Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • Poverty demands our of necessity. Plenty compromises out of utility. Wealth avoi

    Poverty demands our of necessity.

    Plenty compromises out of utility.

    Wealth avoids compromise and demand out of luxury.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-05 09:38:00 UTC

  • “The family no longer produces; it only consumes.”— Francesco Principi

    —“The family no longer produces; it only consumes.”— Francesco Principi

    Source date (UTC): 2015-10-03 07:02:00 UTC

  • PRIVILEGE ENDED 1) Americans conquered a new continent 2) They sold off this con

    http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/when-america-was-great-taxes-were-high-unions-were-strong-and-government-was-big/407284/POSTWAR PRIVILEGE ENDED

    1) Americans conquered a new continent

    2) They sold off this continent to immigrants

    3) They sold consumer goods to these immigrants.

    4) They caused a collapse in prices in Europe (like china does to americans today)

    5) They created new fiat money to give credit to these immigrants.

    6) They directed these profits to investment in everything including the 20’s boom.

    7) Europeans sought to control german expansion and created the european civil war.

    8) The resulting correction and the oppressive settlement with Germany led to the second world war, which was merely an extension of the first, and which destroyed the word’s economy.

    9) Americans inherited control of the British empire’s trading lanes and took over as the reserve currency.

    10) American workers benefitted from producing expensive but low quality products to a world largely destroyed by war.

    12) It took to the 1970’s for the world to reasonably rebuild.

    13) In 1990 the effects of Chinese abandonment of communism and their entry into world labor started the dramatic shift in american consumption of consumer goods, just as america had done to Europe more than a century before.

    15) In 2007 the rest of the world has largely adopted the same fiat money and consumer capitalist techniques.

    16) In 2015, Americans have lost most competitive advantages EXCEPT for their GERMANIC high trust ethics and rule of law.

    17) By 2040 Americans will lose their advantage in high trust ethics and rule of law to cultural and genetic conquest.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-29 22:54:00 UTC

  • CAPITALISM, MIXED, SOCIALISM : A EUGENIC VS DYSGENIC GAME RIGHT: Capitalism: the

    CAPITALISM, MIXED, SOCIALISM : A EUGENIC VS DYSGENIC GAME

    RIGHT: Capitalism: the voluntary organization of production as a the result of the incentives that result from the anarchic evolution of money, prices, exchanges and contracts under the single principle, norm, regulation or law of the voluntary exchange of private property. This process is naturally meritocratic and eugenic and therefore scientific, which is the reason why the marxists despise it.

    CENTER: Mixed economy: the voluntary organization of production of capitalism, combined with the involuntary confiscation and redistribution of the proceeds of production. It can be dysgenic or eugenic, meritocratic or not, depending upon the amount of confiscation and the use of confiscated proceeds. This is the least worst option in which neither lower nor upper classes can obtain better conditions. (Like marriage).

    LEFT: Socialism: the involuntary organization of production and the distribution of proceeds independent of the contribution to production. It is dysgenic and non meritocratic, and provides insufficient incentives to produce enough to meet demands. But this prevents the lower classes from being ‘left behind’ which is their central intuitionistic fear.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-29 04:50:00 UTC

  • INTUITIVE ECON: THE INTERNET INCREASES PRICES —Economists have two standard ve

    https://shar.es/17xxNnCOUNTER INTUITIVE ECON: THE INTERNET INCREASES PRICES

    —Economists have two standard very simple models of product competition: firms can compete on price or compete on quantity.—

    —“whether firms compete on price or quantity depends more on which of these they must commit to earliest, not which is easier to change at the last minute. Knowing this, once you heard that it would be easier to change prices at the last minute for products sold on internet, you should have predicted that the internet would increase quantity competition and reduce price competition. Which it in fact has. Economics is general and robust enough to predict things like how selling products on the internet changes competition. But you have to use it right.”—

    The author is trying to make a different point, but I want to riff off it to show that firms compete in commodity and non-commodity spaces. And to some degree economists study commodity activity where noise and signal cancel one another out. But that isn’t how companies think about competition, it’s how distributors do.

    I have taught the following means of competition by firms:

    1) Price,

    2) Quantity,

    3) Profitability or Debt

    4) Rents (firms like polities accumulate renters)

    5) Adaptation Costs (innovator’s dilemma).

    6) Geographic Housing Costs (salary costs)

    7) Segmentation (startups start in niches and expand)

    Why? Decreasing production cycles, increasing distribution of production, the increasing importance of TALENT and innovation service industries. vs capital or credit in manufacturing and distribution companies.

