The psychologist Stanley Milgram has pointed out that only six degrees separate everyone in the United States. Milgram was likely wrong. The number may be three or four degrees of separation. Six degrees of separation in a US population of 150 or 200 million that existed when Milgram did his work implies an assumption of everyone's knowing only 22-25 or so distinct people (there's always overlap because your neighbor knows many of the same people you do). That is because 22**6= 113,379,904 and 25**6 244,140,625. Most of us know many people casually. I have probably had close to 10,000 students in 17 years of teaching (many of my classes have been 50 to 70, and I have frequently taught summers). Likewise, a single politician like Hillary Clinton probably knows at least ten thousand people, and has probably met many more than that. So there are fewer than six degrees of separation, maybe only three. If on average we each know 1,000 then 1000**3 = one billion without taking overlap into account.
Of course, the degrees needed to reach any one of our ancestors in ancient times is greater and more difficult to compute. Part of the difficulty is that conquest dislocated people. Take the case of western Europe. There is no specific date for the fall of Rome in western Europe, but Totila and the Ostrogoths depopulated the city in the sixth century. Rome was sacked four or five times. Geiseric and the Vandals sacked Rome in 455 and Romulus Augustus, the last emperor, was deposed in 476. Alaric and the Visigoths sacked it in 410 AD and Brennus and the Gauls sacked it in 387 BC. The Arabs attacked it in the ninth century. One may guess that conquest in those days involved taking slaves.
The matter is also complicated by plagues. According to the Hacienda Pub site, "the Plague of Justinian (6th Century A.D.), the Black Death (14th Century A.D.), and the Bubonic Plague (1665-1666, which coincided with the Great Fire of London) caused an estimated 137 million dead in a world much more sparsely populated than it is today." Many in those periods lost their entire families.
So how many degrees of separation are there across generations? How many people are you removed from Julius Caesar? I would guess it takes about 80 generations to get us back to the days of Romulus Augustus (the last Roman Emperor, who was deposed in 476) and about 100 to the days of Augustus. In socialist and conservative, pre-free-market societies, life expectancy was about age 25-35. So if we figure that people died at 35 there were at least two generations alive for most at any give time.
But the world population was a tiny fraction of what it is today, even going back two centuries. Wikipedia estimates that western Europe's population was 25-30 million in Charlemagne's time, one thirty second of today's and the world's population was about 200 million, also about one thirty second of today's.
With 30 million alive at the time of Caesar, we can guess that there were no more than three degrees of separation. So My guess is that you have to go back 100 degrees to get back to Caesar, then 2-3 more laterally, so if you assume 100 down and 2-3 across there's about 200-300 degree of separation between you and Julius Caesar.
But that assumes a right triangle of relationships, vertically down through the generations and then horizontally across in ancient times. There are also "hypotenuse" relationships whereby someone you know now, knows someone from an earlier generation who was slightly closer to Caesar and the path could follow diagonally. Putting on my 10th grade geometry cap for a second (my worst subject) then if the base of the right triangle is 3 and the leg is 100 the diagonal is 3**2 + 100**2 = 10,009, the square root of which is about 100, and that would seem closer to the right answer.
I wonder if you formed a chain beginning with someone who knew Julius Caesar and ending with the person you know who is closest to Julius Caesar today, what the differences across the generations would seem like. After just a few generations the people would be quite unlike most anyone in the world today. We are much closer to people remote from us in distance than we are from the past. Yet, many people are loyal to ancient ancestors but suspicious of strangers. Of course, our ancestors are dead so do not threaten us as can people in today's world. But socially, culturally, intellectually and in most visible ways, we are more like someone who lives in China than we are like our ancestors in Roman times.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Nobel Peace Prize So 20th Century
As Swedish peace activists and virtually everyone I know have pointed out, the Nobel Prize should not have been awarded to Barack Obama. The Peace Prize, awarded by a Finnish (not Swedish) government-appointed panel is politicized. Last year it was given to Al Gore, a politician who advocates everyone else's cutting back so he can consume more, and this year to another Democratic Party hack, Barack Obama. Perhaps the Norwegians gave it to him because they believe him to have been born in Norway. But they were afraid to ask for his birth certificate.
In any case the Peace Prize has been degraded. Not that I would think that the Scandinavian governments in Sweden and Norway have any moral substance to give such an award. In the 1930s Sweden quietly back Hitler, and although it was formally neutral during the Second World War, a third of Swedes did not mind seeing six million Jews gassed, and more than a handful likely were happy about it.
