Author: Curt Doolittle

Weight of 192 today. That’s as good as my best 3 years ago. It’s some kind of barrier though. Hard to get into the 180’s in the past. 185 is probably a pretty good weight for me. I doubt I could to 175 without losing muscle mass. I got there in 1996 briefly from that flu that killed all those people in europe. Anyway, slowly improving my health. Slowly.

What makes the west special is competition: the balance of power, and every individual’s commitment to preserving the balance of power, and respecting the consequences of that conflict as beneficial. It is a social system that is antithetical to everyone else on earth.

While the self congratulatory set would love to say we achieved this feat on purpose, through debate and wisdom, that’s entirely false. It is a remnant of tribal heroism. Something else much of the world criticizes us for. (See John Keegan)

While the self congratulatory set would love to say that our success comes from democracy, that’s false. It comes from aristocracy. From a balance of power between small states, who treated the church as a sort of supreme court system. Democracy is a luxury good. It’s something the very wealthy can afford for very short times – it’s a means of spending your trust fund. But it doesn’t make that trust fund.

The west’s “Killer Apps” as Nial Ferguson calls them are, 1) competition, 2) science, 3) property rights, 5) the consumer society 6) the work ethic. It’s these killer apps that created the great divergence between “the west and the rest”.

But those six apps are CAUSED by every individual’s commitment to preserving the balance of power, and competition as a means of determining outcomes.

Under the competitive model, we do not develop consensus.

We develop experiments.

Some human social mechanisms are black boxes filled with chaotic nonsense gears, which even under analysis are absurd. In fact, they work, in part, because they are absurd, chaotic, nonsensical black boxes impervious to rational scrutiny.

Rationalism is overrated. You cannot teach a child to be fully rational in real time. You cannot teach all human beings to be fully rational – because the grasp of some of the greater abstractions upon which our complex world is based is simply beyond all but perhaps ten percent of the population. (Nothing is so irrational as the idiocy of smart people.) You can however, teach parables, myths, and legends: narratives and history, and from that teach children how to use the black box.

Protestant christianity is a mashup of the objective and technical nature of germanic language, ancient germanic social sentiments and legal customs, pagan river and forest mythology, the demands of being a poor minority on the world stage, an attempt to keep the ‘decadent’ east at bay, the christian ethic restated in germanic terms, a history under the church and a rebellion against it in favor of germanic customs, and a rapid assimilation and embracing of classical aristotelian ideas.

No sane person would devise such a mechanism. It is a personal philosophy with political ends, and enormously beneficial economic consequences. (And plenty of other religions achieve just the opposite ends – perpetual ignorance and poverty.)

It works. That’s the problem. Christianity produces ‘goods’. Even in the developing world, the market and political reforms are driven by christians.

That’s why I support it. Not because it’s rational. But because supporting it is rational.

I don’t care that it’s nuts. I care that it’s a goose that lays golden eggs.

Numbers in financial statements are a record of your decisions, not a predictor of the future. They don’t predict your business. They predict your behavior. They are predictive to the extent that the quality of your decisions tends to decline if your business changes, tends to remain constant if your business remains constant, and tends to improve if your decisions improve. And the only way to demonstrate that your decision have improved is if your goods and services remain competitive in the market, and profit results from their sale. So, the numbers are a record of decisions. Look to your decisions for insight, not the numbers.

Why it is that numbers are so addictive to so many people that they inverse the causal relations, and seek insight in the numbers rather than the market is beyond me. I suspect it’s because it’s easier to rely on the false promise of certainty in those numbers, for some, and for others, that their reliance on those numbers allows us to evade the political confrontation that comes from the conflict between the battle for ideas and the organization necessary to execute them, and the constraint on collective resources where everyone in the organization seeks to use them for their own ambitions or fulfillment.

This is why organizations decline over time: In the organizational battle, the number-certainty-addicts, and rent-seekers win over the customer and market reflectors because of the difference in effort and risk between the two factions.

The CEO’s problem is to choose whether he will be part of the false-number coalition – a rent-seeker, part of the customer and market coalition – an innovator, or an arbiter between the two – an administrator. And from that decision all other decisions follow.

Free Speech Is A Good Only In Public Not Private Venues http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/09/free-speech-is-a-good-only-in-public-not-private-venues/

Aggregationists Vs Individualists http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/09/aggregationists-vs-individualists/

http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/09/free-speech-is-a-good-only-in-public-not-private-venues/Variation is the spice of life. And the source of innovation.

http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/09/aggregationists-vs-individualists/An analysis of Keynesians Vs Austrians

http://www.businessinsider.com/boxnet-2011-9What did I tell you three years ago? The clock is ticking on Oracle, the bell already rang on Sun. And the local hero is in trouble because of innovator’s dilemmas. Why? Technology tools are being invented as a byproduct of other revenue streams, not in and of themselves. There is no capital in tools.

Goes to my dictum: “For any existing company, any sufficiently competitive innovation cannot be expressed in financial reports.” This optimization of the PAST is what leads to innovator’s dilemmas. The “Financialization” of any business is must of necessity cause it’s future destruction.

Worse, the softly-typed programming languages have won. Anyone who doesn’t understand that will not be in the tools business in ten years.

Do I need to say that again?

Tyler Cowen Isn’t The One Who’s Confused http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/09/tyler-cowen-isnt-the-one-whos-confused/