent of the Designer.
They do enjoy misinterpreting things, I’ll give them that.
First of all, GGW is not a top-down system. It’s a top-up system. Whenever the girls bare their breasts, it is always by LIFTING the shirt, never by pulling it down.
Secondly, we all know that the Internet is a system of tubes. When the entire system is down, it’s pretty obvious what happened – someone has blocked one or more tubes with a ginormous file of a dancing baby or a cute kitten eating soup.
I’ve gotten that impression from some economists, actually. Caveat here that my impression of “economists” has been, to the most part, shaped by (a) my drunken undergraduate economics lecturer and (b) the econo-pundits one encounters in the media; I’m sure there are serious intelligent economists that aren’t filled with that that maketh plants strong.
Other than the believe in a real Invisible Hand, the big impression I’ve gotten from economists is that they think that their science is prescriptive. That is, “The free market favors production without environmental controls, therefore environmental controls are bad,” for example; compare the “Evolution favors promiscuity in males, so males should be promiscuous” that gets ascribed to real scientists. Does anyone else think the economists are giving the rest of us a bad name?
“So are the Darwinians religious people: They believe in an anti-religion of materialism that liberates them to pursue pleasure any way they wish”
Which reminds me, where are we holding the next all-in Scientist’s orgy?
Same place as last year?
Putting a ranting Old Testament patriarch in a shiny cheap mylar space-costume with a Buck Rogers toy raygun in his hands doesn’t make him look contemporary and progressive–it makes him even more laughable.
Kudos – that synthesized a lot of my thoughts on modern, sophisticated (by religious standards) apologists trying to defend misogynistic, racist 13th century BC tribal chieftains. Quote of the week.
Lytefoot comments, “Does anyone else think the economists are giving the rest of us a bad name?”
I’m not certain who ‘us’ refers to in that sentance, but as someone who has been studying economic theory for the past five years (as a dilletante, not directed, which means all my conclusions are highly suspect, and I know it) economics appears to be a field where the social aspects are downplayed in order to concentrate on the two prevailing models; Classical and Keynesian.
The pundits who attempt to explain economic theory seem to have forgotten that ALL of economics is about creating a model to explain what happens as humans assign value in an arbitrary fashion. Gold and gems are worthless to an aardvark, but less pollution from production may have value to a human being.
Economic theory can accomodate the idea that humans will assign a higher value to production which pollutes less. The problem is not in the theory, but in the diffusion of the belief that lowered pollution is a benefit.
For the ‘invisible hand’ to operate, the belief of the society (or in some cases simply the industrial leaders of a society) must create a demand for one type of product (in this example a product with clean manufacturing) over a product which doesn’t exhibit the same trait.
Which leads us right back to the problems of education and selfishness. Education is necessary to enable the consumer to be aware of all the short-term and long-term costs of production (including environmental) then the selfishness aspect must be overcome in order to make individual consumers care about the costs inherent to production (why should an American consumer care about the environmental degregation in China?).
Of the two, selfishness seems to be the hardest to combat.
This comment should be read with the understanding that I’ve finished a 3/4 of a bottle of reasonably priced Merlot (not my favorite grape by any means but it was conveniant), and plan to shortly retire to re-read, I think, George MacDonald Fraser’s Flash for Freedom, it’s been awhile.
Ciao!
I am a CSE (Computer Science Engineering) major in my Senior year and I can say that network theory deals with graphs and discrete (that is, non-continuous) (a)symmetry. It does deal, in some cases, with hierarchal structures in some of its sub-categories… However, it is not its main purpose.
I’d like to note that it is more of a Mathematics subject that has applications in Computer Science and not explicitly a Computer Science subject.
Wait… information theory has a top-down structure to it? News to me. Where did he pull that from?
Oh. Never mind.
GG dogmatized:
A friend of mine has four cats. She could supply quite a lot of used cat litter.
There has yet to be any demand created.
Heather, where can I see the cute soup eating the kitten, that I have got to see. Though I can uderstand why such a picture would clog up the tubes :)
Let’s look a little more closely at what this…this…BRAINIAC says:
1. “The Darwinians essentially uphold that the human brain is all the intelligence in the universe.”
Essentially? REALLY? Poll: How many Darwinists think that the human brain is the pinnacle/limit of intelligence in the FRIGGIN’ UNIVERSE?
2. “God requires faith; it is not a matter of science. The science of intelligent design accommodates the possibility of God – even points in some crude way to God, if you want to look at the vector of its thought. But it does not define or specify or prove God.”
Is It, or Isn’t It? Does She, or Doesn’t She? Only his hair-dresser knows for sure. (Apologies to Memorex and Clarol). WHAT “vector of thought”??? WHAT science???
3. “Darwinians think they can prove the absence of God.”