    In a highly efficient market, one can sacrifice profits for talent while larger organizations accumulate internal rents. This is most frequently the reason

    Generally speaking, higher profits incentivize more rents. And while prices are sticky, internal rents are much stickier than prices.

    Generally speaking, adaptation costs vary dramatically from industry to industry: service firms trade out people and production firms trade out people and capital. The difference being that GAP regulation and tax policy obscure the tail of fixed vs human capital, largely because we can finance against the illusion of fixed capital value while we cannot finance against the obvious lack of control over human capital.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-27 18:43:00 UTC

  • Q&A: CURT, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF PREDICTION MARKETS? —“what do you think of pre

    Q&A: CURT, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF PREDICTION MARKETS?

    —“what do you think of prediction markets?”—

    Unfortunately, this is an incomplete question. 🙂 To have an opinion I must have some outcome (context) to judge them. As an empirical means of obtaining excellent information and overcoming journalistic bias, I think that they are very close to self-insured propositions. And as a Propertarian and Testimonialist, I have nothing but good to say about them as experiments in demonstrating the LACK of quality of the opinions of public intellectuals. (which I think we all know is only useful as a set of propositions to choose between, not as particularly predictive.)

    But it’s possible that your question may intend to ask whether we may institutionalize prediction markets for some particular end. And I’d have to know that end in order to answer it.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-20 09:38:00 UTC

  • (Yeah. What you see me doing is constructing markets that create commons without

    (Yeah. What you see me doing is constructing markets that create commons without the possibility of discretion. Libertinism avoids commons. But commons are the consequence of western high trust. And our competitive strategy.)

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-16 07:24:00 UTC

  • Question for you. The Guardian put out a story the other day about “unaffordable

    Question for you. The Guardian put out a story the other day about “unaffordable Brittain” – although looking at the interactive map they published (shown below), they’re only really talking about England and Wales. Do you have a view on this? Will have a look for the parent article and post it below.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-16 06:53:00 UTC

  • WHY IS GOLD VALUABLE? There are many scarce things that are not valuable, and th

    WHY IS GOLD VALUABLE?

    There are many scarce things that are not valuable, and there are many non-scarce things (diamonds) that are valuable. The plague is rare, and it is not valuable. Meteoric iron is scarce, not very pretty, and too scarce to be used as money. If scarcity were enough, then meteoric iron would be more valuable as currency than gold. But it isn’t, because not enough people want meteoric iron’s utility in tool making as want gold’s utility in signaling.

    Gold is valuable because:

    a) it is scarce enough that it takes great effort to mine and cast, and therefore hard to alter the market price by supply fluctuations, and even holds its value across centuries, but it’s not too scarce to cause frequent monetary shortages – and silver is a substitute when there are monetary shortages.

    b) It’s divisible easily in to smaller units – a necessary property of money.

    c) each of the units is small enough and valuable enough that one need not carry wagon loads for commercial purposes.

    d) It’s identifiable as what it is (unlike paper money) its very hard to counterfeit. It’s consistent in weight and heavy enough that simple tools can be used to measure it’s consistency.

    e) It is an excellent store of value because it does not tarnish or rust.

    f) It’s pretty – it can be worked and reworked, formed and reformed at low temperature, and it’s useful as a means of decoration and jewelry so it can be used to signal status, and that does not deteriorate – even across generations. It is the most malleable material and so a very small amount of it can be hammered out and used in foil to give the illusion of even greater wealth.

    g) and because it’s a status symbol as well as durable, identifiable, and optimally scarce, then EVERYONE recognizes it and everyone wants it. And that universality is what makes a good currency.

    In other words it’s identifiable, durable and desirable and transformable, as well as scarce enough to hold a stable market price, but not so scarce that it cannot be used as money.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-15 15:52:00 UTC

  • “tries to show how recursive and constructive mathematics could be employed to e

    “tries to show how recursive and constructive mathematics could be employed to economic problems;” Bingo.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-09-13 09:42:20 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/642996727600009216

    Reply addressees: @SanguineEmpiric

    Replying to: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/642982818268606468

    IN REPLY TO:

    Original post on X

    Original tweet unavailable — we could not load the text of the post this reply is addressing on X. That usually means the tweet was deleted, the account is protected, or X does not expose it to the account used for archiving. The Original post link below may still open if you view it in X while signed in.

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/642982818268606468