Curt Doolittle

Author: Curt Doolittle

  • PROPERTARIAN REASONING ON TOO BIG TO FAIL I won’t go into it here because it’s l

    PROPERTARIAN REASONING ON TOO BIG TO FAIL

    I won’t go into it here because it’s late, I am tired and it’s loud here. But if I follow Propertarian reasoning, then no bank is insulated from too big to fail without warranty of every individual committing to a price.

    The only way to create large banks immune to perverse incentives and dependence upon impossible calculations, is to professionalize banking, require insurance, and eliminate all immunity.

    This would dramatically increase the number and quality of bankers and flatten the income distribution in federations of banks.

    More details are required to grok this if you are knowledgable about banking (finance).

    But my point is that you cannot fix too big to fail any other way.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 16:11:00 UTC

  • Where else does a pot of tea in an upscale club cost $1.30?

    Where else does a pot of tea in an upscale club cost $1.30?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 15:56:00 UTC

  • That’s it. Thats enough work on Oversing for one day. So, enough with all you lo

    That’s it. Thats enough work on Oversing for one day. So, enough with all you losers. I’m off to Fashion Club. Gonna blow my voice out. Whoot! The hardest rock possible while still carrying a melody. 🙂

    hmmmm… I’m in the mood for …. Sweet Dreams, by Marylin Manson.

    (wimps) 😉

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 14:56:00 UTC

  • PROGRAMMING TEACHES YOU TO JUMP LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION So if you have a model, an

    PROGRAMMING TEACHES YOU TO JUMP LEVELS OF ABSTRACTION

    So if you have a model, and can jump levels of abstraction you can in fact model economies. Which is why libertarians are good at it.

    (As usual, I will separate libertines from libertarians)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 11:44:00 UTC

  • MODELS ARE FOR SMART PEOPLE –“I’ve been telling EconLog readers about my articl

    MODELS ARE FOR SMART PEOPLE

    –“I’ve been telling EconLog readers about my article with Steve Miller on intelligence and economic beliefs for years. Now our piece has finally been published in Intelligence. Quick version of the paper:”–

    —-

    Adding a measure of intelligence to the list of independent variables and re-estimating confirms that ability bias is present and substantial. Adding intelligence as an independent variable does not simply shrink our estimates of the effect of education. It is more important than education in both statistical and economic terms. In fact, intelligence turns out to be the single strongest predictor of economic beliefs.

    First, even though intelligence is the most important overall predictor of economic beliefs, it is not the most important predictor of beliefs in any of the four categories. Party, ideology, and male gender are stronger predictors for the anti-market questions. Education and “other race” are stronger predictors for the anti-foreign questions. Black is a stronger predictor of the make-work questions. Income growth is a stronger predictor for the pessimistic questions. Intelligence is the most important overall predictor of economic beliefs because it has a strong effect in all four categories, not because it has an overwhelming effect in any particular category.

    Second, intelligence is more important than education for every category except anti-foreign bias. For anti-market and make-work bias, intelligence is much more important than education; for pessimistic bias, intelligence has a moderate edge. Education is, however, the most important predictor of anti-foreign bias. This is consistent with the literature finding that education “tends to socialize students to have more tolerant, pro-outsider views of the world” (Hainmueller & Hiscox, 2006, p. 473). In contrast, the typical educational experience gives students mixed signals about anti-market, make-work, and pessimistic biases. Classes in economics and high-IQ peers restrain these biases, but classes in other social sciences and humanities, as well as student activism, arguably encourage them.

    —–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 11:44:00 UTC

  • REACTIONARY BOOKS – SOON ONLINE I’ve found a fellow who has done the work of col

    REACTIONARY BOOKS – SOON ONLINE

    I’ve found a fellow who has done the work of collecting all the Reactionary Authors into downloadable form. I’ve copied them. Now I’m going to bind Mencius’s works into that list as well.

