My answer to Who is your favorite economist, and why? My top 5 are Thomas Piketty, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Haye… https://www.quora.com/Who-is-your-favorite-economist-and-why-My-top-5-are-Thomas-Piketty-Ludwig-von-Mises-Friedrich-Hayek-John-Maynard-Keynes-and-Richard-Thaller/answer/Curt-Doolittle?srid=u4Qv
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-22 04:13:02 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/955292197410299904
—-”Who is your favorite economist and why?”—-
You know, I have spent the better part of 25 years trying to understand what is wrong with Economics, and I think I have done so.
And from that understanding, I would say certainly the most IMPORTANT economist was Hayek, principally because he understood the central problem of economics is providing information necessary for indirect cooperation, AND because he understood that all economics is a byproduct of the natural law of torts (property). Which is why later in life, he (as I have), devoted himself to improving understanding of the law (natural law of tort) as the institution by which we solve cooperation(contract) and information(truth) problems, since what we call economics is just the consequence of the law and a very simple technology we call money, that like numbers is so elegant precisely because they are so simple.
Other than Hayek, I respect Friedman for his efforts at attempting to produce collective commons through market means (vouchers etc). The economists I respect today are very few and far between, because there are NONE that I know of that measure changes in ALL capital rather than cherry picking, and in particular cherry picking consumption.
I’m probably a fairly good scholar of Mises, in understanding his terrible failure. But that he failed just as bridgman and brouwer did and to some degree hayek, because he didn’t understand that he had discovered operationalism in economics, not a ‘science’ – thereby making a fool of himself as an idealogue. I tend to find everything of value in Simmel, although I use most of Mises’ definitions in my work because as an operationalist his are most accurate.
I read pretty much everything that comes out in economics. I follow Tyler Cowen because I have similar interests in social science, and I follow Scott Sumner because he sees things I don’t.
I am curious how long it will take the mainstream to understand that you get what you measure and they’re measuring the wrong thing, and if they measured the right thing it would end the left forever.
It’s not science if you’re cherry picking. And the entire discipline is built on it.
https://www.quora.com/Who-is-your-favorite-economist-and-why-My-top-5-are-Thomas-Piketty-Ludwig-von-Mises-Friedrich-Hayek-John-Maynard-Keynes-and-Richard-Thaller
—-”Who is your favorite economist and why?”—-
You know, I have spent the better part of 25 years trying to understand what is wrong with Economics, and I think I have done so.
And from that understanding, I would say certainly the most IMPORTANT economist was Hayek, principally because he understood the central problem of economics is providing information necessary for indirect cooperation, AND because he understood that all economics is a byproduct of the natural law of torts (property). Which is why later in life, he (as I have), devoted himself to improving understanding of the law (natural law of tort) as the institution by which we solve cooperation(contract) and information(truth) problems, since what we call economics is just the consequence of the law and a very simple technology we call money, that like numbers is so elegant precisely because they are so simple.
Other than Hayek, I respect Friedman for his efforts at attempting to produce collective commons through market means (vouchers etc). The economists I respect today are very few and far between, because there are NONE that I know of that measure changes in ALL capital rather than cherry picking, and in particular cherry picking consumption.
I’m probably a fairly good scholar of Mises, in understanding his terrible failure. But that he failed just as bridgman and brouwer did and to some degree hayek, because he didn’t understand that he had discovered operationalism in economics, not a ‘science’ – thereby making a fool of himself as an idealogue. I tend to find everything of value in Simmel, although I use most of Mises’ definitions in my work because as an operationalist his are most accurate.
I read pretty much everything that comes out in economics. I follow Tyler Cowen because I have similar interests in social science, and I follow Scott Sumner because he sees things I don’t.
I am curious how long it will take the mainstream to understand that you get what you measure and they’re measuring the wrong thing, and if they measured the right thing it would end the left forever.
