Inequality is intractable. I’ve written about this often. Innate inequalities — the unequal distribution of superior qualities — naturally create social and economic inequalities, and the only way to level these natural differences is by the creation and imposition of new inequalities of power. It follows, then, that a social movement (or, properly understood, a […]
January 16, 2014 – 4:58 pm
For today’s reading, we have an essay on income inequality by tech entrepreneur Paul Graham. Mr. Graham makes two key points: First, he reminds us that in a free society, the natural diversity of human characteristics, talents, and dispositions will always result in inequalities of wealth: When people care enough about something to do it […]
September 19, 2013 – 1:40 pm
Cleverly displayed, using animated maps. Here.
October 27, 2011 – 11:28 am
Over at the AEI blog, a new piece by Jim Pethokoukis calls into question some received wisdom about income inequality. Disappointingly, it carries a provocative title — 7 Reasons Why Obama Is Wrong About Income Inequality — but then, as one reader points out in the the comment thread, completely neglects to cite the particular […]
The comment-thread to my recent post about Joe Biden’s fawning tribute to the deceased thug George Floyd turned in some interesting directions. Among them was the observation that Christianity was no longer able to serve as the scaffolding that once built, and braced up, Western civilization. Was this a failing of Christianity itself? I remarked […]
The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below: 1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not […]
November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium. Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without […]
I note two related items in the media today: one is this story, about introducing a new “adversity score” to the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the other is this essay, by Heather Mac Donald, about the poor performance of “diversity hires” in elite law-firms. The link between them, is, of course, an unfortunate truth, previously […]
Two posts ago we read Michael Anton’s emailed reply to a collection of questions I’d posted in Part 1 of this series. I mailed back a response, and received another reply in return. (There the correspondence stands, for the moment, as I’ve been traveling and working the past couple of days. I’d also like to […]
My last two posts (here and here) were in response to an extensive review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas West’s new book on the American Founding, and to a comment by our reader Jacques. In Saturday’s post I laid out some questions that I thought the review, and Jacques’ comment, had raised. I did not […]
Last Saturday’s post was about the scuffle between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over the role of genetics in the varying distribution of cognitive, behavioral, and personality traits in distinct human populations (and over Mr. Harris’s association with Charles Murray, whom people like Klein accuse of peddling racism and “pseudoscience”). I linked to Andrew Sullivan, […]
Our friend Bill Vallicella has posted an interesting essay on the Left’s attempt to maintain a doctrine of transcendent egalitarianism while scraping away the transcendent. He describes the problem as follows (after noting that our academic institutions have become “Leftist seminaries”): What explains the fervor and fanaticism with which the Left’s equality dogma is upheld? […]
Making the rounds recently: an excellent article at Quillette about the ongoing purge of moderates and conservatives from the social sciences. After beginning with some evidence that the purge itself is real, accelerating, and is driving the academic community sharply to the left, the author, Uri Harris, compares two ideological narratives. The first is the […]
Our reader and commenter Robert, a.k.a. “Whitewall”, has sent along an item from the University of Chicago Divinity School’s newsletter Sightings. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the mind of the postmodern cult-Marx priesthood that haunts the halls of the 21st-century Cathedral. (That is to say, the ones who are responsible for the grooming and education […]
Sturdy class structures, although they may diminish individual opportunity, keep superior genes, when they arise, within each class. In doing so, then, they strengthen classes at every level. High social mobility, by contrast, tends to “boil off” superior individuals, who, when they are given the opportunity to do so, move up and out — taking […]
November 1, 2016 – 2:14 pm
In a post from 2013, we quoted Will and Ariel Durant on the persistent delusion of Equality. The pursuit of an unattainable equality has been a reliable political implement throughout the modern history of the West, despite the natural impossibility of its achievement. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read […]
October 5, 2015 – 5:07 pm
In the mail today came a link to an excellent, informative, and even-handed article on inequality, social mobility, and the heritability of advantageous traits. The author is an Englishman named Toby Young, and he zeroes in nicely on the question one comes to once one has hacked through the thorny ideological thicket surrounding these topics. […]
August 3, 2015 – 10:36 pm
The inescapable Neil deGrasse Tyson informs us that scientific illiteracy is “a tragedy of our times”. Not “the” tragedy of our times, mind you, just “a” tragedy of our times. There are, you see, just so many of them — so many, in fact, that it’s becoming hard to keep track of which ones to […]
Here is the French Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius: M. Fabius seeks an international arrangement to impose strictures upon the sovereign nations of the world in an attempt to control the Earth’s climate. (That such an arrangement will also transfer aspects of that sovereignty to gentlemen such as himself and his professional colleagues is, I believe, […]
February 6, 2014 – 5:41 pm
Some good reads from the Web today: Matt Ridley on inequality. Kevin Williamson on feminism. From the Statistics Lab at Cambridge University, a look at some climate-alarmist buncombe.
