Time Preferences form a spectrum, from the very short (high), to the very long (low) — just as do frequencies of light. As one’s [glossary:time preference] increases in length (lowers), and the ability to perceive abstracts must necessarily increase. As one’s ability to perceive abstracts decreases, time preference also must necessarily decrease (lower). On average we all see a similar portion of the spectrum. Some the shorter and lower, some the longer and higher. Concepts are the equivalent of production cycles. And concepts of different lengths are incommensurable. Therefore human beings habituate and reinforce their time preferences, until they can no longer recognize or attribute value to concepts in the other portions of the spectrum. At that point of habituation, [glossary:Time Preference] becomes [glossary:Time Bias]. So for genetic, environmental, cultural, pedagogical, and habitual reasons, people are effectively ‘color blind’ to different areas of the conceptual spectrum. We cannot value each other’s time preferences because of our Time Biases. We are unable to. It is impossible to. [glossary:Time Bias] is the great unspoken problem with cognitive biases. Because cognitive biases are largely universal – equal among all people. But time bias creates social classes, and creates economic classes. This is one of the reasons that people cannot come to consensus in large numbers. There is no harmony on means even if there is some harmony on ends. —- NOTE: Perhaps I should separate out the different properties of Time Preference (high/low- emotive) from Time Preference Capacity (iq), and Realized or Habituated Time Preference ( the result). I will have to ask David for advice on whose writings to approach other than Banfield’s.
Author: Curt Doolittle
-
It’s Not Colonization, It’s Containment
Obama was warned by Bush, along with the other democratic candidates, that once he gained office he would not be able to exit either country. The one who paid attention to that warning was Clinton. Obama softened slightly but was more reliant on the radical left. So he wasn’t as careful. Now that he’s in office he can’t fulfill his promises to his radical left supporters. Contrary to some of the nonsense I’ve been reading from the left lately, we aren’t colonizing the muslim world. We wouldn’t want to. It’s thankless work. It’s expensive. And they’re too primitive to be of value to us as colonies. The labor is too ignorant and uneducated to function as laborers. The people are too poor to function as consumers for advanced goods. The institutions and infrastructure are too corrupt and unreliable to assist in production and distribution. So, It isn’t colonialization. It’s containment. Americans spent the last century containing communism, and the result was a conversion of the marxist economies to totalitarian capitalism, and perhaps the greatest shift in human standard of living since the invention of farming. While communism was a religion masquerading as a political movement, Islam is a political movement masquerading as a religion, and is the current replacement for marxism – a means of the world underclass to counteract the effect of modernization on their primitive social orders. Like marxism, islam is a primitivist and economically destructive political movement – perhaps more destructive than was it’s prior instantiation, which we call Roman era christianity. The underlying military and political problem is that Islamic Civilization does not have a core state, and that of the core state candidates (iran, pakistan, saudi arabia and turkey) three choices are corrupt, despotic and terrible, and the fourth is unlikely. The impact of the schism is still with the civilization. From a strategic geopolitical position, Core states can be pressured to keep fringe states in line and out of military action. Islam (magian or perhaps magical civilization is a better term) cannot be contained without a core state. Therefore Islam is the new communism until there is enough of a reformation in one of the states that a reliable core state can be formed. THE STRATEGY IS TO DESTABILIZE UNTIL A CORE STATE CAN FORM DUE TO INTERNAL PRESSURE. This is probably too grown-up an analysis for people who think that people who have grown up, real jobs, and real responsibilities, are not acting on emotional or antiquated mystical fantasies like ‘colonialization’ rather than pragmatic economic and security concerns. But that doesn’t mean that the truth shouldn’t be told to those who actually have the capacity for such understanding. The best answer is for us to build 200 nuclear power plants and to get off of oil, and let the middle east fall back into barbarism until they are ready to abandon their magianism and join the modern world. CURT
-
Is There A War On Police?
There have been a large number of police deaths lately.
“It’s not a fluke,” Richard Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, told MSNBC.com. “There’s a perception among officers in the field that there’s a war on cops going on.”
