Monthly Archives: February 2016

A Review of Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own

Suppose you could a) improve your own IQ by 10 points, or b) improve the IQs of your countrymen (but not your own) by 10 points. Which would do more to increase your income? The answer is (b), and it’s not even close. The latter choice improves your income by about 6 times more than the former choice. . . .

Jones devotes much of the book to explaining why this empirical regularity exists. Many of the reasons that he discusses are political or cultural. For instance, he presents evidence showing that high-IQ countries tend to have less corruption. He also presents evidence from laboratory experiments showing that high-IQ people tend to cooperate with each other more than low-IQ people.

Jones also discusses some reasons from microeconomics that help explain the empirical regularity. Specifically, he shows that your own productivity tends to increase when you work around people who have high IQs. . . .

The parable begins with a simplifying assumption. This is that it takes exactly two workers to make a vase: one to blow it from molten glass and another to pack it for delivery. Now suppose that two workers, A1 and A2, are highly skilled—if they are assigned to either task they are guaranteed not to break the vase. Suppose two other workers, B1 and B2, are less skilled—specifically, for either task each has a 50% probability of breaking the vase.

Now suppose you are worker A1. If you team up with A2, you produce a vase every attempt. However, if you team up with B1 or B2, then only 50% of your attempts will produce a vase. Thus, your productivity is higher when you team up with A2 than with one of the B workers. Something similar happens with the B workers. They are more productive when they are paired with an A worker than with a fellow B worker.

So far, everything I’ve said is probably pretty intuitive. But here’s what’s not so intuitive. Suppose you’re the manager of the vase company and you want to produce as many vases as possible. Are you better off by (i) pairing A1 with A2 and B1 with B2, or (ii) pairing A1 with one of the B workers and A2 with the other B worker?

If you do the math, it’s clear that the first strategy works best. Here, the team with two A workers produces a vase with 100% probability, and the team with the two B workers produces a vase with 25% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces 1.25 vases per time period. With the second strategy, both teams produce a vase with 50% probability. Thus, in expectation, the company produces only one vase per time period.

The example illustrates how workers’ productivity is often interdependent—specifically, how your own productivity increases when your co-workers are skilled.

The example generates an even more remarkable implication. It says that, if you are a manager of a company (or the central planner of an entire economy), then your optimal strategy is to clump your best workers together on the same project rather than spreading them out amongst your less-able workers.

The parable has some interesting implications for immigration policy. . . .

ricochet.com/review-hive-mind-nations-iq-matters-much/

The amazing failure that is Bernie Sanders’ life

Before he achieved political office, Bernie Sanders never had a steady paycheck in the first four decades of his life. . . . Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything.

Sanders failed to earn a living, even as an adult. It took him 40 years to collect his first steady paycheck — and it was a government check. One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

. . . he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story.

Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.

The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off.

prntly.com/blog/?p=4838

Eli on Social Justice Warriors

Social justice is a cult of weakness, of duplicity, of envy, of bitterness, of helplessness, of ugliness, of failure.

For my part, I would rather uphold the standards of truth, beauty, strength, honor, aspiration, victory and success.

There’s no honor in suppressing and tyrannizing the weak and the defective.

But there is still less in allowing them to accomplish the total inversion of values, the total inversion of virtues.

These assholes have to be ripped out, root and branch.

‘Hundreds-strong’ mob of masked men rampage through Stockholm station beating up refugee children in revenge attack for female asylum centre worker killed by Somali ‘boy’

A mob of black-clad masked men went on a rampage in and around Stockholm’s main train station last night beating up refugees and anyone who did not look like they were ethnically Swedish.

Before the attack, the group of 200 people handed out xenophobic leaflets with the message ‘Enough now’.

Swedish media reported that the thugs, allegedly linked to Sweden’s football hooligan scene, were targeting unaccompanied minors with a ‘foreign’ background.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3423968/Mobs-hundreds-masked-men-rampage-Stockholm-central-station-beating-refugee-children.html