From Left To "Liberal"

Readers on both sides of Mamet’s current political stance can take issue with his social conservatism. He is, among other things, an unbending proponent of traditional gender arrangements; and yet who even on the left can deny the miseries that have attended the decline of the two-parent family? Nevertheless, it is exhilarating to hear so much common sense expressed with such forceful eloquence: “The honest man might observe…that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and go out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.”
Mamet is not a man with a plan. Neither the right nor the left is to be entirely trusted, and a complete national salvation may remain forever beyond our grasp. “We are a democracy,” he writes, “and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.”
http://reason.com/archives/2011/06/02/david-mamets-conversion-story

Liberal as in the classic liberalism in which government is limited the People retain the responsibility to govern themselves.

Limits of Free Will

Another fascinating example of how our "free will" is limited, constrained, impacted by biology and physiology.  Certainly the conscious mind impacts the unconscious and vice versa, but this is often happening in ways we've never even conceived.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704681904576313243579677316.html

Private Pensions? That Will Never Work

Implemented by José Piñera (now a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Cato) to replace unsustainable public pensions, private retirement accounts have averaged real annual rates of return of more than 9 percent, contributed to economic growth and the rise in savings, and helped turn working Chileans into capitalists. They’ve been a key to Chile’s economic progress and political maturity. The reform has been copied in part or in full by some 30 countries around the world. And contrary to what American critics on the left claimed at the time, private pensions weathered the global financial storm admirably.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/thirty-years-of-private-social-security-in-chile/

Harsanyi: The Pres Should Be Cheering

Harsanyi's latest is as good for a laugh as always:

The left's "energy" initiatives of the past decade -- the entire purpose of energy policy, in fact -- have been aimed at artificially driving fossil fuel prices up to incentivize the bitter clingers to embrace the government's Utopian energy schemes. No secret has been made of it. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama was asked by CNBC's John Harwood, "So could the (high) oil prices help us?" Obama: "I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment." Sudden spikes are bad (politically speaking), but gradual price spikes? Helpful. That same year, current U.S. "Energy" Secretary (then just a zany professor) Steven Chu clarified that "somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe."

Who says this administration doesn't get things done?

What we need are clean energy investments, properly inflated tires, Chinese-style rail systems -- all free of the distraction of capitalism. Also, we must rid the nation of oil subsidies. This I completely support, as long as the funds are reinvested into projects beneficial for the struggling American worker, say, bike paths or public service announcements.

This is the Darwinian political calculus of the Left:  We sell our souls to unions to appeal to the "workers", while we sell our souls to the Greens to get their votes, and we lie like a rug to cover up the cognitive dissonance required to be "for" both groups while working against both of their interests.  But whichever group they coopt, the results is more government control.

Inflation, Debt, Wealth - McArdle

McArdle writes:

And I cannot disagree too strongly with the notion that the US can't default because we can always print money.  It isn't even technically true--Zimbabwe eventually ran out of hard currency to buy the ink it needed to print the money to sustain its hyperinflation.

 

Moreover, the dismissive way that Galbraith treats this problem looks only at the stock of debt, not the flow of funds.  Inflation is only a good way to get out of your debts if you aren't planning to borrow any more money.  Otherwise, investors simply recover their losses--and then some--by requiring higher interest rates on all your new borrowing.  "All your new borrowing" eventually includes all of the money you borrowed before, because unless you're running a surplus, you're going to have to roll over every penny of that old debt into new loans as it matures.

Inflation was a good way to ease the burden of our World War II borrowing--once the war was over.  But it is not a good way to ease the burden of an increasingly expensive entitlement program that shows no signs of winding down.

 

You can pull all sorts of tricks to force bondholders to eat some losses on the money they lent you--but you can't pull them over and over.  America was able to wriggle its way out of a substantial portion of its WWII debts in large part because it was otherwise pretty fiscally sound.

Debt held by the public is in the range of $9 trillion, or about 64% of GDP.  The average maturity of our public debt holdings is under 5 years, meaning that roughly half of our debt will have to be rolled over within that time frame.  You can see how short-lived our ability to inflate away our debt would be--and how quickly the budget could be severely compromised by higher interest costs, even if we are using our "means of production" to the hilt.  

 

You can argue that a small amount of inflation is preferable to the alternatives, distributing the pain very broadly in order to avoid the intense dislocations of a sudden shock.  I might even agree with someone who argued this. But small amounts of inflation are not going to rid us of $10 trillion in debt.  And the pain of large amounts of inflation is extremely painful--arguably, more so, not less so, than technical default.