This is not rocket science, but it cannot be attributed to one thing alone. Instead:
It is not one issue on it’s own. It is the cumulative effect of the changes in american society due to a century and a half of policy. That policy was enacted during a period in which the USA had a strategic economic advantage. Because of that advantage, the class, race and cultural factors were suppressed by a period of extraordinary temporary wealth. But now that the circumstances have been reversed, and the consequential renormalization of human behavior has emerged as that economic advantage has been removed by the spread of capitalism’s economic institutions – particularly to Asia. The result is that the west is being destabilized again, just as it was when the american west opened up to development and caused shocks and price recessions in Europe. Add to that, that white folks are now starting to act like a diasporic minority, and less willing to support their system politically or fund it economically. In western literature, holding together a stable political system is an advantage. But it is also a high cost to the holders and comes at great sacrifice and discipline. The west (england and germany) has the most stable political system ever developed by man. But it comes at high cost. And people are no longer willing to pay that cost. Thorsten Veblen and Joseph Schumpater were correct. The political class will inevitably destroy the civilization under democracy.
-
Capitalism Is A Political Concept
THIS IS FALSE: “capitalism is not a political concept” – Andrew J Galambos. THIS IS TRUE: Capitalism is not a *rhetorical* concept that relies upon the process of debate for the purpose of decision-making about the use of resources within a geography. However, capitalism is a political concept, because it relies upon the **absence** of rhetorical debate for the purpose of decision-making about the use of resources in a geography. And it requires agreement upon the *absence* of authoritarian property definitions, and managerial administration of property and transactions. Any principle that requires unanimity of compliance in a population is by definition political. Property rights require unanimity of compliance in a population. And creating those rights (albeit expressed differently in different cultures) is the purpose of government. Some governments create horrid property rights, others egalitarian. All nations have property rights of some sort. But few have individual property rights. And it’s individual property rights that permit economic calculation and incentives in a vast division of knowledge and labor. Therefore Capitalism is a political concept even if it does not include a dependence upon the process of debate for the purpose of allocating resources. Capitalism is a process of utilizing and allocating resources and providing incentives to serve one another. It is a political concept. It simply does not depend upon the decision-making of politicians – managers. Even totalitarianism is a political process because some number of people must be incentivized to comply with the totalitarian edicts for the purpose of compelling those people who are non-compliant. The capitalist system simply acknowledges that the market is superior to both managerial socialism, authoritarianism, and classical republican rhetorical debate. Because the purpose of the market is to allow us to cooperate in large numbers WITHOUT debate when our minds are incapable of possessing sufficient knowledge, and we are not capable of coordinating actions in a vast division of knowledge and labor. Nor is debate capable of providing the individual incentives needed for peaceful cooperation, since there is no ordered agreement on the use of resources in a population, nor can there be agreement on the use of resources other than under market prices. This is the fundamental criticism of socialism that brought about its end. it is not that socialism is immoral. It is that it is IMPOSSIBLE for people to cooperate, to calculate, and to possess incentives for increasing production that then causes decreases in prices by any other means, whether rhetorical or dictatorial. – CD. We have given up on socialism, which means the destruction of private property. We have instead, adopted redistributive socialism, which treats all property as collective, and where individual property is a temporary right for the purpose of cooperating and coordinating, and where rights to commissions on the use of property are determined by the state. This democratic socialism is simply a slower way of destroying a civilization than individual property rights. That there may be limits on the concentration of capital is not unreasonable. If money and property can be used to distort the market, or for political ends, then this is the exercise of power that is not in the interest of citizens. Therefore there must be limits on the use of capital. Especially under fiat money, where all money is effectively borrowed from average citizens.
-
Mario Rizzo: Hobbesian War (First Great Thought Of 2011).
I captured this post in it’s near-entirety from Think Markets. It’s the first succinct and meaningful post of the year that I’ve come across. And I captured it for my own reference, for posterity. Of course, my answer to this problem is the calculative rather than political society. Unfortunately, unless I devote full time to this solution to the Hobbesian problem from within an institution I will never turn Hayek’s analysis into a sufficiently and articulated solution to be meaningfully employed by others. But at least Mario has correctly and simply stated the issue, if not the solution to it. It is not that we need a minimal state. It’s that there is a maximum number of people wherein political discourse is a logical means of achieving ends. Beyond that limited number, like all other aspects of human behavior, we need tools to calculate that which we cannot perceive.
