Mark Krikorian and I have been singled (doubled?) out for a sneer from AEI’s Nick Schultz. Are our heads exploding (he wants to know) at the news that Mexicans lead the world in “total minutes worked, paid and unpaid, per day”?

Mark is very well able to speak for himself. My own reaction on seeing the OECD chart Nick displays was that Mexicans are getting dismally little bang for the industrious buck. After five hundred years of toiling away for 594 minutes a day they have nothing much to show but a mediocre economy propped up by oil revenues and expatriate remittances, dysfunctional politics, and wellnigh zero achievement in the cultural or
intellectual spheres.

A few minutes’ number-crunching confirms the impression. Remember how your Uncle Stan used to tell you that while working hard is good, working smart is better? OK, let’s create an Uncle Stan index. I’ll divide annual per capita GDP (from the CIA World Factbook) by the daily number of minutes worked to see how much annualized per capita GDP each minute generates. For Mexico I’m dividing $13,800 a head by 594 minutes, to get annualized $23.22 per person per minute worked in the day.

On the Uncle Stan Index (USI) Mexico ranks 27 out of 29 on the OECD list. That is to say, it’s one of the least efficient nations in the world at turning work into wealth.

Here’s the table. I’ve included a column for mean national IQ, these numbers taken from Tatu Vanhanen’s latest book. The last two columns correlate quite well:  r = 0.47.

Now, see how unfair life is. Here’s me, a poor freelance drudge, doing all this math, while Nick Schultz has a nice cushy number at AEI where apparently he is required to do nothing but strike politically-correct moral poses. Nick doesn’t even bother to source his data: I had to Google for the spreadsheet link.

I guess Uncle Stan was right …

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[Cross-posted from The Corner at NRO]

Astrophysicist Sir Martin Rees, who has a walk-on part in We Are Doomed (and who is properly written of as “Lord Rees,” though nobody seems to bother any more) has been awarded the Templeton Prize  ”for career achievements affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

Previous winners of the prize, which seeks to promote better understanding between science and religion, include Catholic nun Mother Teresa, U.S. preacher Billy Graham and Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well as many leading scientists.

This will be good for some rhetorical fireworks from the more militant kind of atheists. In those precincts, unbelievers who accept the  Templeton Prize are regarded as wishy-washy “accommodationists.” Richard Dawkins has already harrumphed.

Sir Martin has described himself as “an unbelieving Anglican who goes to church out of loyalty to the tribe.” I’d suspect that this position is utterly incomprehensible to anyone not (a) raised an Anglican, (b) in England, and (c) more than 50 years old. Compare George Orwell’s oft-quoted remark — it’s in Jeffrey Meyer’s biography  somewhere — that “I like the Church of England better than Our Lord.”

My NRO review of Sir Martin’s splendid gloomy look at the human race’s near future (he doesn’t think we have one) is here.

The converse of an unbeliever who goes to church is a believer who doesn’t. The Audacious Epigone has crunched some numbers from the General Social Survey on this (though I think that “less than” in his penultimate paragraph should read “more than”).

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Lunchtime mail brought my April copy of The Dominion, “News of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island.” The front page leader was by my local prelate, The Right Reverend Lawrence C. Provenzano, Bishop of Long Island.   Titled “Budgets, Leadership, and Public Service,” it is an angry broadside against the cutting of public services — any public services.

The approach to addressing the fiscal crisis in New Jersey and in a host of other states across the country appears to be to assault those who do the public’s work as state employees, to imply that they receive benefits and salaries that go far beyond what they deserve and that they immorally avail themselves of these benefits.

His Grace recommends that his parishioners join in a new initiative from the religious left under the slogan “What Would Jesus Cut?“  If you join in, you can get a WWJC bracelet!

Would Jesus cut Head Start — a bureaucratic extravaganza of no proven value whatever?  Would he cut foreign aid — correctly described by Peter Bauer 30-odd years ago as “The transer of money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries”?  Where would the Saviour have stood on defined-benefit vs. defined contribution pension plans?  We know what he thought of tax collectors (e.g. Matt. 18:17), but where did he stand on tax payers vs. tax eaters?

