The damage done by probability blindness

The Damage Done By Probability Blindness https://t.co/mCm4aG8IrI

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 17, 2021

As Bishop Joseph Butler said in 1736, "probability is the very guide of life."

The coronavirus has generated more blind fear than perhaps any other event in recorded history. That fear is blind because it ignores easily calculated probabilities.

The reported coronavirus deaths in the U.S. now stand at six hundred thousand. The population of the U.S. is approximately 330 million. When you divide deaths by the population, the number is less than two-tenths of one percent. As catastrophes go, that is a relatively small number.

There is a wide disparity of coronavirus deaths among age groups. That fact has been deliberately ignored by the authorities and the media.

Eighty percent of all deaths have occurred in the over 65 population even though that age group constitutes only 16 percent of the total population. The number of deaths in that group is 464 thousand. The total population of Americans 65 and older is 51 million. Dividing the deaths by that population gives you a probability of 0.0089, or nine-tenths of one percent.

Top Articles The Top Ten Pending Eruptions What Was California Thinking? Lester Holt: Poster Child for Media Bias The Fifty-Year War on America’s Soul Taking the Racism Test Read More Moral Legitimacy and the US Government Taking the Racism Test Taking the Racism Test The number of COVID deaths in the 49 and younger age group is twenty-seven thousand. The total number of Americans in that age group is 233 million. Again, dividing the deaths by the corresponding population gives you a probability of 0.00011, or one one-hundredth of one percent. A probability that small is often described as "not significantly different from zero."

Comparing the young and old age groups reveals that the 49 and younger age group's risk of COVID death is ninety times less than the 65 and older age group's.

There has been virtually no difference in policies in regard to various age groups. It has been the costliest application of a "one size fits all" approach ever.

There would have been far fewer deaths and much less disruption of our lives if the bulk of the attention had been focused on the over 65 age group. Rest homes should have been quarantined. Schools should never have been closed. Masks were unnecessary for anyone 50 or younger.

If health officials and the media had acted responsibly, they would have informed the public about these probabilities. They haven't even tried because their objective has been to raise anxiety, not reduce it.

Politicians and public health officials have a very low estimate of the intelligence of the general public and an extremely high (and unjustified) estimate of their own intelligence. They believe their deliberate concealment of facts is admirable.

We know far more now about the coronavirus than when it began, and what we know is very encouraging. Telling the public the truth, however, would expose health officials and the media for the politics behind their incompetence. They would have to admit that most of the pain and damage they've created has been totally unnecessary.

___________________________

◼ The damage done by probability blindness

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

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Remember when leftists were obsessed with self-esteem?

Why, in a few decades, has the left's obsession flipped from self-love to self-loathing, from pride to shame?

During the 1970s the "self-esteem movement" commenced. According to Wikipedia:

The underlying idea of the movement was that low self-esteem was the root of problems for individuals, making it the root of societal problems and dysfunctions. A leading figure of the movement, psychologist Nathaniel Branden, stated, "I cannot think of a single psychological problem from anxiety and depression to fear of intimacy or of success, to spouse battery or child molestation that is not traced back to the problem of low self-esteem."

As is the case with most obsessions of the left, the self-esteem movement soon faded into obscurity. You no longer hear much about it. The problem was not with the goal of self-esteem. It makes perfect sense that self-esteem and self-confidence are useful in living our lives. The problem was that the left tried to achieve it in its usual simple-minded, ham-handed style.

We can earn real self-esteem only by overcoming life's challenges and disappointments. In contrast, the self-esteem movement's solution was to make life easier for children and take the possibility of disappointment out of their lives. The results were grade inflation, participation trophies, fear of competition, elimination of standardized testing, trigger warnings, and micro-aggressions.

Consequently, our characters have grown weak and fragile. Our culture has grown morbidly obese. Universities overflow with "snowflakes" and "safe spaces." Ordinary debate is taboo.

Human nature evolved to cope with hardships much greater than those we face in today's world. Our instinctual responses to modern life are out of sync with current conditions.

When there are no hardships such as those we've evolved to endure, one response is to create imaginary ones. When we no longer need to worry about where our next meal is coming from, we invent and exaggerate distant and unproven specters — e.g., "catastrophic global warming." We then overreact to minor problems that our forebears would have laughed at. Psyches built for primitive survival ironically struggle to survive modern-day abundance, comfort, and long life expectancies.

