Random thoughts #80

Random thoughts #80

Behold! The three handed lib! Right handed! Left handed! And underhanded too!

Would you believe that the US spent $360,000 storing contraceptives that would have been sent to Africa through USAID? Now only $1.7 million of the original $9.7 million remain usable and those have expiration dates looming soon.

Seems like everyone wants us old folk to downsize. Southern Living says that 1,500 square feet is the ideal size. Maybe for some but not for me. I happen to be emotionally attached to my home. I designed it myself. It is perfect. It even has a place for me when I get too old to climb the stairs to my office and bedroom. I had a first floor two bedroom apartment incorporated into the plans for my aging parents. Of course, they refused to leave Atlanta. But I can move into there – unless I decide to die at the family farm in Georgia where I designed a space that even Southern Living would be proud. It is 1,100 square feet with a 900 square foot garage apartment.

A bit of sad news, A B-52 crashed shortly after takeoff from Edwards Air Force Base in California killing all 8 crew members. I misted up. My late brother was a B-52 pilot who also flew out of Edwards. The commanding officer said “My thoughts are with the bomber and test communities during this difficult time. I am keeping the families, friends, and loved ones affected in my prayers.” I too send out my deepest condolences as well. My brother loved that plane.

Did you see the report where a majority of law professors say that they keep their opinions to themselves for fear of backlash from the students? I was shocked. Most of the law professors I know are liberal and I would have thought that their views would be in line with those of their students. However, for those few law professors who are conservative, I can see where some might want to avoid controversy. I was not a law professor. I was still one of very few conservatives – even in the business school. I was never shy about tying real world examples of harm done by laws such as minimum wages and usury ceilings. I even would say when some employees were protesting for a “living wage” that it was curious because none of them appeared to be dead and yet they were managing to work – however badly. One student later said that her sociology professor kicked her out of class for saying “My finance professor said……” So basically, I have concluded that the “majority of law professors” citied were wimps. BTW, fittingly the article appeared in “Legal Insurrection.” https://legalinsurrection.com/2026/06/survey-majority-of-law-professors-self-censor-to-avoid-backlash/

Something called the World Inequality Lab released a perfectly stupid report saying that to narrow income inequality and to fight climate change, the developed countries should stop growing so the “resulting ecological space” would allow poorer countries to grow. Did AOC pen this nonsense? The report calls for caps on economic growth in rich countries, top income-tax rates of 90 percent, and a World Sovereign Fund to redistribute wealth to poorer countries. – probably distributed by the authors of the report. This again is the Marxist notion of a fixed economy where if one portion grows it is at the expense of the others.

George Mason’s Veronique De Rugy rightly tears the argument to shreds. She calls it an exercise in envirodictatorship. How apt. Importantly she references a paper by Pritchett and Lewis that debunks this nonsense. https://www.theunseenandtheunsaid.com/p/more-pritchell-less-piketty

Pritchett and Lewis find the following:

The relationship with GDP per capita has four features that hold across every specification:

• The relationship is strong. GDP per capita alone predicts basic human wellbeing with a correlation of around 0.90. The statistical significance is, in the authors’ own word, ‘astronomical.’
• The relationship is non-linear. Growth matters most where countries are poorest. For the world’s bottom billion, an extra dollar of GDP per capita does two to eight times as much for basic human well-being as the same dollar does in a middle-income country. The poorer you are, the more growth transforms your life, which is precisely why capping it is most cruel to those Piketty claims to be helping
• Third, GDP per capita is empirically sufficient. There are no countries with high GDP per capita that have low scores on basic human wellbeing.
• Fourth, GDP per capita is empirically necessary. There are no countries with low GDP per capita that have achieved high scores on basic human wellbeing. You cannot get there without it. No combination of targeted programs, clever NGOs, redistribution schemes, or foreign aid has produced a poor country with rich-country health, nutrition, and education outcomes.

Despite always being debunked, most academics will continue to be leftist and produce poorly crafted papers to justify it. I am reminded of what the sainted Milton Friedman said on why academics tended to the left. He said it was not the sharing of ideas but rather the desire to impose them on others was why academics were on the left. I also think that the almost total absence of real world experience comes into play. Many, if not most academics, went straight through school from kindergarten to PhD to the college classroom. Very few even have work experience in the areas where they teach. I was often asked in seminars “where do you get your ideas?” The answer was always real word experience on corporate boards and from regulating financial institutions – rather than reading about it.