Indeed, in large amounts, inflation is just default by another name.  And it retains many of the problems of default.  Either way, we'll be forced to suddenly slam on the brakes of our deficit finance--either because no one will lend to us, or because the higher interest rates they demand will make such borrowing impractical.  (Just look at Ireland).  

Inflation, Debt, Wealth - Kinsley

Kinsley on inflation impacts on debt and wealth:
Here's an easy prediction: Soon, many of the people who have been talking about how the return of high inflation is terribly unlikely will start talking instead about how a bit of inflation is harmless or even healthy for the economy. In fact, it's already started. This is from a news article in the New York Times: "[T]he purchases [of debt by the Federal Reserve Board] have improved economic conditions, all but erasing fears of deflation…. Inflation, which is beneficial in moderation, has climbed closer to healthy levels since the Fed started buying bonds."

Why are people talking this way? Here's the missing explanation: Inflation reduces the value of debt. If poorer people are on balance borrowers and wealthier people are on balance lenders, inflation can help to reduce one of our most serious economic problems, which is the increase in income and wealth inequality. More important, inflation is the only conceivable easy way we can pay down the national debt to a manageable size, or at least slow its growth.

This is how it works: The debt ceiling we're about to crash through is $14.3 trillion. But even as we borrow more (about $1.6 trillion this year), inflation erodes the value of what we already owe. At an inflation rate of 2.7%, $14.3trillion will be worth about $13.9trillion in today's dollars a year from now. That's nearly $400billion wiped away from the national debt without fuss, without debate and seemingly without cost or pain. A quarter of the deficit. And that's with inflation at record lows. If inflation were 5%, it would wipe out $715 billion; at 10%, nearly the entire projected annual increase in the national debt, even at its current record high of $1.6 trillion.

Of course, it would also wipe out people's savings at the same rapid clip. Anyone who lived through the inflation of 1979-81 knows that there are noxious social effects as well. To say that inflation, at 2.7%, has "climbed closer to healthy levels" is insane.

Unsustainable, That's What You Are

Think we can just raise taxes on the rich to save the welfare state?  That's a negative, ghostrider, because the retiree patten is full and getting moreso.  The welfare state is not sustainable.

http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_1_birthrates.html  - excerpts follow:

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face—and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels—that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward.

Demographers are scrambling to adjust their population projections, with little notice in the press. In the early 1990s, United Nations researchers projected that the world’s population would reach a maximum of 10 to 12 billion people (up from about 6.7 billion today). They subsequently scaled back that projection to 9.5 billion and then to about 9.1—adding, however, that it might be as low as 7.9. But the truth is that no one knows how this massive reversal will end. The UN demographers optimistically claim that the world’s fertility rate, currently at 2.6 children per woman, will decline to replacement level and then stabilize. But there’s no clear reason for that to happen; dozens of countries have seen their rates sink far lower. In his book Fewer, Ben Wattenberg estimates that if the rate were to stop at 1.85 births per woman, the world’s population could shrink to 2.3 billion by the year 2300.

Unfortunately, getting people to work longer won’t solve countries’ fertility-related economic difficulties, even if it will have a modest impact on pension spending. The Japanese, for instance, already boast a nearly 70 percent labor-force participation rate for those aged 55 to 64. But because of the country’s extreme birth dearth, by mid-century the average Japanese would need to work until age 83 to keep a constant ratio of workers to retirees. Europeans would need to work until their late seventies.

Reality - Not Optional

Free markets are based on risk and will always be prone to particular failure. Only government attempts to prevent or compensate for particular failure can threaten the systemic variety.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/04/19/peter-foster-keynesianism%E2%80%99s-systemic-failure/

Harsanyi Never Fails to Amuse

And isn't it about time we shared responsibility and kicked in our share for the extraordinary benefits provided to us by Washington? And by "all" of us, of course, I mean the folks who make more money than I do.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/04/20/if_washington_is_so_great_lets_all_pay_for_it_109607.html

Another jewel:
This mystifying phrase, I came to discover after a thorough investigation, translates to this: "Hey, let's tax the rich because everyone hates those bastards anyway."

Fantasy, Let Me Introduce You to Reality

Fantasy, Meet Reality
This is a great read, and a great opening photo, both worth indulging in.  Sad?  Yes, it is that when fantasy is revealed and hope for long delayed suffering arrives.  These are great examples of why as little as possible should be entrusted to the feeble human minds of those who would be the leaders of a coercive monopoly state.