The left's plan to bolster self-esteem by making everyone weaker did not work. It did, however, help Democrats in their never-ending quest for more power.

But even creating weakness has not satisfied the left. Leftists not only want us to be weak but also want us to loathe ourselves. A guilt-ridden, shamed citizenry is much easier to control and manipulate. Happy people do not want their lives to be controlled by other people — e.g., politicians. Furthermore, it's far easier to get people to hate themselves than to love themselves.

The left now tells us, in no uncertain terms, that we are despicable people who reside in an irredeemably racist country, a country with a history we should be deeply ashamed of.

Years ago, leftists' obsession was to instill self-esteem in people who didn't deserve it. Now it's to instill guilt in people who don't deserve it and victimhood in people who don't deserve it. It seems that all they care about is making sure that whatever anybody gets is undeserved. ____________________

◼ Remember when leftists were obsessed with self-esteem?

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

Righteous Recycling

Why should leftists bother to make recycling work when their real objective is reached merely by appearing to practice it?

 

Recycling is a leftist sacrament. It fulfills emotional needs for Democrats. They suffer deep-seated guilt from participating in a materialistic culture that they think results in widespread environmental harm. For them recycling serves as a kind of visible penance. Unfortunately, recycling leads to unintended consequences. 

 

A recent article in the Eureka, California Times-Standard began as follows: 

“The CRV situation in Humboldt County is a losing situation for everyone. 

Three major recycling centers in the county have halted all buyback programs for cans, bottles, and glass. 

Customers who pay 5 cents per can at the grocery or convenience store have a nearly impossible time getting that fee back.” 

“CRV” stands for California Refund Value. Two out of three of those words are bogus. Refunds have almost ceased and recyclables have little or no value. The program, however, epitomizes California. 

 

Californians are the truest believers in recycling. Over the decades the state has passed laws that use both force and bribery to increase recycling obedience. One such law pertains to glass, plastic, aluminum cans, and bottles. It requires merchants who sell beverages to charge customers an extra 5 cents for containers up to 24 ounces and 10 cents for containers above 24 ounces. 

 

The legislation enabling the program is the “California Beverage Container Recycling and Litter Reduction Act.”  It has been in effect since 1987 and is administered by the CalRecycle agency. 

 

The law requires supermarkets and other beverage dealers to reimburse the 5 or 10 cent deposits to anyone bringing in their containers, no matter where they acquired them. Milk, wine, and distilled spirits containers are exempt from the law. Beverage merchants must pay a fine of  $100 a day if they choose not to participate. 

 

As you might suspect the program has been something of a minor catastrophe. Part of the problem is that in California and elsewhere recycling has all but collapsed, partly because China stopped buying recyclables. The state passed the law based on the assumption that recycling would always be economically viable. 

 

Wildberries Marketplace, a local supermarket, has chosen to pay the $100 a day fine. According to manager Aaron Gottschalk , “We are here to sell groceries. We are not a recycling center. We felt it was a risk to the safety and sanitation of our store. We just knew we couldn't do it. Did we want to avoid the fee? You bet. But in order to avoid the fee paid to CalRecycle, we would have to fabricate a story and say we were doing something that we were not doing. We weren't going to make that choice and we're paying the fee.” 

 

Wildberries, in other words, is being forced to pay a $100 a day fine for being out of compliance with a law that is all but impossible to obey. 

 

Wildberries is where my wife and I buy most of our groceries. In a conversation with Gottschalk she was told, “Complying would cost us way more than $100 a day. We would have to take every bit of recycling offered to us and then truck it to Crescent City at our expense.” (Crescent city is 85 miles north of the store.) 

 

According to CalRecycle 50 retailers in Humboldt County are now obligated to redeem CRV containers in stores. Notably absent from CalRecycle’s list are Walmart, Target, and Winco. 

 

Most of the Humboldt County designated recycling sites are simply ignoring the rules—they aren’t taking in cans and bottles and they aren’t paying the fines. CalRecycle has been locked down for the past year so there has been no on-site enforcement. 