Nah. Some Darwinians do think they can prove the existence of stupidity, ignorance and severe mental illness in fallible and fragile creatures called human beings, though. Say, like in those who insist without a shred of evidence that they KNOW that “God” exists.
4. “You can know every electron or atom across a fiber-optic network…”
So we may presume that Gilder doesn’t cater to quantum mechanics BECAUSE he doesn’t understand it. Or physics in general. This guy doesn’t even understand CLASSICAL physics: electrons or atoms aren’t the particles of interest within a fiber-optic. PHOTONS are.
5. “the key thing that makes us human and makes science possible and makes the theoretician viable, he denies.” [Presumably, Gilder means by “he” some average Joe Scientist. No other reading can be attributed to that passage].
Evidently Gilder hasn’t the capacity to appreciate the crucial importance of the denial of stupidity. There is a certain hierarchical irony in that.
6. QUESTION: “You say that “scientists became theologians.” But it sounds as though what you’re really saying is that they became idolaters.”
ANSWER: “Well, that’s another way of putting it. They made idols of math.”
That explains a lot. What he can’t comprehend he disdains. Proudly.
But lets not be TOO hard on this fancy-talking lunatic. After all, what he REALLY wants to do, according to the intro of this insipid interview, is “[clarify] how his scientific reasoning, political positions and religious faith are not only consistent with one another, but converge in a way that makes sense out of life – and makes life make sense.”
There’s a lesson there: what people like Gilder REALLY worship is the cozy feeling of certitude…evidence and rationality not required.
Now for some aspirin.
Personally, I expect this was largely the case–but it’s worth noting there has been an active debate regarding the degree to which we can extrapolate about the past from hunter-gatherer societies within recent ethnographic memory. As well, there are recorded cases of hunter-gatherer societies that included quite a bit of social hierarchy, notably here in the windward side of the Pacific Northwest. If that case is paradigmatic, it would suggest that human societies begin to hierarchalize (a) when they become less economically marginal and (b) when they sedentarize.
-pr
Good going Gilder!
http://thestubborncurmudgeon.blogspot.com
I have a feeling that the ID people think that the invisible hand actually exists, and is the economic equivalent of the Designer.
I r4call Pat Robertson saying the ‘invisible hand’ is the ‘hand of god’ many years ago.
Blake Stacey, OM: Quite true. Epicurus was not an epicure. He once wrote someone to ask for some cheese so that he could have a “feast” made from bread and the luxurious cheese. He was, as one might suppose, an ascetic, which is IMO too far the other way.
RavenT: Not all sedentarization improves economic well being, though. Think of the groups from Colorado, who were desperate farmers and meagre hunters sometimes. They were sort of “squeezed” and were much nutrionally worse off than (say) the Inuit who were as close as one gets to non-sedentary.,
Lytefoot:
Economics is definitely not prescriptive. In a model we look at the relevant agents in the problem, see what their objectives are, what constraints they face and how the interact.
There is no presumption about what the agents should try to achieve. In applied policy analysis the goal is to understand how the economy works in order to achieve an arbitrary social objective.
Thanks, Keith–that sounds like a very good point to me.
However, that post under my name was actually by Mr. Raven, who forgot to change the defaults on the shared computer to his ‘nym before he hit submit. (Clearly, we’d make really crappy sock puppets, if we ever tried.)
He’s the anthropologist in the family, so I’ll turn this particular specialized discussion back over to him, having learned something myself.
Your life’s work has been eclectic, to put it mildly. What do the relations between men and women, supply-side economics, microchips and intelligent design have in common?
I’d like to suggest the term polyhack, or polyhackery, to describe Mr. Gilder’s life’s work- “claiming expertise in, or finding relationships between, disparate fields one knows nothing about.”
re #58, #60:
Keith: that definitely is a good point. Unfortunately, I did not speak very precisely. By invoking the Pacific Northwest groups, I meant to reference the situation in which there was combined (relative) economic well-being and sedentarization, but the way I wrote the post didn’t make that very clear.
That problem was probably related to the circumstances of posting (nodding off a bit while finishing up), which apparently led to a more fundamental error: I must have refreshed the screen at some point and restored Raven’s defaults, and accidentally posted under her name. I am indeed Mr Raven, inducer of canine defecation (though only when someone else is in my presence). Sorry about that. I’ll return now to my secret identity… all of you are getting verrrry sleeeeeeepy…..
-pr
Polyhack–great term.
I wrote a book on Silicon Valley back in the late 70s, and Gilder read it, along with a few other non-fiction computer titles, and was suddenly proclaiming himself an expert on computer networks. Pretty funny.
Dirkh
http://addiction-dirkh.blogspot.com/
I wish I could have figured out how materialism, atheism and evolution lead to the fantastic promiscuous sex that theists like Gilder attribute to us nonbelievers.
Mark Plus
The 47-year-old virgin and atheist