February 1, 2014 – 10:59 pm
Over the years readers have mentioned to me that too much of the discussion here takes place in the comment-threads, which are often far longer than the posts themselves. The days go by, the posts roll away down the screen, and exchanges that happen days after the original post are, effectively, hidden. I’ve been trying […]
January 4, 2014 – 12:11 am
They’ve been piling up a bit, I’m afraid. — Graphene: the gift that keeps on giving. — Remember what happened to the Shakers, kitten. — How to keep your man. — The Daily Telegraph, just a century ago. — “You will know us by the trail of dead.” — Ice, Ice, Baby. — Eagle grinders: […]
November 7, 2013 – 12:24 am
— Hovercrafts. No eels. — Safety first! — Thomas Sowell on race war in America. — From Isegoria: the original Peabody & Sherman! — Hayek rips Keynes a new one. — Gordon Ramsay explains how to cook a perfect steak. — A mendacious montage. — Jowls a-flappin. — It’s always in the last place you […]
In 1965, near the end of a long lifetime of scholarly study and reflection, the great historians Will and Ariel Durant brought forth a slim volume called The Lessons of History, a companion to their magnum opus, The Story of Civilization. The third chapter, Biology and History, deals with topics now associated with the dissident […]
December 12, 2012 – 11:09 am
Townhall.com has published a fascinating article about household income inequality in America, based on a novel analysis of historical income data. Applying the mathematics of log-normal distributions to census data for the incomes of working and non-working individuals of both sexes, the authors found a way of simulating various household combinations that allows them to […]
November 29, 2012 – 5:34 pm
Here’s an item that’s making the rounds today: it’s the abstract of a paper published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. The topic is something called “benevolent sexism”, which refers to all those “chivalrous” things gentlemen do for ladies: holding the door for them, seating them at table, offering them your arm during a stroll, […]
October 31, 2012 – 10:47 am
Here’s a video that’s making the rounds, from Steven Crowder (the fellow who gave us that Lena Dunham parody a few days ago). In this one Mr. Crowder “redistributes” Hallowe’en candy to reduce inequality. Needless to say, the kids he’s taking the candy from don’t like it. It’s a funny video, sort of, and yes, […]
February 26, 2012 – 7:06 pm
A while back, in a private correspondence with a conservative blogger about what the Left means when it talks about “social justice”, I wrote the following: Daniel Dennett once wrote that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. The central principle of liberal “justice”, and of Rawlsian justice, is exactly that: to […]
September 13, 2011 – 10:33 pm
A while back I quoted some passages from the book Before the Sabbath, which is a year-long collection of daily musings by the longshoreman and autodidact Eric Hoffer, written in 1974 and 1975, toward the end of his life. I was reminded of Mr. Hoffer again today, when I ran across an item by Matt […]
Anthony Daniels, who writes as “Theodore Dalrymple”, gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Sixth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society, in Bodrum, Turkey. (The P.F.S. looks like an interesting outfit, by the way, if you have libertarian sympathies, and for this meeting they fielded an impressive lineup of speakers.) In […]
April 26, 2011 – 10:08 pm
For colleges, men’s sports are often hugely profitable, while women’s sports nearly always aren’t. This caused many schools not to support women’s sports at nearly the same level as men’s. Add to that the fact that far fewer young women than men are even interested in joining college sports teams — due, no doubt, to […]
February 1, 2011 – 1:15 am
Things are just so terribly unfair, so pitilessly unequal in this awful society that some days it’s all I can do not to retire to the attic with a notepad and a length of stout rope. Today’s Times brings to our attention yet another clamant injustice: egregious gender inequality at Wikipedia, where it turns out […]
January 24, 2011 – 11:18 pm
The show trial of Lars Hedegaard, the president of the International Free Press Society, took place today in Copenhagen. He stands accused, for remarks he made in a privately taped interview, of violating a Danish law that allows a prosecutor to bring criminal charges against anyone deemed to have spoken words that insult or degrade […]
October 28, 2010 – 9:07 am
Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, wrote a sharp little post a couple of days ago about the divergent philosophical assumptions that inspirit the political struggle between liberals and conservatives. The problem, he argues, can be represented as an aporetic tetrad: In illustration of my thesis, consider the the values of individual liberty and material (as […]
On the front page of today’s Times we read about Kyrgyzstan, which is busy providing intelligent observers, at sanguinary cost, with yet another data-point about the incomparable blessings of Diversity. Meanwhile, Dennis Mangan brings to our attention an outstanding paper on said blessings, by Australian academic Frank Salter (original here, but visit Dennis’s place for […]
Well, it’s been kind of an eventful morning. My response to a form letter from President Obama’s political strategist David Plouffe has led to a truly mind-expanding back-and-forth exchange, and, frankly, I guess I have to say the scales have fallen from my eyes. I’ve been a pretty harsh critic of the whole Democratic political […]
French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced yesterday that the burqa — the head-to-toe garment worn by some Muslim women — is “not welcome” in France, and the French National Assembly is now preparing an inquiry into whether the enshrouding of women to shield them from the view of men other than their owners is so fundamentally […]
September 13, 2008 – 10:43 pm
As always, there is a provocative exhange of views taking place over at the website Edge.org. It began with an essay by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt entitled Why Do People Vote Republican?
No-one should be surprised by the grumbling on the Left about the Supreme Court’s decision on racial discrimination, for reasons that hardly need enumeration here. In broaching the subject at all I am on thin ice, as a white male: a member of a morally stunted, congenitally tainted group that is deemed in many circles […]
Michael Moore is on his (presumably steel-reinforced) soapbox once again. In his newest movie, Sicko, he brings his folksy propaganda style to bear on the American health-care system, which is, he alleges, fundamentally inferior to the socialized arrangements in place in other countries, including even the tyrannized and impoverished nation of Cuba (whose “revolutionary” medical […]
January 20, 2007 – 10:57 pm
There are few topics that get folks as worked up these days as the notion that there might in fact be innate differences amongst people (or even worse, statistical differences between identifiable groups of people). You may recall that Harvard president Lawrence Summers was tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail for so much as suggesting that known differences in the distribution of various cognitive attributes in men and women might account for some of the unequal success of the sexes in the sciences.
December 14, 2006 – 6:31 pm
I call the attention of readers to two recent posts on the subject of “equality”. The first is by Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher; the second is by the inimitable Deogolwulf, writing at his website The Joy of Curmudgeonry. Both make the same excellent point, which I shall reiterate here.