… There are some simple facts the commentators cannot or will not face. The reason we cannot have a coherent, comprehensive plan to solve the political and economic difficulties of the federal government (and of the state governments) is that people do not have a coherent, comprehensive hierarchy of values beyond the basics of social order. Hayek made this argument in The Road to Serfdom with regard to the problems of comprehensive economic planning. To a large extent, we are now facing this problem in reverse. We have attained the current level and extent of the welfare state as an accretion of special interest legislation and short-sighted but popular redistribution programs. All of this took place over a long period of time with little or no thought to the overall effects, to what kind of society we have been building. But now the threatened fiscal messes at both the federal and state level are requiring some form of “orderly” reduction in the size and scope of government. But, as I opined here in the final days of the Bush Administration, the “reform” of the welfare state will not be orderly. It will be driven by a war among the various interests groups who, as is their habit, do not see the other person’s point of view. But why should they? They got their largesse from the government by being single-minded and self-interested. Bad habits (from the social perspective) are hard to break. The “unreasonableness” of the discussion stems from the fact that there is no underlying objective code of values (or at least not one that can be accessed by the political system). Most players are guilty of avidity and partiality. We all have hard-luck stories to portray to the media. Most people’s minds are too concrete-bound to see the larger, somewhat abstract, picture. The unreasonableness, or so it seems, of our political culture is, to a large extent, a product of the kind of special interest redistributionist society we have built. Some commentators have rationalized the welfare state in terms of notions of distributive justice. But these are the mental spinnings of academics. These ideas have not been the driving political and economic forces that have created our culture. Those forces are derived from an abandonment of the traditional concept of the “common good,” that is, the good of each and all. There is very little beyond the minimal state that is truly in the interests of all of us. Every movement beyond that takes us into the unreasonable territory of the exploitation of one group by another. No wonder discussion is not civil. Whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.
-
are getting there. Slowly. Accumulating people. Accumulating influence. All than
http://blog.mises.org/15272/mises-org-is-the-10-in-a-most-influential-study/We are getting there. Slowly. Accumulating people. Accumulating influence. All thanks to Lou and crew at Mises.org. If we become influential does that mean that we’re mainstream? And if we’re mainstream does that mean that we’re no longer radicals? “Let Us Rid Economics Of The Ludic Fallacy.” Probabilism in economics is a failure.
Source date (UTC): 2011-01-10 12:14:00 UTC
-
problem with the guardian’s position, is that Gifford’s attacker is a radical LE
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/09/gabrielle-giffords-shooting-rightwing-rhetoricThe problem with the guardian’s position, is that Gifford’s attacker is a radical LEFTIST. He wasn’t agitated about anything ‘right wing’. He was angry that the congresswoman wasn’t LEFT WING ENOUGH. (Yet another example of the vast delta between the urgency of news reporting and the accuracy of what’s reported.)
Source date (UTC): 2011-01-10 10:34:00 UTC
-
Capitalism? It’s Cooperative Technology. It’s Not A Religion.
A laugh. From a Galambos Fan. A link to a posting on Dubai’s economy.
“Capitalism is that societal structure whose mechanism is capable of protecting all forms of property completely.” — Galambos Is the new epic-center of capitalism to be the Islamic World?
They already have a religion… 😉 But let’s look at this Islamic world:
- Low median iq.
- Poor education.
- Science-denying biases.
- Rampant mysticism.
- Religious schism.
- No core state
Dubai simply has no oil and wants to be the Switzerland of the Muslim world. This is not a capitalist strategy per se. It makes no appeal to the social order. Instead It is a casino strategy – draw from extended regions whomever you can regardless of how they obtained their money. Capitalism is either a social order with incentives for all members, or it is a platonic and absurd personal philosophy that runs counter to the facts. 😉 Curt
-
Rereading The Constitution Of Liberty Leads To A Few New Insights On Freedom
I’ve read Hayek’s The Constitution Of Liberty twice again lately while editing it so that I could convert the text to spoken audio. The resulting audio is imperfect — because my editing of the multitude of optically recognized characters is imperfect — but for personal consumption it’s works just fine. But editing a text forces you to read it more carefully than casual reading does. The first time I read it I did not really appreciate the book’s depth of reasoning. I don’t even remember when I did read it the first time. I was probably in my early thirties? But it’s more than that. Because one needs considerable knowledge of the field, it is not apparent to the casual reader that he is making logically NECESSARY arguments – especially given Hayek’s gentle, advisory, tone. Hayek felt that the writer should show sympathy for his opponents. A technique which is very useful in engaging the reader, but a tone that is also prone to misinterpretation of the underlying purpose of his arguments. I have, and so have others, said, that Hayek’s great failing was in failing to defeat Keynes. He left that task for history because he thought it so obvious. But he did not understand the attractiveness of the positivist methodology when opposed only by the conservative libertarian framework that solves for freedom as an absolute good.