We hear so much about the Religious Right, far too little about the Religious Left and its maleficent works — it is, for example, the main motive force behind the refugee resettlement rackets.  From the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the Right Rev. Lawrence Provenzano, what I mostly see in the pulpits are lefties. 

The pity of it is that elsewhere in The Dominion and its national-level equivalent, Episcopal Journal, I read of good and commendable works by church groups in, for example, relief for victims of the recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan.

Do these Christian lefties not see the contradiction between encouraging voluntary charity and demanding that ever more of the work of comforting the afflicted be transferred to government functionaries whose benefit packages are written into their state constitutions?

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From this weekend’s Radio Derb (transcript here):

As an unbeliever, I have naturally asked NRO to give me paid leave for the entire month of May so I can celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of David Hume, taking a trip to the great philosopher’s birthplace in Scotland and devoutly attending the four-day public reading of the Treatise being planned by my colleagues at Secular Right.

Have we fixed a location for the party yet?

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“Religion may become extinct in nine nations, study says.”  Thus the headline on the Beeb News website.  And those nine nations would be which?  Lemme see if I can guess:  Pakistan, Nigeria, Egypt, Thailand, Israel, . . .  Am I getting warm?

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Oh.  So religion may become extinct in nine comfortable cool-temperate-zone social democracies populated mainly by mean-IQ-100 white Europeans of Christian heritage, seven of which nations speak languages of the Germanic family and the other two of which are in the broad German-Austrian-Lutheran cultural sphere.

Back to sleep.

[Incidentally, why doesn't the Czech Republic get itself a proper name?  Why not "Czechia"?  Though I suppose in the fulness of time "Czechistan" may come to fit.  The TFR is 1.26 children per woman. "The Czech Republic has one of the least religious populations on Earth," says Wikipedia.]

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The British philosopher Colin McGinn gives us that old-time irreligion in this essay ”Why I Am an Atheist“.

I normally can’t take very much of this well-worn atheism-vs.-agnosticism stuff, but McGinn pulls it off very well & I found myself reading to the end, in spite of those too-long paragraphs.

He actually admits he can’t take much of it either:

I have also reached the point (I reached it long ago) that the issue of God’s existence no longer strikes me as an interesting issue. I mean, when it comes up I tend to glaze over, because all the moves are so familiar and the debate seems so antiquated. I find it hard to get fired up about it. It just seems dull. No intellectual sparks fly off it. The question has important political and cultural significance, to be sure, but as an intellectual issue in its own right it lacks vitality.

Now I’m even more puzzled that I read the whole thing …

I am not competent to judge McGinn’s status as a philosopher. He writes well, and I always enjoy his articles. (I have never read any of his books.) He is a handy prop when discussing education, though. Thus:

Like me, McGinn grew up in England under the “eleven plus” regime of school assignment. The way it worked was, everyone who passed through the state-school system (private schools were hors de combat) did six years in elementary school, then at the age of, of course, eleven plus took an IQ test. That’s what it was: a frank, straightforward IQ test.

Based on your test score you were then assigned to one of the three categories of school:

• “Grammar school”:  Very academic, lots of homework. Latin, Greek, modern languages, higher math, economics, … the works.
• “Technical school”:  Less academic, more vocational, but the cognitively demanding kind of vocational — aiming to produce electronics engineers, not plumbers.
• “Secondary modern”:  Prole school. You’re going to be a factory hand, but you’re too young to start yet. Hey, let’s have a game of football!

I forget the proportions, but they seem to have been very roughly 20-40-40. It wasn’t a bad system, though it might not work in a post-industrial economy.

Anyway, one of the objections raised to the system (which was swept away in 1970s reforms) was that once assigned to a technical or secondary modern school a child would accept his place in society and give up on anything cognitively demanding. The notion that anyone should accept his placein society was loathsome to the egalitarian New Class that was taking over the 1960s-70s British establishment. Hence those reforms.