I would add that their most famous intellectual, the socialist Gunnar Myrdal, supported Hitler during the 1930s. Roland Huntford's book New Totalitarians dissects the ugly, amoral quality of Swedish socialism. Huntford points out that noticeable elements of feudalism continued into the 1950s in Sweden, specifically the bruk system in which workers in certain factories were tied to the factories, essentially as serfs (with their homes the property of the factories). Notice that American socialists admire Swedish culture because it is reactionary. The Swedes are barely out of the Middle Ages. But remember that it is the Finnish who give the Peace Prize, the Swedes the other prizes.
Yassir Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize before refusing to make peace. Obama's chief contribution to peace was reappointing George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, Robert M. Gates, after telling Americans that he is for "change". "Change" to him meant appointing the same guy. It is difficult to take the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which takes an partisan role in American politics, seriously.
The Nobel Peace Prize is a thing of the past. I'm sure recipients want the monetary award, but would you want to share a "peace prize" with Al Gore, Yassir Arafat and Barack Obama?
In any case the Peace Prize has been degraded. Not that I would think that the Scandinavian governments in Sweden and Norway have any moral substance to give such an award. In the 1930s Sweden quietly back Hitler, and although it was formally neutral during the Second World War, a third of Swedes did not mind seeing six million Jews gassed, and more than a handful likely were happy about it.
I would add that their most famous intellectual, the socialist Gunnar Myrdal, supported Hitler during the 1930s. Roland Huntford's book New Totalitarians dissects the ugly, amoral quality of Swedish socialism. Huntford points out that noticeable elements of feudalism continued into the 1950s in Sweden, specifically the bruk system in which workers in certain factories were tied to the factories, essentially as serfs (with their homes the property of the factories). Notice that American socialists admire Swedish culture because it is reactionary. The Swedes are barely out of the Middle Ages. But remember that it is the Finnish who give the Peace Prize, the Swedes the other prizes.
Yassir Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize before refusing to make peace. Obama's chief contribution to peace was reappointing George W. Bush's Defense Secretary, Robert M. Gates, after telling Americans that he is for "change". "Change" to him meant appointing the same guy. It is difficult to take the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, which takes an partisan role in American politics, seriously.
The Nobel Peace Prize is a thing of the past. I'm sure recipients want the monetary award, but would you want to share a "peace prize" with Al Gore, Yassir Arafat and Barack Obama?
Democrats Are The Party of Greed
Libertarians have long known that FDR's "New Deal" was primarily about banking and that the programs were a smoke screen. FDR used the ancient Roman strategy of bread and circus, small change to the proletarians while the wealthy extract ever larger gains. The bread and circus consisted of inter-generational transfers (from later to earlier generations) and failed attempts to rationalize and re-engineer labor relations and banking. High marginal tax rates and abolition of the gold standard re-enforced government authority over the individual, and during the 48-year Democratic Party reign from 1932 to 1980 the government pursued a bleeding-and-extraction process by which the wealthy extracted the national blood from workers, small business and the poor, using the Federal Reserve Bank as its syringe.
Until the past few years the military-financial-industrial complex was able to keep the public happy with bread and circus; the public's fear of unemployment; and a social security plan that seemed to work until about 10 years ago. The price was massive growth in government waste and special interest extraction, as big business, government employees and most of all the financial community rushed to the public trough to suck productive Americans dry. The Democratic media have lied and covered up this process to the point that Americans now willingly pay 50% of their income for a government that produces S-H-I-T.
The worst of it is yet to come. Both retirement funding and health care will place heavy burdens on the public's pocket book, and the baby boomers are facing a looming gap in both.
The public is seeing itself get poorer as the policies of the Democratic Party turn into the policies of special interest greed. No party in American history has lied more aggressively than the Democratic Party during the Bush years. Damning Bush for greed, the Democrats took power on the promise of change. But their first action was to produce the largest special interest subsidy in the nation's history, exceeding the greed and stupidity even of the Rockefeller Republicans and George W. Bush. The multi-trillion dollar handout to Wall Street, supported by every Democrat, all of whom a few years earlier claimed be concerned with income inequality, is the largest single subsidy to any industry at any time in American history. The Obama bail-out is the largest exercise of greed in the nation's history.
Was the subsidy needed to avert a depression? That claim, which was used to convince some Americans to support the Democrats' exercise of greed, is pap. Most Americans are concerned about depression for one reason: the risk of unemployment. Five trillion dollars was NOT NECESSARY to cover the risk of unemployment. If twenty percent of the 140 million strong workforce or 28 million were out of work (more than double the current number), every one of these people could be paid $30,000 for two years at a cost of about $1.7 trillion, a fraction of the cost of the bailout. Throw in a third year, and the amount goes up to $2.2 trillion, less than half of what the Democrats have spent.
