1. Affordability laws decrease the incentive for improvement to the physical structures being invested in by developers
2. Affordability laws bring in tenants who have less to offer the community over all, including money (to spend on other things like retail and improvements to their own homes), educational attainment (to help school rankings), or crime (the poor commit more violent crimes than the wealthy)
3. People use their homes like bank accounts; if property prices cannot be depended to go up, then most of the net worth of Americans will be stuck in a slow-growth asset, thus hurting the wealth accumulating ability of normal people.
4. Prices operate a signals for desirability; if these signals are distorted, then people who have lost the bidding war to be in desirable locations will nevertheless get to stay in those desirable geographical locations because of government fiat.
5. The poor will not benefit because the wealthy adapt faster than the poor; they build different communities, they make donations to pass legislation, they do things to avoid paying taxes that fund the projects, passing those costs onto those who are supposed to benefit from them. The last time a massive affordable housing experiment was tried, white flight occurred, and the inner cities turned into ghettos.

Christian should not be used as an adjective of objects; there is no such thing as a “Christian nation” or “Christian music”, for how can these things be Christ-like when Christ was a man? And if this means that these things were made by Christians or composed of Christians, does this pre-suppose that everything made or done by Christians is Christian? Can there be Christian arguments, or Christian pornography, given that Christians may do these things? And the argument that this adjective only applies to Christians doing things that are in line with the Bible also falls apart. Is there Christian sex or Christian work? The point is that Christian as an adjective for objectives cannot mean as much as Christian as an adjective for people; calling something “Christians” leaves a degree of flexibility that the term does not have, allowing it to be applied in situations that clearly do not apply. For example, the Nazi Party was a “Christian” party, there are “Christian” Objectivists and “Christian” Transhumanists. Effectively, using “Christian” as an adjective allows whatever isn’t Christian to suddenly become more morally palatable or to put something on a higher moral ground. America is a good nation because it is a “Christian” nation; this is good music because it is “Christian” music.

1. White privilege, as defined by Francis Kendall, means “having greater access to power and resources than people of color [in the same situation] do.” There is, of course, no definition for either power or resources given in her essay, which implies a movement from rigorous demonstration to emotional communication i.e. the reader is supposed to “get” what she means by this. Power is defined by Merriam Webster in various ways, including “ability to act or produce an effect” and “capacity for being acted upon or undergoing an effect”. A resource is defined by Merriam Webster as “a source of supply or support : an available means”.
2. I am not going to try to guess what various authors and writers mean when they use the term “white privilege”. I am instead going to argue that the entire reason this term is used is so it is unfalsifiable, and is thus the very definition of pseudoscience. What central claim does white privilege make about the world? Is there a proposed mechanism by which it is possible? Is there an empirical
3. Any social idea that does not make specific, empirical assertions cannot be useful and must be subordinated to claims that do have this ability. Again, if it operates an abstraction, I can choose not to believe it, and you cannot convince me otherwise.
4. If white privilege is not a rigorous sociological concept, what is it? Perhaps it can be thought of as a mental model, where the assumption is that whites who are in comparable situations will be treated slightly better than other groups of people. For example, a white person will be treated slightly better than an African American in a comparable social situation where the African American and the white are normalized for income etc.
5. Two questions: Does this matter? Even if one were to believe that white privilege existed, because it is not sociological claim subject to empirical, one could not argue that it affects any measurable outcomes. If one does, it reverts back to the situation before.
6. Do white people deserve it? If we treat people as intentionally race-conscious and treat people as groups, does it necessarily follow that everyone group should be treated the same? If, for example, white people can be depended upon being magnanimous and culturally accepting, then wouldn’t want to be around these people more often than people from groups who could not be depended upon to be nice?
7. What does this say about any other kind of racially differential interactions? What about the nth move? |Does a black person who lacks the characteristic “black accent” get treated better because the person makes the mental calculation that this person is dissociated, either intentionally or unintentionally from the culturally
8. The first impression is said to be a very important thing from a psychological perspective. But what defines a first impression? Do I have a first impression of someone by looking at them? By hearing their name? Can I have my first impression of someone by imagining what people in a certain setting will be like?

I find the following mental model very insightful and predictive. It contrasts two broadly different classes of people and predicts their opinions and ideas about a wide range of different subjects and topics. Of course, I am not proposing that everyone must fit into one category or the other; I myself am at the intersection between these two groups. What this idea does propose is a framework for thinking about broad social, economic, and political trends. I view the Romans as the archetype of the former description, and the Greeks as the archetype of the later description (thus Latin vs. Greek).

Latin

• Rural
• Agricultural
• Militaristic (pro-imperial)
• King David
• Averse to philosophy
• America before 1861
• Thomas Jefferson
• Anti-centralization
• Socially conservative
• Distrust intellectuals & intellectual processes
• …

Greek

• Urban
• Industrial
• Anti-imperial
• King Solomon
• Enjoy philosophy
• America after 1865
• Alexander Hamilton
• Pro-Centralization
• Socially liberal
• Trust intellectuals and intellectual processes
• …

(With more contrasts coming as I can think of them…)

This is an important question that I did not address in my project: does Burlington need to pursue an economic policy aimed at increasing the wealth of the population? Some may say the answer is yes, but it does not necessarily have to be so. Cities are extremely flexible and the small scale helps cities to compete with one another to bring the best product. Perhaps some people care more about having a lot of money spent on education than they do about being able to build wherever they want to. This may cause some to move in areas where heavy fees are imposed on builders to pay for higher quality public schools. This trade-off is problematic, but it represents the advantage of scaling down communities to the local level. If I were not a fan of such an approach, I could always move to another city down the road, which may offer more competitive economic policies. This is the dynamic of movement oftentimes in American families. Many children grow up in the suburbs, because their parents want them to attend better than average public schools. Later, these children will become young adults and move to college towns to build skills and have fun. After college, young adults will move to the city to get as high paying a job as possible and work for a living. After some time, these people will meet a spouse, have children, and move back to the suburbs because urban congestion and lack of quality schools (in some areas) affects the ability to raise children in urban areas. OF course, many people do not follow this model, but it accurately portrays a lot of people’s lives.