Friedman On the Value Of Human Life

This sort of understanding results from the mis-understanding of what money is.  Money IS human life.  It is created by, has value from, the amount of human productivity it represents.  Destruction of wealth and money equals a destruction of those things which allow us to live, to thrive.  Pretending that each life has an unlimited value ignores real choices we make each day - like deciding to drive to work.
HT:  http://mjperry.blogspot.com

Enought is Enough!

Latest Undercover Sting
As the 2008 campaign wore on, O'Keefe said, insiders grew worried Obama might actually win. They began dropping hints that the candidate was just a parody. They had him complain about the price of arugula to Iowa farmers. When that didn't work, Obama went bowling, scored a 37, and then joked that the almost impossibly poor performance "was like the Special Olympics or something."

Who's After Your Liberty? The Smart Folk Are!

I loath the left end of the political spectrum, especially the collectivist end (but I repeat myself).  It chaps my hide that I have to go to people whom I consider to be living in a fantasy world to get some semblance of reality in terms of public policy. But that's where it's at. Yea, I suppose I could be a friend of even someone like Sarah Palin, even though I think she's either a moron or, so ignorant on so many levels as to make the distinction meaningless. But you know what: I trust her to leave me alone to a far greater extent than your average Prius driving, NPR sticker sporting, miserable commie -- who would have me in the social cannibal pot in the blink of an eye.
http://freetheanimal.com/2010/11/jimmy-moore-the-muckraker-paleo-and-christianity.html


LOL on that quote!  There have been plenty of comparisons between how likely you are to be murdered by a Harvard grad vice an NRA member, and this one's in that vein - who'd you trust your liberty to?  A well intentioned Harvard grad or a semi-educated self starting pistol like Sarah Palin?  


My truth is - neither, but since that's not the choice, I'd trust Palin with my liberty over any liberal, any day.

Joke Becomes Reality

A man of twenty-one with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers’ money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute. Why not? His social worker says sex is a “human right” and that his client, being a virgin, is entitled to the support of the state in claiming said right. Fortunately, a £520 million program was set up by Her Majesty’s Government to “empower those with disabilities.”
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Dependence-Day-6753

I've been joking with friends about this for months, but didn't think I'd see it come to fruition so fast!  But really, if we're going to use the coercive force of the state to take money from the subjects and apply that money with the benefit of governmental wisdom to alleviate suffering - what greater reduction in suffering could there be than to 'empower' young men to avoid the suffering of sexual deprivation!?! 

Steyn's a genius, if a bit too enamored of using words like 'we' when he means 'the political class with the consent of those who are mesmerized by them'.  But this piece covers a lot of ground and is worth reading more than once, if one can hold off the urge to feel as depressed about things as Steyn seems to.

Think Small and Throw Mud

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/13/opinion/13friedman.html?_r=1
I long ago realized this author is a good reporter but nothing special as a thinker - his thought process on everything seems to revolve around his desire that government take other peoples' money and spend it according to his ideals.  And why not?  It's not his money.

In this piece, he points to a process by which a few million, adding up to a billion over time, might be flung at the idea of accelerated science and technology development mills.  Who knows, perhaps this kind of government inspired do-gooder stuff would work - it hasn't very often, the sterling example being the government funded project to map the human genome, which was totally outclassed in both cost and efficacy by private sector efforts - but there's simply no real reason for optimism on this front.  If it was as simple as throwing money at projects, we'd all be eating bon bons right now.  Does he think no one's come up with this idea before? 

Interestingly, he throws a dart at the Tea Party movement - "Welcome to Tea Party America. Think small and carry a big ego."  This is totally unrelated to the rest of the article, and seems to have been inserted only as red meat to the author's sense of his audience - those who love all the big government ideas that the author seems to enchanted by.  Apparently, he thinks the Tea Party has 59 seats in the Senate, a majority in the House and also holds the office of the Presidency, thus the Tea Party's death grip on the US budget.