(Most of the New Class reformers were graduates of the Grammar Schools, by the way. The rest had been privately educated. And this line of thought was, as you may recognize, ancestral to the “stereotype threat” flim-flam currently popular with U.S. educationalists.)

In fact the system was more flexible than that. Mis-assignments and late bloomers could transfer up to better schools. I was at university with a girl who’d been assigned to a secondary modern school.

Well, McGinn is the star exhibit here, having been assigned to a secondary modern school in gritty,greasy Blackpool circa 1962.

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Andrew:

The fame of C.S. Lewis’s “trilemma” argument has always been deeply baffling to me. The normal reaction of a thoughtful person (me, Martin Gardner, Richard Dawkins) on first hearing it is: Why couldn’t Jesus just have been mistaken? People mistakenly believe all sorts of wacky things; and the notion that one might be divine was a lot less wacky in 1st-century Palestine than it would be in 21st-century Manhattan. It is after all a tenet of most religions that every one of us is to some degree divine.

Yet this (it seems to me) trivial piece of illogic is mightily famous. Google turned up “about 11,200 results” — admittedly less famous than Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (91,900 results) but nearly twice as famous as the Ragsdale Conjecture (6,090 results). The defenses of it, which form a good portion of that 11,200, are logic-free, so far as I could be bothered to look.

The other thing that baffles me about ol’ C.S. is that he has been so enthusiastically embraced by American Christians. I recall reading that there is a church somewhere in the Republic with a Lewis-themed stained-glass window.  The dotty-Anglican type is perfectly familiar to anyone raised in England, but I’m surprised it travels so well, or least has in Lewis’s case.  If Americans will swallow this, what possible objection can they have to Marmite?

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[Cross-posted to The Corner]

Taoism (which we are nowadays supposed to write as “Daoism,” though neither spelling is more correct than the other) is the country cousin of major world religions: generally thought to be long on gaudy superstition and short on intellectual content.

There is more to be said about that:  I’ve reported a sympathetic encounter with Taoism here, and Joseph Needham considered Taoism to be the “source of intuitive scientific philosophy” in China. The country-cousin gaudy-superstition side is certainly on display in this Wall Street Journal piece, though:

In December 2008 … Wong Tai Sin introduced its groundbreaking digital initiative: e-praying. Worshipers too busy to visit the temple can send a free e-mail prayer to the temple’s monks via the Sik Sik Yuen website. Monks receive the prayers, filter out hoaxes and print the rest on prayer paper before burning them in the traditional Taoist ritual. Wong Tai Sin says it receives about 30,000 electronic prayers annually, roughly half from Hong Kong and half from abroad.

That iPhone Confession app the Vatican is in a tither about must look positively quaint to the folks at Wong Tai Sin.

[Note please that the subject here is religious Taoism, a different thing from philosophical Taoism, though the two phenomena have considerably interacted. They are denoted by two different words in Chinese: Dao-jiao for the religion, Dao-jia for the school of philosophy. Religious Taoism is a real polytheistic religion, with scriptures, priests, and temples.  It even has a Pope, though there are persistent schismatic tendencies. Nor is it the case that religious Taoism was founded by Lao Tsŭ; it is an autochthonous folk religion, like Hinduism, with no one founder, although, again like Hinduism, it took in much metaphysics from the philosophers.]

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Was the Tucson shooter inspired by the American Renaissance race-realist website/newsletter?  The Obamarrhoids planted a suggestion that he was; Fox News took the bait; American Renaissance denied and disproved the slur; now the accusers seem to have backed off. 

This little episode left me wondering whether perhaps the liberal Left has been infiltrated by American Renaissance moles.

Consider:  Every February American Renaissance has a conference. Last year’s was nearly derailed by a leftist mob phoning in death threats to employees of the conference hotel. I blogged about it on Secular Right at the time.

Now this year’s conference is coming up, and the Left is once again giving American Renaissance some timely free publicity (of which commodity, please be reminded, there is no such thing as bad).