What does this have to do with Burlington? Burlington has several options: it can attempt to move businesses here, it can convert to a bedroom community that decongests itself (aka moves people out so citizens have more land for housing), or it can remain the same. The first may cause gentrification (a good thing, even if most people don’t believe it), which is at least nominally condemned in the policies of most cities, the second will change the demographic (like the first, except this would be mostly middle aged people with secondary school aged children moving in an attempt to better their child’s education), and the third is, of course, boring. None of these options are without their consequences and none of them are an island to themselves. The point of my project is to highlight the reason why we should opt for reason 1 instead of reasons 2 or 3; this city is better suited for business development than is occurring in Burlington’s city limits as of today.

Wealth is often held on a pedestal of importance, regardless of whom it comes from. For instance, some socialists often demean the wealthy for their supposed abuses of the working class, especially here in America. Likewise, many others hold that wealth is a symbol of competence and intelligence, and the people who are wealthy should admired for their achievements. Both of these perspectives what being wealthy may really mean: something totally different for every situation.

Consider the plight of the socialists’ world. Bernie Sander’s Continue reading “The problem with Discussing the “Rich”, Part 1″ →

The purpose of this blog is to do one thing and one thing only: wonder. Wonder what life would be like if governments were different, wonder what life would be like if cultures changed, if economic institutions disappeared, if biology were to enter into a sudden upheaval. Maybe to wonder about everyday things, like how a town should be run or whether the next piece of legislation will or won’t do what it is intended for. Questions are an important form of thinking, and provide the framework for how we analyze situations. What questions we ask determine what results will be given, making the question even more important than the answer. This blog is designed to provide no answers, but lots of questions and lots of ways to deal with all of the uncertainty that comes from not necessarily knowing the answer.

 

We are making a mistake in America’s school system by understressing math and overstressing the liberal arts. Now, considering that this is for a liberal arts class, let me make my case. First, the liberal arts should be left for individuals to teach themselves, since a lot of liberal arts are simply a way to understand opinions about the world. Math and science have an objective component, and even though they may be wrong, their objectivity and rigor leads to better thinking among those who have taken a lot of math and/or science. Second, the liberal arts have become somewhat of a way to spread the political and social ideologies of the professor that teaches the class. If the professor is a liberal, then the professor will, consciously or unconsciously, choose examples that guide his students toward his worldview. If the professor is a conservative, then the professor will likely do the same. Are there opinions and fields in mathematics and science? Yes, but the opinions in math have very little to do with social politics or opinions, limiting these discussions to mathematics alone. One can agree that epigenetics is a false concept without being on the left or the right, and vice versa. Third, liberal arts lack the rigor of mathematics, and thus students who are looking for a class that does not challenge them take liberal arts in the hope that it will be easy. Unfortunately, this stigma means that the individuals inside of liberal arts classrooms will not take the subjects seriously, further impairing the students ability to learn from the subject. Fourth, liberal arts are too important to leave to the thoughts of very opinionated professors. Yes, liberal arts are important, but they may be too important for school.

In an attempt to better understand the world around me, I have come up with five of my own logical fallacies that help me read, understand, and interpret the information that I need to analyze to be an informed person. Continue reading “An Ever Expanding List of Logical Fallacies” →

Analytics are both misunderstood by its proponents and its detractors. Statistics are not ever wrong, but are often used to measure something that the statistics do not apply to. For instance, GDP does measure the monetary output of all the goods and services of the country. However, it does not account for a) measuring inflation (i.e. the GDP of a country can look vastly larger if the currency that GDP is measured in goes down significantly in value) and b) price drops (i.e. the price of a good may fall significantly due to increased supply. While this does not measure immediately in GDP, overall the standard of living has gone up for citizens). Statistics are often used to mislead people as well. For instance, GDP growth may be used to support the re-election of a candidate, despite the fact that economic cycles are virtually agnostic to whom is elected or not (look at the stock market; you will not be able to decipher long term trends based on who was elected). This misleading use of statistics is often flaunted in the media, as most news websites do not have the time to explain them and most journalists do not understand them. However, detractors of analytics also miss a few key points. First, most detractors of analytics do not understand math, and therefore have necessary incentive to go after numbers indiscriminately, because for all they know, the numbers are the same. Second, analytics can be used if questions are asked in the correct way in every context that they apply to, including the ones where many people say that they should not apply. For instance, if there was an economic report that suggested that rich would help the economy more by keeping their own money rather than giving it to charity, this is a conclusion that everyone should seriously consider, despite possible backlashes against greed. These are just some of the examples of misunderstanding on all sides of the argument.