The obviously goofy part of all this is that there are plenty of entities besides the government who could throw a billion dollars at a project like the ones described IF THERE WAS ANY REASON TO THINK IT WOULD WORK.  The author has some sort of blinders on about where technological advancement comes from and who pays for it and why.  They had one of these types of deals in the 1950s to develop alternatives to oil.  The fact that the project failed doesn't mean every subsequent one would fail, but what basis is there to believe that this round of government backed investment would work when there are so few examples of government's success in determining when to invest what amount of money in which things?  I'd be willing to argue that the government's take over of the financing of science is the biggest brake on success in scientific research we've seen in our life times - because ultimately government only acts due to political imperative.  What we see in drug research, AGW research, health and weight loss research, is that once the inner circle is formed of like minded researchers, the research that gets funded is the research which tends to validate the significance and agenda of that inner circle.  "Squirrels begat squirrels." 
Supposedly, corporations are beholden to the almighty dollar and are corrupted by greed.  As if politicians and their sycophants aren't?  Greed is the constant - what mitigates greed is the incentive to cooperate to get satisfaction.  When we can satisfy our greed through coercion, all bets are off.
Government of course has but one tool - coercion.  Businesses, unless or until they can enlist the government to stave off the competition (e.g. Sherman Anti Trust and similar law), succeed via their mastery of cooperative arrangements.  This does not create utopia, but the outcome is far better than what is created by coercion. 
So the author blithely discuss his frustrations with the Tea Party while chatting up foreign leaders.  Perhaps that's the sort of thing he's best at, and apparently he can out earn most of by these pursuits.  I remain uninspired by his love of state control over everything that matters, and his generally small or silly ideas which he champions as if they were something else. If government were so wise and competent, it wouldn't need advice from the likes of him.

Prufrock

Prufrockian Political Economy
by Russ Roberts on July 22, 2010

When I talk about risk and safety, I always like to point out that it's easy to make sure that no one ever dies in an airplane crash: ban air travel. The fact that we don't suggests that we really don't want perfectly safe air travel.
Similarly, it's easy to make sure that you luggage is never lost when you fly-fine airlines $1,000,000 for every lost bag. (First heard this example used by Jonathan Skinner) Not only would you never lose a bag, if you could collect the fine as compensation, you'd encourage travelers to try to get their bags lost. But even without that perverse result, travelers don't want a million dollar fine. True, no bag would ever get lost, but the cost of a ticket would become much higher because of all the costs that airlines would incur to avoid lost bags. The bottom line is that we don't want the probability of a bag being lost to be zero.
Similarly, we don't want ratings agencies to be perfect seers. The WSJ reports:
Ford Motor Co.'s financing arm pulled plans to issue new debt, the first casualty of a bond market thrown into turmoil by the financial overhaul signed into law Wednesday.
Market participants said the auto maker pulled a recent deal, backed by packages of auto loans, because it was unable to use credit ratings in its offering documents, a legal requirement for such sales. The company declined to comment.
The nation's dominant ratings firms have in recent days refused to allow their ratings to be used in bond registration statements. The firms, including Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings, fear they will be exposed to new liability created by the Dodd-Frank law.
The law says that the ratings firms can be held legally liable for the quality of their ratings. In response, the firms yanked their consent to use the ratings, hoping for a reprieve from the Securities and Exchange Commission or Congress. The trouble is that asset-backed bonds are required by law to include ratings in official documents.
The result has been a shutdown of the market for asset-backed securities, a $1.4 trillion market that only recently clawed its way back to health after being nearly shuttered by the financial crisis.
Many horrific results of legislation are intended. But this one, I suspect is more in the J. Alfred Prufrock category: That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."
As Hayek said in The Fatal Conceit:
The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
http://cafehayek.com/2010/07/10324.html

What's the Purpose of Government?

Natural Reluctance
Elena Kagan's disturbing refusal to acknowledge pre-existing rights
Jacob Sullum | July 7, 2010
Excerpts:
According to the Declaration of Independence, people create government to protect their pre-existing, inalienable rights. Yet when Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) asked Kagan whether armed self-defense is one of those rights, she professed agnosticism.
"I don't have a view of what are natural rights independent of the Constitution," Kagan said. In two days of testimony replete with the evasive maneuvers that she once complained had rendered Supreme Court confirmation hearings a "vapid and hollow charade," her silence on natural rights was one of the most disturbing things she didn't say.
In addition to eschewing statements that might "provide some kind of hints" about how she would vote on a case that could conceivably come before the Court, Kagan declined to offer opinions on subjects, such as natural rights, that she deemed irrelevant to the Court's work. In short, she was happy to answer any question, as long as it was neither related nor unrelated to the positions she would take as a justice.
But was Kagan right to say that natural rights should play no role in constitutional interpretation? "I'm not saying I do not believe that there are rights pre-existing the Constitution and the laws," she said, but "you should not want me to act in any way on the basis of such a belief, if I had one," because "my job as a justice is to enforce the Constitution and the laws."
Although justices should not read their own idiosyncratic notions of natural rights into the Constitution, the concept is essential to understanding what the Framers were trying to do. In addition to the Declaration of Independence, which reflects the Framers' philosophical premises but does not have the force of law, the Constitution itself repeatedly refers to pre-existing rights.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/07/07/natural-reluctance
The First Amendment does not say, "The people shall have a right to freedom of speech." It says, "Congress shall make no law.abridging the freedom of speech." Likewise with "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" and "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures."
These are not rights the government creates; they are pre-existing rights the government is bound to respect. There is no other way to make sense of the Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
By contrast, here is how Kagan summarized the Supreme Court's conclusion in the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller (emphasis added): "The Second Amendment confers.an individual right to keep and bear arms." What the decision actually said is that the Second Amendment acknowledges that right. "It has always been widely understood," the Court explained, "that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right" that was considered "one of the fundamental rights of Englishmen."
That point was crucial in deciding, as the Court did last week, that the Second Amendment applies to the states via the 14th Amendment. Some theory of pre-existing, fundamental rights is also necessary in applying neglected yet important constitutional provisions such as the Ninth Amendment and the 14th Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause.
Constitutional interpretation aside, Kagan's reluctance to endorse the concept of pre-existing rights was troubling because without it we cannot draw moral distinctions between legal regimes. How can we condemn a dictator for legally authorized oppression, or say that our own Constitution is better now that it bans slavery than it was when it tacitly approved the practice? The traditional American answer is that people have certain rights by virtue of being human, regardless of what the law says.