Coincidence? I think not.

(I recently did a Q&A with Taylor here.)

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Here’s a cross-posting from The Corner at National Review Online. Been doing a few rounds with the George W. Bush fans, most recently with one Peter Wehner, who worked in Bush’s Department Of Alleviating All Suffering Everywhere And Hang The Expense.

The topic is PEPFAR, Bush’s AIDS-relief-for-Africa program. On National AIDS Day last week, Bush wrote a smug editorial in the Washington Post praising himself for spending our money on this program. I took a couple of shots at the editorial, then this Wehner bloke responded with an egregiously sneering, self-righteous assault on me at the Commentary blog. I gave him both barrels.

GWB is a Religious-Left “social gospel” liberal world-saver, out of Jimmy Carter by Woodrow Wilson. Face it, guys.

——————– Cross-post follows:

Kathryn:  I’m going to pass very lightly over the fact, noted by several emailers, that the two persons whose responses to my anti-PEPFAR posts (Dec. 1 and Dec. 2) you have chosen to publish bear the names Putze and Wehner. Possibly you are signaling something … but as I said, I prefer to pass over this without further comment.

Now to Peter Wehner’s Commentary blog post:

First, those “few facts that undermine Derbyshire’s case.”

•  “Africans have fewer sex partners on average over a lifetime than do Americans.” I never wrote anything to the contrary. I wrote in general terms of “customary practices.” Mr. Wehner’s statistic, even if true (he offers no links or references), therefore does nothing to undermine my case.

So far as I understand the epidemiology literature, the most relevant of those customary practices is concurrency, i.e. having two or more steady sex partners at the same time. There is a cursory survey here, with some useful links. Sample quote:

Researcher Martina Morris … later teams up with the mathematician Mirjam Kretzschmar to develop a new model that couldcompare the spread of HIV through two hypothetical populations: one in which concurrent partnerships were common and another in which serial monogamy was the norm. They found that HIV spread 10 times faster in the first population.

•  “22 countries in Africa have had a greater than 25 percent decline in infections in the past 10 years.” Possibly so: butdoes this have anything to do with PEPFAR, which is the subject under discussion? Let’s take a look.

UNAIDS offers some very handy interactive web pages where you can summon up all the relevant statistics. (Sample such page here.) I just went through the pages for the current PEPFAR focus countries, graphing “Number of new infections — all ages.” There was no data for Ethiopia. For the other 13, here is the year in which the graph last turned down (alphabetic order by country, Botswana to Zambia):  1997, 1994, <1990, 1994, 1994, 2003, 2000, 2003, 1999, 1993, 1991, 2001,2005.

PEPFAR was authorized in 2003. The first field programs got under way in mid-2004.

[I note that (a) this is a rather good illustration of Charles Murray's Trendline Test, and (b) the leveling-off you see in most of those graphs across the past few years might be taken as support for my case that, once the drugs were available, people resumed doing what they had customarily done. You'd need a deeper data analysis to clinch the argument; but at the very least, we are a long way from "facts that undermine Derbyshire's case."]

•  “America’s efforts are helping to create a remarkable shift in how, in Africa, boys view girls — reflected in a decline of more than 50 percent in sexual partners among boys.” Unfortunately the UNAIDS charts are nothing like as clear on this and I can locate no other data source. No doubt Mr. Wehner can provide one, including of course evidence that the increasing restraint among African “boys” (?) is driven in part by PEPFARS.

Then there are some impertinent speculations concerning what I do and do not care about. I shall surrender here to the temptation that always comes over me when I am the target of sanctimonious bullying by self-congratulating prigs:  Bite me, pal.

Next Mr. Wehner tells me that I am “more than a decade behind in [my] understanding of overseas-development policy.” He tells us how “transformational” President Bush’s development effort was. He throws in another sneer: “Derbyshire seems to know nothing about any of this. That isn’t necessarily a problem — unless, of course, he decides to write on the topic.”

