This article in The New York Times titled “I.B.M. Explores Shift of White-Collar Jobs Overseas” no doubt sends shivers down the backs of every worker-bee in the IT sector. There are a few things to address here.

* Now college educated people understand the rage that blue-collar workers who expected lifetime employment at $45,000-60,000 a year felt as they saw their jobs moved overseas.

* This seems to be a modified version of what Paul Krugman spoke of in Peddling Prosperity when he asserted knowledge workers could be made redundant by computers while cooks & janitors will always be needed because of the lack of progress in robotics. The difference is that these knowledge workers aren’t being replaced by computers, but rather instantaneous communication and radically lowered barriers to cooperation because of IT has made American workers expendable when faced with cheap foreign knowledge workers. In contrast, cooks and janitors are still around and not being exported overseas, but, humans from overseas (or across the Rio Grande) are now filling those positions.

Personally, I think that the pendulum will swing back from outsourcing all the high level development and architecture when the limitations of technology and intercultural communications over 6,000 miles become apparent. Additionally, the social & personal element still exists when a group of programmers collaborates, and that is hard to come by if they are scattered across the four corners of the earth (of course, until we have realistic VR technology). Until the expectation and reality re-equilibriate, it’s going to be kind of painful for IT workers in the US.

Related article in The American Conservative.

Godless comments:

“Increased global trade was supposed to lead to better jobs and higher standards of living,” said Donald A. Manzullo, an Illinois Republican who is the committee chairman. “The assumption was that while lower-skilled jobs would be done elsewhere, it would allow Americans to focus on higher-skilled, higher-paying opportunities. But , what do you tell the Ph.D., or professional engineer, or architect, or accountant, or computer scientist to do next? Where do you tell them to go?”

You tell them to start their own company, is what you do! Are these highly trained guys all wage slaves? I thought they were smart and creative…interest rates are at an all time low, and now is the time to bootstrap a new company.

 

Lethal stereotypes: Hair and eye color as survival characteristics during the Holocaust asserts a new study excerpted over at Dienekes’ blog.

Interesting opinion from an atheist who defends the Church of England as a potent force for secularism. The nutshell of the argument is that the C of E acts as a vaccine against more virulent forms of religion. Christopher Hitchens once expressed similar opinions in Freethought Today. Until recently all of Scandinavia had state supported churches (Sweden disestablished in 2000), while Germany and The Netherlands give financial support to prominent religious denomenations [1]. None of these countries is known for its piety (40% of Dutch are “Nothing,” 25% of Germans are explicitly “confessionless,” while Lutheran churches in Scandinavia are rather empty on a usual Sunday). Of course other European nations, France prominently, that have high walls of separation between church & state are also irreligous in the main, so it is hard to find a pattern.

But some theorists of religion (Rodney Stark) have long argued that a competitive religious marketplace, such as the United States, is an important factor in the observance and zeal of a population. Though there might be something to this, there are nations such as Japan that have an open marketplace and many small new religious movements, and yet remain rather secular (South Korea is an example of a nation where this thesis seems valid, but one must remember that at least 45% of South Koreans are not religiously affiliated). So I am not going to advocate an established church for the United States anytime soon….

[1] The fundamentalist/traditionalist Protestant churches in Germany who do not recieve state support are termed “The Free Churches.”

The Washington Post reports that a gene variation makes some people more vulnerable to clinical depression after a major trauma (e.g. divorce, job loss). The article utters nary a word about IQ or testosterone, but offers this tidbit:

“Moffitt’s study, being published today in the journal Science, involved Caucasian patients, specifically a group of New Zealanders of mainly English, Scottish and Irish descent. There has been limited study of such genetic variations in other ethnic groups, Moffitt said, although preliminary studies indicated that groups in West Africa, as well as African Americans, were more likely to have the protective form of the gene. Small studies in Japan, Korea and China found a higher frequency of the gene that increases vulnerability, she said. Neither Moffitt nor Weinberger knew of any studies examining the question in Hispanics or Native Americans.”

