“The capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas is enough to define intellect but not enough to encompass intelligence, which involves combining with judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory factors and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges. Intelligence minus judgment equals intellect. Wisdom is the rarest quality of all- the ability to combine intellect, knowledge, experience, and judgment in a way to produce a coherent understanding. Wisdom is the fulfillment of the ancient admonition, “With all of your getting, get understanding.” Wisdom requires self-discipline and an understanding of the realities of the world, including the limitations of one’s own experience and of reason itself. The opposite of intellect is dullness or slowness, but the opposite of wisdom is foolishness, which is far more dangerous.”
“George Orwell said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them, for no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
From Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
There are those who see our financial problem as a moral failure. In one sense it is, but not in the sense those who wish to frame it in moral tones believe.
To blame greed for the meltdown is simplistic and irrelevant. Greed has been with us forever. Why would it appear in its ugliness now?
I would say that our economic collapse was the fault of a moral supremacy that ignored sound economic principles and common sense. In an effort to encourage home ownership for the poor, the government demanded that prudent lending standards be forced out of the system. To assure a market the government through Fannie Mae guaranteed mortgages and ridiculous financial instruments to feed the market.
When alarms were being sounded the regulators and legislators were being hounded with political pressure from lobbyists for the very firms they were regulating. Chris Dodd, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama were among the largest recipients of campaign funds from Fannie Mae. Barney Frank and many others loudly protested those who warned of a problem, insisting that these programs providing housing for the lower income were somewhat sacrosanct.
It was the unwillingness to understand the limits of government to fulfill our moral wishes that fed this mania. It was our pursuit of moral justice through government force that led taxpayer funded ACORN to pressure banks to make high risk loans to those who otherwise would not have qualified.
It was not greed or the absence of morality that caused this disaster; it was the ignorance of basic economic principles and the belief that the government can create wealth by making promises it can’t fulfill and that it can erase risk by ignoring it. In its malfeasance it made the poor worse off and destroyed equity value for millions of the middle class.
If there is a moral failure it is that the government refused to accept its limitations, and that the voters wanted a government that will promise them everything.
The greed of those who wanted a modest house they could not afford caused us more damage than the titans on Wall Street who found a way to get rich delivering the voters their delusion.
From Randall Hoven at American Thinker
Graph of the Day December 24,2009
Julia Baird writes an interesting piece in Newsweek “Positively Downbeat- Sometimes Happiness isn’t everything.”
She argues that our focus on positive thinking has made us gloomy; to overlook problems, unfairness, incompetence and stupidity.
And stupidity is certainly not limited to the uneducated. A lack of depth has encouraged more certainty that is merited in an uncertain world. The arrogance that comes from combining the morally weak with a lot of education often in subjects that have little semblance to reality have caused much of the distress in our lives.
Mathematical models that seek to emulate human response are doomed to fail. Their excrement has made Wall Street a financial toilet. Business leaders should have degrees in philosophy and history rather than management and math. Some welding and shop classes would also be worthwhile.
Books such as “In Search of Excellence”, “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” have all sought to meticulously study successful companies to provide a blueprint for the rest of us morons to follow. But in all three books most of the companies they followed UNDERPERFORMED the market in the years after the books were published. Success, like most human endeavors and characteristics, is more difficult to reduce to a formula than we thought.
Just as a bad economy makes business more efficient by clarifying the essentials, so our tragedies and setbacks help us clarify what is important in our personal lives. Blind optimism does not build sound character. Those who are ready to encounter the uncertain, the unexpected and the unwanted are the survivors. As Julia quoted Eleanor Roosevlet “happiness is not a goal, it is a byproduct.”