It’s not science if you’re cherry picking. And the entire discipline is built on it.
https://www.quora.com/Who-is-your-favorite-economist-and-why-My-top-5-are-Thomas-Piketty-Ludwig-von-Mises-Friedrich-Hayek-John-Maynard-Keynes-and-Richard-Thaller
My answer to Is communism unstable? https://www.quora.com/Is-communism-unstable/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=e97ca359
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-21 13:12:54 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/955065670831607809
My answer to If defenders of communism could not use the phrase “That wasn’t real communism,” what would their defe… https://www.quora.com/If-defenders-of-communism-could-not-use-the-phrase-That-wasnt-real-communism-what-would-their-defence-be/answer/Curt-Doolittle?srid=u4Qv
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-21 12:50:12 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/955059958386655232
My answer to If defenders of communism could not use the phrase “That wasn’t real communism,” what would their defe… https://www.quora.com/If-defenders-of-communism-could-not-use-the-phrase-That-wasnt-real-communism-what-would-their-defence-be/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=1c5f8b05
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-21 12:50:09 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/955059942519660545
My answer to Why is innovation worshipped in modern societies around the globe? https://www.quora.com/Why-is-innovation-worshipped-in-modern-societies-around-the-globe/answer/Curt-Doolittle?srid=u4Qv
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-21 12:07:33 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/955049223116021760
My answer to Why is innovation worshipped in modern societies around the globe? https://www.quora.com/Why-is-innovation-worshipped-in-modern-societies-around-the-globe/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=81f8adc2
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-21 12:07:32 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/955049220754599936
THERE IS NO DEFENSE TO CLAIMS THAT ‘IT WASN’T REAL COMMUNISM’.
My response would be the same scientific response that the entire empirical establishment settled by the 1960’s.
1. The organization of economic calculation necessary for complex multi-part networks of production is impossible without money and prices. Imputations cannot be made. However, assuming a people desired a minimum autarkic (insulated from external trade) static economy (and underclasses often do), then at least in theory, aside from adaptation to shocks, it might be possible, albeit the middle class would be very unlikely to develop, and a managerial and bureaucratic elite might be able to direct production, distribution, trade, and consumption.
2. Assuming the calculation of production was possible, we are stuck with the organization of people in the act of production, distribution, and transfer (trade). And people demonstrated universally, and continue to demonstrate universally, that they will both do the minimum possible, engage in false reporting, and engage in corruption and fraud to do the minimum possible, because they have no incentive to do otherwise.
3. Humans need to demonstrate status signals in order to obtain mates. Without access to markets of all kinds to do so, they do so by political, and black market means. Humans need new experiences. Black markets form and black markets compete with command driven production.
4. In every place it has been tried, the centralization can be used to rapidly advance a backward country without incurring external financial debt, but as a byproduct the people never develop the middle class of managers and resource calculators necessary to develop middle class norms, manners, ethics and morals.
5. The reverse solution has won out, which is to preserve status signaling, preserve markets, and produce common goods where markets fail. Poor people in america wear designer clothes cast off by the middle class in thrift stores for example.
6. The failure of the american model is due to heterogeneity since no people will permit the sacrifice of their own in order to let loose a political competitor.
7. The failure of the european model is the intertemporal version of the failure of communism: people reproduced insufficiently and engaged in work lives insufficiently to perpetuate the one-generation of benefits of redistribution under american protection that obviated their spending on defense.
8. There is no difference between communism, socialism, and social democracy except the time for to accumulate consequences. Or as others have said, any kind of democracy is just the slow road to communism – and the deterministic outcome of communism: suicide.
9. The abrahamic deception (pseudoscientific religion) of the ancient world killed something on the order of 500M people – mostly due to the Arabs – and destroyed four great civilizations of profound achievement and duration – creating the Abrahamic Dark Age. The second Abrahamic deception of Marxism, Boazianism, Freudianism, the Frankfurt and Postmodern schools, has killed no less than 100M, so far, and set large parts of the globe back a century. The chinese were the smartest and walled off the barbarian peoples. The romans began the project but were overwhelmed, and cold not complete it. Had we walled off europe from the urals to the bosphorus we might have saved ourselves from the Abrahamic Dark Age. However, due to northern european persistence and isolation it was possible to restore western civilization and climb out of the Abrahamic Dark Age via empiricism, and eventually science, technology, accounting, contract, and the western natural law of torts.
10. Europeans have dragged mankind out of ignorance, superstition, poverty, hard labor, disease, and tyranny by one means: markets. Why? Because european civilization is predicated upon sovereignty and non-submission. An as such the only means of cooperation is via market competition. And markets calculate what men cannot through that continuous process of trial and error we call ‘innovation’.
Marxism was and always will be a pseudoscience. Marxist ‘economics’ and history, Boazian athropology, Freudian Psychology, Cantorian sets, and Frankfurt school aesthetics, were all pseudoscientific at best, and outright lies at worst. Just as the Abrahamic Pilpul that they originated from:the invention of the industrialization of lying.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute
Kiev Ukraine
Source date (UTC): 2018-01-21 07:51:00 UTC