Ah, but that approach would not have ensured that George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Obama's supporters on Wall and Broad could be kept in multi-seven-digit incomes, or that the incompetent Wall Street clowns could be allowed to continue to manage businesses that they do not know how to manage.
The Democrats have become the party of greed. They are the party of the biggest subsidy to the nation's ultra-rich in history. They not just have subsidized the rich. They have subsidized the least productive, least competent group that is also the richest of any group of wealthy in the nation's history.
The Republicans must disown the bailout and fight a good fight to make this a triumph. But some Republicans too are linked to beneficiaries of the bailout--Progressives who would rather sacrifice their party's success than see Wall Street suffer.
It is incumbent upon libertarians, free-market conservatives (the only possible kind), and anyone not motivated by an easy job or special interest benefits, anyone who is NOT A GREEDY DEMOCRAT or a stupid, slobbering Rockefeller Republican, to act.
Americans are getting poorer. Taxes and government waste are on the rise. States like New York are largely Peoples' Republics in which personal and economic freedom have disappeared. Many Americans live the lives of slaves and do not even know it. A person born into slavery does not know what freedom is.
Much of the Democratic strategy has been based on hate--hate for Republicans. The Democrats' obsessive hatred for Republicans is a religion, and the public has been fooled "most of the time" by emotional group-think and misdirected rage. The Progressive Republicans have fed this rage by behaving like...Progressive Republicans. Liberty Republicans need to develop a strategy to overcome the McCain/Bush crew once and for all.
Until the past few years the military-financial-industrial complex was able to keep the public happy with bread and circus; the public's fear of unemployment; and a social security plan that seemed to work until about 10 years ago. The price was massive growth in government waste and special interest extraction, as big business, government employees and most of all the financial community rushed to the public trough to suck productive Americans dry. The Democratic media have lied and covered up this process to the point that Americans now willingly pay 50% of their income for a government that produces S-H-I-T.
The worst of it is yet to come. Both retirement funding and health care will place heavy burdens on the public's pocket book, and the baby boomers are facing a looming gap in both.
The public is seeing itself get poorer as the policies of the Democratic Party turn into the policies of special interest greed. No party in American history has lied more aggressively than the Democratic Party during the Bush years. Damning Bush for greed, the Democrats took power on the promise of change. But their first action was to produce the largest special interest subsidy in the nation's history, exceeding the greed and stupidity even of the Rockefeller Republicans and George W. Bush. The multi-trillion dollar handout to Wall Street, supported by every Democrat, all of whom a few years earlier claimed be concerned with income inequality, is the largest single subsidy to any industry at any time in American history. The Obama bail-out is the largest exercise of greed in the nation's history.
Was the subsidy needed to avert a depression? That claim, which was used to convince some Americans to support the Democrats' exercise of greed, is pap. Most Americans are concerned about depression for one reason: the risk of unemployment. Five trillion dollars was NOT NECESSARY to cover the risk of unemployment. If twenty percent of the 140 million strong workforce or 28 million were out of work (more than double the current number), every one of these people could be paid $30,000 for two years at a cost of about $1.7 trillion, a fraction of the cost of the bailout. Throw in a third year, and the amount goes up to $2.2 trillion, less than half of what the Democrats have spent.
Ah, but that approach would not have ensured that George Soros, Warren Buffett, and Obama's supporters on Wall and Broad could be kept in multi-seven-digit incomes, or that the incompetent Wall Street clowns could be allowed to continue to manage businesses that they do not know how to manage.
The Democrats have become the party of greed. They are the party of the biggest subsidy to the nation's ultra-rich in history. They not just have subsidized the rich. They have subsidized the least productive, least competent group that is also the richest of any group of wealthy in the nation's history.
The Republicans must disown the bailout and fight a good fight to make this a triumph. But some Republicans too are linked to beneficiaries of the bailout--Progressives who would rather sacrifice their party's success than see Wall Street suffer.
It is incumbent upon libertarians, free-market conservatives (the only possible kind), and anyone not motivated by an easy job or special interest benefits, anyone who is NOT A GREEDY DEMOCRAT or a stupid, slobbering Rockefeller Republican, to act.
Americans are getting poorer. Taxes and government waste are on the rise. States like New York are largely Peoples' Republics in which personal and economic freedom have disappeared. Many Americans live the lives of slaves and do not even know it. A person born into slavery does not know what freedom is.
Much of the Democratic strategy has been based on hate--hate for Republicans. The Democrats' obsessive hatred for Republicans is a religion, and the public has been fooled "most of the time" by emotional group-think and misdirected rage. The Progressive Republicans have fed this rage by behaving like...Progressive Republicans. Liberty Republicans need to develop a strategy to overcome the McCain/Bush crew once and for all.
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