“I became a conservative by being around liberals and I became a libertarian by being around conservatives. You realized that there’s something distinctly in common between the two groups, the left and the right; the worst part of each of them is the moralizing. On the left, you have people who want to dictate your behavior under the guise of tolerance. Unless you disagree with them. Then the tolerance goes out the window. Which kind of negates the whole idea of tolerance. That’s the politically correct tolerance. Then when you become a conservative, the other kind of moralizing comes from religion. ”
From Greg Gutfield ”What You’re Left With Is Libertarianism” in the October 2009 Reason
HKO comments- so is Libertarianism a political movement without morals or one without ‘moralizing’? Is there a difference?
F.A. Hayek pushed a decentralist, libertarian line instead (of conservatism), because he believed that none of us has a monopoly on truth or knowledge and that “to live or work successfully with others requires.. an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which.. others are allowed to produce different ends.”
Nick Gillespie in the October 2009 Reason “Conservatives with Pink Cheeks”
In an interesting article in American Thinker Selwyn Duke proposes that modern psychology substitues ‘disorders’ for sins, and replaces religious values with psychologial theories that remove the human’s repsonsibility for his own actions.
The article in full.
an excerpt:
The danger of this may be obvious. I cannot prove to you that God and, therefore, Truth and true morality exist; I cannot show you a soul in a Petri dish. But this is undeniable: If you convince people they’re not responsible for their actions, you’ve set the stage for great evil to occur, as they will be able to justify anything suiting their fancy.
As to this, I recently read about psychiatrists who are labeling the desire to engage in excessive text messaging a mental disorder. Then there is “Muscle Dysmorphia,” or the obsessive belief that one isn’t muscular enough; “celebriphilia,” the strong desire for amorous relations with a celebrity; “Intermittent Explosive Disorder,” or road rage; “Sibling Rivalry Disorder”; “Mathematics Disorder”; “Caffeine Related Disorder”; and “Expressive Writing disorder,” to cite just a handful of the hundreds of made-up conditions in the DSM. And every time a new variety is conjured up, psychology’s market and earning potential increases. I have to wonder, though, what do they call the obsession with labeling behaviors mental disorders? Some might call it greed.
What future could a person have with an “illusion,” even the very attractive one that Freud seemed to believe was the opiate of the masses? Yet, with over 20 million Americans, 40 percent of college students and 1 out of 9 schoolchildren on psychiatrist-prescribed psychoactive drugs, one is left to wonder what realm is truly most deserving of that title.
HKO note- it was Karl Marx, not Freud who referred to religion as the ‘opiate of the masses.’
3,000 years ago a group of people came up with the idea of not working for an entire day every week. This day was reserved as the Sabbath, a day of spiritual reflection.
This was a radical idea at the time when people had to work seven days a week just to keep from starving. In fact this idea was so radical that the rest of the westen world has been trying to wipe out the perpetrators of this insanity ever since.
I contend that this idea was a pivotal point in Western Civilization. This day of rest, spiritual leisure if you will, allowed man to think; to ponder his existence. I t also led to a reflection that came up with better ideas on how to produce and improve our existence. This led to an exponential progress that led to the miracles that are now taken for granted.
Other than Cathy Truett at Chik Filet I think this is lost on most of us.
Unspun - Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation by Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson does a good job of demonstrating how information is spun to achieve objectives beyond the facts.
But a few of the subjects repeated require more than mere interpretation of facts. The Iraqi war is more complicated than the mere possible errors of the existence of WMDs (yes I said possible, I belive this information is still incomplete). These errors and the readiness of many of us to believe them is a legitimate source of inquiry and concern. But there were other factors involved in that decision.
The clarification of the facts about the estate tax or as the spinners love to call it, The Death Tax, misses the point. Yes, only a very small percentage of the public actually loose their business or property to estate tax but the amount of resources such as expensive life insurance and estate planning used to avoid crippling estate taxes belies a cost far in excess of the actual property lost to estate taxes.
It is not enough to study the facts, you must expand the question and examine the facts beneath the facts. The answers you get are only as good as the questions you ask.
35 years ago in college statistics we had to read a wonderful, still in print volume called How to Lie with Statistics. unSpun is a good companion piece, but it lacks some essential depth on some of the more complicated issues.