 

For all practical purposes, recycling has ceased. It simply is no longer economically viable. Supply and demand have turned against it. The price paid for recyclables is below zero, i.e. you have to pay to get someone to take it off your hands. As is the case with ethanol fuel, recycling can only thrive by way of coercion or taxpayer-funded subsidies. 

 

Lawmakers in California are aware of the mess they’ve created, but don’t assume they’ll do anything about it that makes sense. North Coast Assemblyman Jim Wood recently submitted legislation that would permit recycling centers to schedule appointments, something that’s currently prohibited. According to Wood, “These modest changes will by no means solve all the problems facing the bottle bill program, but they address a crisis in my district, and hopefully they will help other communities struggling with access to redemption centers.” Exactly how making appointments would solve any of the deeper problems of the program, he did not explain. 

 

Meanwhile ninety-five percent or more of what goes into recycling bins goes to landfills. That reality is something no one wants to talk about. It would be too upsetting. What we have is faux recycling. 

 

The left’s use of recycling as visible penance is similar to what Christian theology called “outward signs of grace.” That was an issue Saint Augustine addressed in the 4^th century. It dealt with the fact that others could not see if you had grace. Recycling is a modern attempt to cope with the same problem. 

 

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor who is currently a wealth manager. He can be reached at rossecon@aol.com. 

 

 

Other articles of interest on this topic: _____________________

◼ CalRecycle's Regulatory Abuse - Leonard Lang

◼ Expert accuses CA of the worst legal environment in the US - Leonard Lang

It’s Time To Revisit The Road To Serfdom

Recently my column "It's Time to Revisit The Road to Serfdom" ran on the American Thinker website. For whatever reason they left out some of the best quotes from the book. For your enjoyment, here's the full text.

It’s Time To Revisit The Road To Serfdom

Recently the books 1984 and Animal Farm have had a rebirth of relevance. They were written by George Orwell in 1949 and 1945.

Orwell’s books coined words and phrases that have become descriptive of what is happening now—doublethink, Ministry of Truth, Big Brother, thought criminal, Newspeak, and, of course, Orwellian.

Another book with a similar theme was written in 1944 by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek— The Road to Serfdom. Hayek was born in Austria in 1898 and spent most of his life in England and America. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1974 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.

Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm are fictional but the dystopias they describe have become disturbingly real.

Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, on the other hand, is a complete explanation of why attempts to achieve utopias always result into nightmarish dystopias.

A few of the book’s chapter titles reveal its theme:

The Great Utopia Security and Freedom Why the Worst Get on Top The End of Truth The Socialist Roots of Nazism The Totalitarians in Our Midst

In The Road to Serfdom Hayek warns us that once on that “road,” society is forced further and further along it. Each step requires an additional step. Eventually we end up as serfs.

He warns us “that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something quite different.”

He warns us about politicians of the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez type: “There are many people who call themselves socialists. . . who fervently believe in the ultimate aims of socialism but neither care nor understand how they can be achieved, and who are merely certain that they must be achieved, whatever the costs.”

Specifically, Hayek explains why socialism inevitably evolves into totalitarianism. First, well-intended socialist attempts to perfect a free-market economy lead to unforeseen problems. Then, centralized “solutions” don’t solve those problems, but create larger ones. Partial control is never enough. The end result is tyranny.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union some of its former member countries used The Road to Serfdom as a guidebook for what to avoid as they threw off the shackles of socialism.

The following excerpts from The Road to Serfdom show us Hayek in his own words:

It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, of those better off—than on any positive task.

Many a university teacher during the 1930’s has seen English and American students return from the Continent uncertain whether they were communists or Nazis and certain only that they hated Western liberal civilization.

The machinery of monopoly becomes identical with the machinery of the state, and the state itself becomes more and more identified with those who run things than with the interests of the people in general.

Several contributory factors strengthen the tendency of collectivism to become particularist and exclusive. Of these, one of the most important is that the desire of the individual to identify himself with a group is very frequently the result of a feeling of inferiority and that therefore his want will be satisfied only if membership of the group confers some superiority over outsiders.

Everyone who has watched the growth of these movements in Italy or in Germany has been struck by the number of leading men, form Mussolini downward. . . who began as socialists and ended up as Fascists or Nazis.

It is hard to believe that those words were written almost 80 years ago. If you want to understand how the worlds of 1984 and Animal Farm can happen, read The Road to Serfdom.