I don’t agree with Christopher Hitchens on many issues, but this line from a profile in Frontpage Magazine hooked me:

Because of September 11, his mission now is “to defend the enlightenment, to defend and extend the benefits of rationalism. By all and any means necessary”. [my emphasis -R]

The interpretation of this line, the actualization of the intent, is problematic & disputatious, but there are those on the Feudal Right and Relativist Left who would would hestiate or dissent from advocating the values of the Enlightenment. Those of us who draw inspiration from the Enlightenment project, its intent if not execution in all the details, often lack the zest and zeal that neo-Feudalists and hard-Leftists bring to their revolutions & reactions. Perhaps we can never equal the irrational rage and fury on the margins of the political spectrum, but we can name them, and we can brand them, and we can know them to better battle them. They are the enemy, of that I have no doubt.

I am all for letting other cultures develop at their own pace-but I also think we should be honest about their differences from liberal democracy. Chris Mooney points out what “Islamic Democracy” usually means in practice. Here is an excerpt of a recent post:

More evidence comes from a 2000 piece in the Washington Post by Abdo, which celebrated the moderate Islamist movement in Egypt. “Unlike in Saudia Arabia,” wrote Abdo, Egyptian Islamists “would not advocate cutting off the hands of thieves or gouging out the eyes of other criminals.” (How generous of them.) “Rather,” Abdo continued,

…they would seek an accommodation between Islam and modernity, not a return to the Medieval Islamic period. They would, however, insist that books and films that do not conform to Islamic principles be banned. But this is in line with the wishes of a majority of Egyptians.

As if the wishes of the majority can justify censorship! If this is multiculturalism, I want no part of it. I’m not saying that we Americans need to go out and thoroughly Westernize every corner of the globe. But I do believe that principles like freedom of expression and thought, which are enshrined in U.N. documents as basic human rights, should not be negotiable in any government daring to call itself democratic.

What Chris is pointing out is that not all democracies are liberal – and that majority rule can sometimes lead to the curtailment of individual freedoms, something that Americans forget too often (and often fall prey to as well, for instance, the movement for the Flag Burning Amendment). This is the central theme of Fareed Zakaria’s new book, The Future of Freedom. We should also note that these restrictions on “universal freedoms” are not just limited to Islamic countries-censorship is accepted in much of the European continent, and to a lesser extent in England (blasphemy laws), when there is an overwhelming perception of detracting from the social good (particularly in areas of “hate” or defamation of character more broadly interpreted). Even in the United States, the First Amendment was not generally applied to state laws until this century, and even when it was broadened, the material still had to have some “redeeming social value.”

Apologists for Islamism as an acceptable form of political organization among the Western intelligensia are clearly among those who I consider “the enemy.” Though as a practical matter I do not believe we can change the world in our image (the Western, and more specifically Anglospheric & American) by force of arms, ceding the moral high ground is tantamount to admitting defeat. It’s an assertion of equivalence between liberal democratic regimes which serve as immigration magnets and repressive societies mired in neo-feudal stagnation and only now stumbling towards the Enlightenment (this last empirical point is telling, for though majorities often wish others to be controlled, they themselves yearn for freedom of action). To be more specific, I do admit that perhaps in this generation the women of Islamic countries may have neither control of their bodies/sexual lives nor equality before the law and society…but just because there are practical issues involved does not mean that I do not believe that one day all humanity will bend the knee before the principles of equality before the law and justice for all.

Article (free) in The Economist about the doom & gloom over the greying of Europe. One thing that the article points out, at current rates of societal aging, immigration can’t make up the balance and save the pension systems of many European countries. This doesn’t even take into account the dangers of supporting white Christian Old Europeans with brownish Muslim nouveau Europeans. Of course the article does not touch on transhumanism. A 100 year timescale to me is long enough that I suspect that the human race will be in a very different place sociobiologically or our current socioeconomic structure will have collapsed under the burden of its incompatibility with our biological heritage.

The key for Europe seems to be the matter of women-“partial emancipation” in places like Italy means that though women have the right and expectation to work, they are also assumed to be primary care givers for children & adult men. This of course dimishes their inclination to be involved with adult men or children. Perhaps one thing that males have to reflect upon is that legal liberation of women has more subtle consequences than we might realize-the burdens & freedoms that women have taken up have an effect on the other side of the equation, as males must take up some of the burdens that women must let go to enter the public sphere. The only way the equation seems to be balancing right now is that children are being removed out of it.