Certainly I am no expert. I did, though, in March 2008 write a longish researched piece on aid to Africa for The American Conservative. (A magazine which, I venture to suspect, never sullied the desktops of the George W. Bush White House. The title alone would have disqualified it.) For background I read with careful attention two books recommended to me by friends knowledgeable in the field, and skim-read half a dozen more, as well as doing the usual internet trawling and attending a lecture.

I can tell Mr. Wehner with strong confidence that if he thinks President Bush transformed the foreign-aid scene from a less-effective to a more-effective model, he is in a world-wide minority of one two.

What we in fact see when surveying the history of foreign aid is an elephants’ graveyard of “transformational” magic cures — Community Development! SALs! SPA! Millennium Challenge Accounts! — each of which glowed bright for a while, then faded away in disappointment, corruption, book-cooking, and bureaucratic face-saving.

(In this, foreign aid strongly resembles education policy — SEED! KIPP! Charter Schools! — where GWB also left his moon-booted footprints.)

The picture drawn by Mr. Wehner, that foreign aid was languishing in a no-strings doldrums until — the reader should imagine some soaring orchestral music here — George W. Bush came along and “transformed” it, is a ludicrous misrepresentation. I should very much like to see him try it out in the presence of someone who is actually acquainted with the history of foreign aid — William Easterley, for example.

There is then some argument that PEPFAR helps promote orderliness in poor nations. On this, I don’t have anything to add to what I said in my December 2 post. Mr. Wehner’s remarks are anyway just a chain of unjustified, unreferenced assertions. Some of them are contradicted by the much more knowledgeable Princeton N. Lyman and Stephen B. Wittels in the Foreign Affairs paper that was the hinge of my original post.

Mr. Wehner has nothing to say about that paper. If he has read it he will know how spurious is his comparison of PEPFAR — an ever-increasing permanent welfare commitment — to the 2004 tsunami relief effort, a one-off rescue mission.

I will yield to the collective wisdom of the U.S. electorate on what humanitarian calamities we should or should not spend public money to relieve; but I’d bet that while a healthy majority of Americans favor one-off disaster relief efforts in remote places, far fewer would, if told honestly about it, support an everlasting, ever-swelling commitment to provide expensive medications to people in inconsequential countries for the alleviation of a venereal disease.

Along the way there somewhere Mr. Wehner quotes Abraham Lincoln at me. Why? While I am sure Lincoln approved of private missionary efforts to improve lives in Asia, Europe, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America, I have never heard that he asked Congress to appropriate funds for such works.

The rest is just more low ad hominem sneering. Goodness, how the man does sneer! He says that I am “eager to celebrate [my] callousness,” and quotes in support something I wrote in early 2006. Since I write roughly a hundred thousand words of fugitive journalism a year, that is around half a million words ago. I don’t see much “eagerness” there. If I were to mention, say, Brussels sprouts once every five years, would Mr. Wehner accuse me of being obsessed with that vegetable? Probably he would, if he could deploy the accusation in such a way as to demonstrate his own moral superiority over citizens so busy working for a living, caring for their families and friends, and worrying about the condition of their country that they have nothing to spare for the misfortunes of people in remote, unimportant places.

Such an approach to the affairs of the world is, says Mr. Wehner, falling very naturally into the cant vocabulary of liberal condescension, “ugly.” Well, well; perhaps ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

Charity begins at home, Mr. Wehner. If not exactly noble — certainly it is at an infinite distance below the nobility and, ah, beauty of your own lofty concerns — the indifference that I am so “eager to celebrate” once or twice a decade is at least less harmful to my own family and nation than the universalism of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, whose attentions to the natives of Borrioboola-Gha (“on the left bank of the Niger”) left her no time to spare for her own kin. Says the narrator:

It struck me that if Mrs. Jellyby had discharged her own natural duties and obligations before she swept the horizon with a telescope in search of others, she would have taken the best precautions against becoming absurd …

At least Mrs. Jellyby’s enterprises did not draw on public funds. But as George Orwell observed: “A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.”

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