_____________________
This article originally ran at American Thinker.

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

The big difference between Democrats and Republicans

◼ The big difference between Democrats and Republicans - American Thinker

My father often said persuasion is better than force. I doubt he knew how universally true that is.

You've probably heard many times someone say there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans. That is just plain wrong. The choice of persuasion or force is the central difference between the Republican and Democrat parties. For the most part, Republicans dislike the use of force, and Democrats dislike the use of persuasion, especially persuasion in the form of free speech.

Why the Democrats' lack of interest in free speech and their reliance on force? They have no confidence in the strength and soundness of their ideas. Most of their policies are counterproductive disasters. They don't know how to be persuasive. It's too hard for them. Force is their default. Their intolerance of free speech has become painfully clear — witness the cancel culture, censorship, and the lifetime lockout of Donald Trump from Twitter. Censorship prevents and cancels opportunities for persuasion. Democrat tech oligarchs, in particular, hate persuasion. They fear it. How the tech tyrants have chosen to use their power shows a degree of arrogance beyond anything ever seen in America. Their lust for domination knows no bounds.

Democrats are not satisfied just outcompeting their opponents; they want to crush them. They aim to humiliate them so thoroughly that they or no one like them ever tries anything like this again. They seek to destroy not only Donald Trump, but anyone who ever agreed with any position he ever advocated.

The Democrat tech tyrants, specifically, are the biggest private-sector bullies ever. If there were guillotines available they would use them. Their Trump Derangement Syndrome only intensified as he was on his way out the door. They want revenge, and they want blood. We're witnessing a revival of the French Revolution.

Big Tech has become the greatest concentration of power that's ever existed in the private economy. It used to be that "conspiracy in restraint of trade" was a violation of our anti-trust laws. Don't expect Joe Biden's administration to start enforcing those laws. The tech oligarchs have been far too useful to the Democrat party.

The Big Tech corporations wield their power in the form of censorship and suppression, both being extremely destructive forms of force. Without free speech, America cannot be America. If you erase a person's freedom, you erase the person.

Democrats prefer force because they detest a free citizenry. They scorn the First Amendment. During the lockdowns politicians and power-mad Democrat health officials wiped their feet on it, especially on those parts about freedom of speech, assembly, and religion.

The Founding Fathers specified a free press in the Bill of Rights because they knew that a free press is crucial in limiting the power of government. We now have a situation where the press has become so one-sided it is no longer "free." The media conform so thoroughly that their pathetic members have no minds of their own. They use the exact same words and phraseology in their reporting.

Meanwhile, Democrat politicians have gushed over the opportunity to wield force bestowed on them by the virus lockdowns. Sad to say, they have actually fallen in love with the virus itself. It has been a cornucopia for those thirsting for power.

Concentrated power inevitably leads to the use of force because humans do not give up their freedom without a fight. Our Founding Fathers recognized that threat. While the primary purpose of the Constitution is to limit the power of government, more generally it restricts the concentration of power. As Lord Acton said, "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Power generates its own gravity that forever pulls more power toward it. That's what we're seeing now with the Democrat tech giants and the Democrat lockdowns. Dictators and tyrants always want absolute power. That's why unchecked power brings on totalitarianism.

To err is human and unavoidable. Progress can happen only through a process of trial and error. The smaller the trial, the smaller the error. The more small trials, the more progress. But when absolute power errs, the damage is massive. ____________________

This article originally ran on American Thinker, February 4, 2021. Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

Democrats Have Created Scores of First-Time Trump Voters

Parents, sports fans, new gun owners, and more have plenty of reasons to go red this time around.

The Democrat Party has chosen the wrong side of several crucial issues in 2020. For that they will pay a high price.

They have inadvertently created several groups of first-time Trump voters.

One such group is parents of school children. In part because of fealty to teachers unions, Democrats have strongly resisted fully reopening public schools. As a result, millions of parents have become involuntary home-schoolers. It would only be natural for these parents to lean toward President Trump, whose Secretary of Education has been vocal in her support for fully reopening all schools.

Also ripe for becoming first-time Trump voters are millions of people who are fed up with other coronavirus lockdowns, where draconian mask mandates have become irresistible opportunities for petty tyrants and busybodies to lord it over their fellow citizens.