Orders Emerge

"It's Friedrich Hayek's "spontaneous" order in action: Instead of sitting at a mechanized light waiting to be told when to go, drivers meet in an intersection and negotiate their way through by making eye contact and gesturing. The secret is that drivers must pay attention to their surroundings - to pedestrians and other cars - rather than just to signs and signals. It demonstrates the "Peltzman Effect" (named after retired University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman): People tend to behave more recklessly when their sense of safety is increased. By removing signs, lights and barriers, drivers feel less safe, so they drive more carefully. They pay more attention.
In Drachten, Holland, lights and signs were removed from an intersection handling about 30,000 cars a day. Average waiting times dropped from 50 seconds to less than 30 seconds. Accidents dropped from an average of eight per year to just one.
On Kensington High Street in London, after pedestrian railing and other traffic markers were removed, accidents dropped by 44 percent.
"What these signs are doing is treating the driver as if they were an idiot," says traffic architect Ben Hamilton-Baillie. "If you do so, drivers exhibit no intelligence."
Once again, freedom and responsibility triumph."
http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel/private-enterprise-does-it-better.html

Context Is Everything

"Contrary to Mr. Crowther's suggestion, the 18th century was not less polluted than the 21st; it was vastly more polluted. Human excrement and other environmental hazards were a part of everyday life in the 18th century in ways that we in the 21st can barely imagine. Any good book on life in that century tells a repugnant tale of dirt, disease, and environment-borne dangers.
For example, in her 2000 book Dr. Johnson's London <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312291531/qid=1084017246/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/104-9906493-3283169?v=glance&s=books> , Liza Picard describes conditions in the world's wealthiest city in the mid-18th century. They weren't pretty. She writes, for instance, of the common danger of weaning babies "on to solid food, prepared from germ-laden water and milk and polluted bread, in unhygienic kitchens" [p. 158].
We today do have more of certain kinds of pollution than did our 18th-century ancestors. But on the whole, the industrialized world of the early 21st century is indescribably cleaner, safer, and more pleasant for humanity than was any time prior to the industrial age.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux"
http://www.cafehayek.com/

Explanation for Morons

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/?hp
"Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”
It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.
There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth.  We literally see the world the way we want to see it.  But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that.  Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it.  Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it.   We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.
ERROL MORRIS:  Knowing what you don’t know?  Is this supposedly the hallmark of an intelligent person?
DAVID DUNNING:  That’s absolutely right.  It’s knowing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. [4] Donald Rumsfeld gave this speech about “unknown unknowns.”  It goes something like this: “There are things we know we know about terrorism.  There are things we know we don’t know.  And there are things that are unknown unknowns.  We don’t know that we don’t know.”  He got a lot of grief for that.  And I thought, “That’s the smartest and most modest thing I’ve heard in a year.”
David Dunning, in his book “Self-Insight,” calls the Dunning-Kruger Effect “the anosognosia of everyday life.”[10] When I first heard the word “anosognosia,” I had to look it up.  Here’s one definition: Anosognosia is a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability. [11]  Dunning‘s juxtaposition of anosognosia with everyday life is a surprising and suggestive turn of phrase.  After all, anosognosia comes originally from the world of neurology and is the name of a specific neurological disorder.
DAVID DUNNING:  An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed.  If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it.  And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.”  They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis.  There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side.  There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.”  It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment.  If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face.  And they’re not aware about the other half.  If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food.  You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage.  It was an analogy for us.[12]
This brings us in this next section to Joseph Babinski (1857-1932), the neurologist who gave anosognosia its name."