[callout]Freedom is intuitive as an experience, but counter-intuitive as a process.[/callout]
FREEDOM IS INTUITIVE AS AN EXPERIENCE, BUT COUNTER-INTUITIVE AS A PROCESS Besides being both an [glossary:appropriated term], and an [glossary:expanded term], Freedom is a proscription against the political input of actions for the purpose of obtaining unspecified (and promissory) output actions. And as such Freedom is logically inconsistent to the human mind, whose action orientation finds such systemic solutions all but impossible to believe, and in retrospect finds the relations between cause and effect, deterministic or accidental, rather than the result of a policy of restraint – “not acting”. While the cause of our tradition of freedom is to be found in the military tactics of western chieftains and their retinue, and their distrust of the concentration of power, and the social status accorded those who rose as leaders by merit in commerce and war, it bears noting that the rarity of Freedom as a sentiment is in no small part due, to the fact that the very idea of unorganized action is illogical to the human mind. HAYEK SOLVES FOR FREEDOM Hayek is ‘solving’ for freedom and western civilization. I think the assumption is that by solving for these things, we create great wealth. But human beings do not solve for freedom, they solve for gaining experience and certainty of gaining them at the lowest cost and risk. While different social classes solve for different TIME frames in which they gain those experience, and how they perceive risk, we all solve for experiences. We call this acquisitiveness, which is a vulgar commercial way of expressing the same series of concepts. Solving for that which is incomprehensible as an input, and which cannot logically be connected with outputs assumes that the reader agrees with the proposition that freedom is a ‘good’ in the first place. SOLVING FOR UNEMPLOYMENT They Keynesian prescription is to solve for unemployment and use monetary policy, despite the fact that doing so exaggerates booms and busts. They Hayekian prescription is to solve for productivity and prices, and then unemployment will maintain natural levels. The social democratic prescription (which is the only option available to smaller states) is to solve for high taxation and high redistribution that pays the unemployed to stay home. The Poor Totalitarian prescription (in china) is to employ everyone in some productive capacity and redistribute via state control of capital. The Poorer Socialist prescription (India) is to pay the private sector to accomplish what the state lacks the resources to do. (Which I’m a fan of.) The worst solution is solving for unemployment because it distorts the economy. NOTE: While I use the term Freedom here, I use the term “Sovereignty” in my work because Freedom is an appropriated and expanded term that has lost meaning. Liberty likewise, holds a similar problem. These terms too often describe experiences rather than necessary causes. Sovereignty means that you have a monopoly over yourself and your property. Freedom means the absence of coercion. And that is too loose a definition. Monopoly over one’s self and property is much clearer. It means that the individual is the only state.
-
Putin: Your Cow Better Be Silent
Putin Slams West for Wikileaks’ Assange Arrest : Putin Suggests U.S. Criticism Is the Pot Calling the Kettle http://abcnews.go.com/International/putin-slams-west-wikileaks-arrest/story?id=12364345 Putin criticizes supposedly democratic institutions for clamping down on a dissident.
“The villagers say, that if your neighbor’s cow is mooing, yours better be silent”. Which is the Russian equivalent of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’.
[callout] In fact, what’s impressive about the Wikileaks data, is that the USA actually looks like a pretty benevolent, if mildly overstretched and incompetent, empire, whose only material problem is creating a responsible, peaceful, core state for Islam[/callout]
I wrote two days ago that arresting Assange is nonsense unless we have a real property crime. Unless property is transferred (technology secrets) and unless there is material harm ( our people get killed), or a trust is broken on a contract with a foreign government (we are trying to help rescue some government from oppression) there is not really a crime. In fact, what’s impressive about the Wikileaks data, is that the USA actually looks like a pretty benevolent, if mildly overstretched and incompetent, empire, whose only material problems are assisting in the maturity of market-participating states everywhere, and in particular creating a responsible, peaceful, core state for Islam – solving a serious problem for the world by helping modernize a violent, non-market, ignorant, superstitious and primitive expansionist culture so that it can play with the rest of the grownups in the world. Putin is one of my personal Heroes. I think, for Russia, he’s a perfect leader, and the leader that they need. Is Russia, and is all of Byzantine Christianity corrupt? Yes. Is the state an oligarchy? Yes. Is that bad for Russia at this point in it’s lifetime? No. Democracy, or at least, civic republicanism is NOT something that’s intrinsically good. Corruption is bad. Democracy can be a check on corruption. But only when the middle class is fully active, and fully enfranchised. Otherwise, the people will vote themselves into totalitarianism. Russians in particular will do so. Putin should be Tzar. Russia needs a King. The west needs kings. We all need kings. Not kings that can write laws. Kings that can veto abuses of the law. We may not know what we should do. But we can know what we should not do. And that is a job of a great monarch. Kings make it impossible to compete for political power, and force people to compete for economic power. That’s the beauty of monarchy.