    And put it on my web site, linked to google docs.

    Now, I am not one of those folk. I consider them ‘pre-propertarians’: using rhetoric rather than science. But capturing all of their works is useful. Plus, not everyone is capable of analytic argument, and sentimental, moral, psychological, historical, and allegorical argument are good enough. If we can get people to focus on truth telling, voluntary exchange, and propertarian ethics, then that is enough. They can remember and use these older authors, without having to resort to the formal logic of propertarian arguments.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 11:15:00 UTC

  • Eli. Libertarian cognitive bias and computation. LIBERTARIANS HAVE A MODEL – NO

    http://ivo.co.za/2007/08/09/libertarian-iq/From Eli. Libertarian cognitive bias and computation.

    LIBERTARIANS HAVE A MODEL – NO ONE ELSE DOES

    (actually I argue that we have the correct model and everyone else’s enlightenment model is false.)

    —“Just as programmers have a model of computation, libertarians have what I call a model of interaction. Just as a programmer can “play computer” by simulating how specific lines of code will change program state, a libertarian can “play society” by simulating how specific actions will change societal state. The libertarian model of interaction cuts across economic, political, cultural, and social issues. For just about any given law, for example, a libertarian can tell you exactly how such a law will affect society (minimum wage laws create unemployment by setting a lower-bound on entry-level wages, drug prohibition artificially inflates drug prices which leads to violent turf wars, etc.). As another example, for any given social goal, a libertarian will be able to tell you the problems generated by having government try to achieve that goal and will tell you how such a goal can be achieved in a libertarian society.I believe this is qualitatively different from other predictive models because of the breadth of the model and the focus on transitions (both of which are also true of programming). On newsgroups I often see questions … [that] … libertarians almost always quickly answer by saying, “I’ll tell you exactly what would happen…” And, surprisingly, the libertarians tend to give the same answer in most cases.

    I think most people find this odd about libertarians. They understand how an economist might be able to predict the effect of a certain law on the economy or how a social scientist might be able to predict how drug legalization might affect the ghettos, but they don’t understand how somebody could predict all of these things, especially someone who has no formal training. Libertarians, on the other hand, don’t seem to understand how someone could fail to have such a model of interaction… The nonlibertarians have no comprehensive model of interaction, and as a result, they can’t communicate in a meaningful way with those who do. Their attention is always focused on misleading superficial problems rather than on the underlying causes of such problems.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 09:15:00 UTC

  • Talking with Don at the moment on why so many CS guys leann libertarian: because

    Talking with Don at the moment on why so many CS guys leann libertarian: because our generation understands (a) information transfer, (b) undecidability of propositions, (c) correspondence vs causation (d) the frailty of reason that writing software forces you to accept (e) the problem of computability (existence proof), (f) the incentives provided to users via interacting with information they observe.

    Hoppe’s generation did not have it. Plus he was trained by Marxists and their reliance on rationalism, in German universities under german rationalism. He didn’t have the luxury of standing on the shoulders of Turing, and so when he read through the Intuitionist and Operationalist argument he did not understand that they had found what Mises had failed to.

    I’m lucky. I can stand on the shoulders of Hoppe and On the shoulders of Turing, Poincare, Brouwer, Bridgman.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 08:26:00 UTC

  • In eastern Europe In the country of Ukraine In an architecturally Polish (and Au

    In eastern Europe

    In the country of Ukraine

    In an architecturally Polish (and Austrian) town.

    In a new hotel run by Germans.

    In a new restaurant run by Germans.

    Serving a neuvo-American cuisine.

    Playing pop-country American music.

    All that is missing is american customer service.

    What am I supposed to learn from this? lol

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 08:14:00 UTC

  • The Misesian Straw Man. Worth reading for reactionary and aristocratic as well a

    The Misesian Straw Man.

    Worth reading for reactionary and aristocratic as well as libertines.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-10-11 07:13:00 UTC