In her 1902 book The Open Door, Helen Keller wrote, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Joe Biden loves masks and is seldom seen without one. President Trump rarely wears one. Mask haters will not miss either message.

Turning to “fracking,” President Trump expresses his enthusiastic support for it at almost every one of his rallies. Joe Biden is for or against it depending on his audience.

If fracking were prohibited, gasoline and natural gas prices would double. Fracking has allowed the U.S. to be energy independent for the first time in decades, freeing us from unfriendly and unreliable foreign countries. Voters aware of those benefits will gravitate in droves toward Trump.

Professional sports leagues, especially the NFL and NBA, are busy self-annihilating. Viewership for the NBA finals is down 48 percent from a year ago and the lowest since records have been kept. Sunday night NFL ratings are down 39 percent. Most of their millions of fans simply do not want athletes and craven franchise owners to sermonize them. Anyone who loves this country detests seeing players insult the flag and national anthem.

Donald Trump has been a staunch critic of such behavior, even being against having an NFL season at all if players were going to kneel. In contrast, Democrats have joined the kneelers in boosting Black Lives Matter. Nationwide polls indicate collapsing support for BLM. That could translate into millions more first-time Trump voters.

In the first six months of this year five million Americans bought guns for the first time, largely in response to Democrat-enabled riots and support of defunding the police. In each successive month, the number of new gun owners broke the previous month’s record. Those five million new Second Amendment supporters are highly unlikely to vote for Joe Biden. They alone could swing the election to Trump.

If the above political undercurrents generate enough first-time Trump voters, he will not be the only candidate to benefit. To the Democrats’ dismay, there will be significant “down-ballot” repercussions throughout the country. __________________

This article originally ran at American Spectator.

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.

Democrats Have Created Scores of First-Time Trump Voters by Ron Ross https://t.co/kvbMKoXiXR pic.twitter.com/lUzxaGzWxe

— The American Spectator (@amspectator) October 9, 2020

The First Perfect Generation

The advantage of wokeness: you’re morally superior to everyone who has ever lived.

Someone on Twitter wrote recently, “History is not something to like or dislike. It is something to learn from.”

We are living in a time of history rejection. The statue destroyers hate history. Their grievance against Washington, Lincoln, Columbus, and others is that none of them was perfect.

Here’s the problem with judging someone using a standard of perfection — perfection does not exist in individuals or in society. It never has, and it never will. Counting on something that does not exist guarantees failure.

In debates Milton Freidman would sometimes ask, “What perfect solution on what perfect planet are you comparing this to?”

The statue destroyers ignore fundamental principles of justice. They find people guilty of violating standards that did not exist during the eras in which they lived.

Where does this stop?

No one is detached from the times in which he lives. None of us is saintly enough to create his own stand-alone morality. No flesh-and-blood participant in society is strong enough or smart enough to do that. How many times has it happened in the history of civilization? It would not require all the fingers on one hand to count them.

Attempting to erase evidence that Abraham Lincoln existed is fruitless. It may temporarily suppress history, but it does not make history go away. If the Washington Monument is destroyed, George Washington will remain the father of our country. Should our Constitution, as great a creation of mankind that has ever existed, be abolished because some of its authors owned slaves?

Our Founding Fathers had shortcomings. So did all other past human beings. They were not perfect, and neither are we. Judging them solely on the basis of their flaws is absurd. Victor Davis Hanson has pointed out that we are judging historical figures on the basis of their worst traits while ignoring their best traits and accomplishments.Jordan Peterson’s sixth rule of his 12 Rules for Life is “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.”

Jesus put it this way: “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam from thine own eye; and then thou wilt see clearly to cast out the speck from thy brother’s eye.”

Do the statue destroyers have their own houses in perfect order? They apparently consider themselves the first perfect generation in human history. Have they actually achieved perfection, or have they merely surpassed all previous levels of arrogance?

The First Perfect Generation by Ron Ross https://t.co/jHhIB1QJ0k

— The American Spectator (@amspectator) August 8, 2020

_______________________
This article originally ran at American Spectator.

Ron Ross Ph.D. is a former economics professor and author of The Unbeatable Market. Ron resides in Arcata, California and is a founder of Premier Financial Group, a wealth management firm located in Eureka, California. He is a native of Tulsa, Oklahoma and can be reached at rossecon@gmail.com.