Excerpt from Tony’s Blair’s speech to the U.S. Congress yesterday:

“The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack. And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify around an idea. And that idea is liberty. (Applause.) We must find the strength to fight for this idea and the compassion to make it universal. Abraham Lincoln said, “Those that deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves.” And it is this sense of justice that makes moral the love of liberty.”

That’s a lot of idealism for one paragraph. Is Tony Blair really just pushing the same supernatural claptrap as the Pope with a different spin (e.g. just substitute ‘Christ’s love’ for ‘freedom’ and ‘salvation through Christ’ for ‘liberty’ above)? What is “liberty” in a material world?

From The Economist:

A “PEACEFUL virus”, is how Colonel Muammar Qaddafi described HIV to the African Union this week. Along with malaria and sleeping sickness, the Libyan leader said, it is God’s way of keeping white colonisers out of Africa.

“Brother Qaddafi” has a sick sense of humor. Read the full article in the extended entry….

Fight over the thinning disease
Jul 17th 2003 | JOHANNESBURG
From The Economist print edition

A crisis crying out for leadership
EPA

A comedian signs autographs for his fans

Get article background

A “PEACEFUL virus”, is how Colonel Muammar Qaddafi described HIV to the African Union this week. Along with malaria and sleeping sickness, the Libyan leader said, it is God’s way of keeping white colonisers out of Africa. That raised a laugh. Other African leaders take the awful threat of AIDS more seriously. But not as seriously as they should, particularly in South Africa. By the government’s own estimate, 1.7m deaths could be prevented by 2010 if all who need anti-AIDS drugs could get them. But the only reason we know this is that the study containing this estimate, which was finished in April but not published, was leaked this week.

Using cheap generic drugs, the report’s authors estimated the cost, including doctors’ time, would be at most 21 billion rand ($2.6 billion) over the next seven years. This is a big sum for a middle-income country, but affordable, easily so if the government could bring itself to accept some of the money that the UN-sponsored Global Fund keeps offering it.

Officials talk blithely of acting with the “utmost urgency”, but the report’s findings have not even been discussed by the cabinet, which has met only once in three months. This fits a pattern. Figures that show infection rates worsening among pregnant women have not been published. And for the past 18 months, President Thabo Mbeki has stymied a plan to allow universal access to anti-AIDS drugs, though money is already earmarked.

What explains this reluctance to act? In part, Mr Mbeki’s scepticism about the safety and usefulness of anti-retroviral drugs. His health minister calls them “poisons”. Another reason is that many South Africans are suspicious of western drug firms, who they fear want only to profit from sick Africans.

Meanwhile, a World Bank study gives warning of a “complete economic collapse” in South Africa if there is no effective response to AIDS. That is probably an exaggeration, but most economists agree that the disease hampers growth, so the cost of not treating it may be higher than doing so (see article). A number of South African firms give drugs to infected workers because, they say, it saves money in the long run. The government may finally be coming round to this view. An adviser to Mr Mbeki says the cabinet will review the leaked report “within weeks”. The delay, it is said, was to “ensure that cabinet is ready to take a decision.”

Posted by razib at 10:06 AM

This New York Times article on the “Great Leap Forward” is a pretty good survey of the issues at hand. As stated, “anatomically modern humans” existed in Africa 100,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until ~50,000 years B.P. that there was a ratchet up toward the hallmarks of modern sapiency. The breakneck speed of cultural evoution and the profusion of forms & styles that characterize our species seems to have lagged our outward humanity by tens of thousands of years.

What was the catalyst? Some theorists posit that an important regulatory gene-FOXP2-played a crucial role, in particular, in the development of the capacity for language. I’m pretty agnostic on this issue. Dr. Henry Harpending has indicated that it might be that not all modern humans made the cultural transition in toolkits that characterizes the “Great Leap,” suggesting that if modern humans are genetically very similar (the result of a radiative expansion from African 50,000 years ago), it is more than just an alteration in in the FOXP2 gene in the African context.