Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • WHAT DOES KALEIDIC MEAN? (worth repeating) (See wikipedia) –“As a propertarian

    WHAT DOES KALEIDIC MEAN?

    (worth repeating) (See wikipedia)

    –“As a propertarian I’m assuming you follow the Lachmann rather than Shackle tradition in your appreciation of kaleidics.”— Chris Shaeffer

    Great question.

    I use the term ‘Kaleidic’ primarily in the broader sense as “indeterministic”, and less frequently in the narrower sense “never reaching equilibrium” or “never reaching neutrality” in which profits are no longer possible. And in practice I follow Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Arnold Kling more closely than either Shackle or Lachmann in the cause for indeterminism: that shocks are more influential than regularities (Taleb), and that rather than Lachman’s argument, flocking and schooling (in my terms) or more precisely, “Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade” due to changing opportunities rather than ‘mechanical rearranging’, and that informational asymmetry, opportunity costs, transaction costs, are less meaningful. In other words, I see opportunities as more frequent and influential than frictions. This is because the costs of increasing efficiency are often higher than the cost of seizing new opportunities in a dynamic economy. As such, companies ‘sort’ by which tactic they are able to pursue.

    Cost cutting hurts your allies (employees). Which hurts you. And Austrian economics treat human resources (alliances) as a resource, when, as dynamism increases, people are the most expensive, least predictive, and most influential resource you can possess.

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-03 03:15:00 UTC

  • “Wrong. It takes volunteers. But if there are no volunteers, it takes a capitali

    “Wrong. It takes volunteers. But if there are no volunteers, it takes a capitalist to incentivize the people to change the bulb. At which point the bulb gets changed and the worker earns money for doing it.” — Greg Bowman

    Source date (UTC): 2015-01-02 07:17:00 UTC

  • wealthy Americans live: near financial centers. Where the money is

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2013/02/12/where-the-rich-live-in-america-conneticut-california-and-virginia-top-the-list/Where wealthy Americans live: near financial centers.

    Where the money is.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-30 03:33:00 UTC

  • “The first problem in life is to stay alive. The second problem is to stay free.

    —“The first problem in life is to stay alive. The second problem is to stay free. The third problem is to stay productive, so that productivity will take care of you. In many societies, it’s a challenge just to solve the first problem, and the second two are luxuries. Many more societies are relatively safe, but victims of the second problem: they have predatory/weak criminal justice systems that engender little to no faith in the legitimacy of their government. If people feel their freedom can be taken away at any time for essentially no reason, why even worry about the third problem? For a society to thrive, all three problems of human life have to be protected by law: life, liberty, and the pursuit of prosperity.”— James Louis LaSalle

    (EDITED FOR CLARITY)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-29 11:48:00 UTC

  • EVERY REDISTRIBUTED DOLLAR IS A LOST OPPORTUNITY FOR MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL EXCHANG

    EVERY REDISTRIBUTED DOLLAR IS A LOST OPPORTUNITY FOR MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL EXCHANGE

    The central argument that I have against Social Democracy (Keynesian economics or dishonest socialism) is not the exacerbation of the business cycle, nor even redistribution, but that it is a means of violating a voluntary exchange between the productive and unproductive classes. Every forcibly redistributed dollar is a lost opportunity for mutually beneficial and productive exchange. And what the productive classes would prefer in exchange, is largely respect for norms, respect for commons, and status signaling. Conservatives certainly don’t disfavor redistribution, they disfavor funding immorality. Most of us would be very happy to directly pay people who behave well, and not pay people who don’t, and to avoid the entire bureaucratic expansion caused by redistribution in services rather than income.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-28 14:07:00 UTC

  • I HAVE IT RIGHT Just going over Bruce Caldwell’s work on Praxeology and feeling

    I HAVE IT RIGHT

    Just going over Bruce Caldwell’s work on Praxeology and feeling very confident. Time to go see him this year. As far as I know I have rescued praxeology from the pseudoscientific fringe. Praxeology is a failed attempt at economic intuitionism / operationalism, and all sciences are consistent, and operationalism is an extension of (or as Ayelam Valentine Agaliba says, consistent with) falsification. All knowledge is theoretical. The means by which we imagine theories is irrelevant, and their survival of criticism is why they are warrantable (true). Science, if we add in both cost and morality (which haven’t been necessary for the physical sciences) is then the moral discipline of speaking truthfully, and philosophy, science, and morality are consistent and complete (synonyms). As such law, when requiring the full suite of scientific criticisms:

    And there is but one universal moral principle:

    (a) truthfully stated

    ….(i) internally consistent (logically tested)

    ….(ii) externally correspondent (evidentially tested as meaningfully predictive and/or explicative)

    ….(iii) existentially possible (operationally defined)

    ….(iiii) falsifiable and falsified (negatively tested)

    ….(v) fully informed (complete)

    (c) productive

    (d) warrantied

    (e) voluntary exchange

    (f) free of negative externality

    Outstanding issues:

    1) “calculability”: the prohibition on pooling and laundering, is the monetary equivalent of the prohibition on loading and framing. In my current conception this is

    included in operational definitions, but I think I must address numbers, money and prices specifically in order to prohibit political ‘discretion’ and ‘general funds’.

    2) Writing it out as legal construction rather than philosophy.

    Then it’s on to work on institutions. And I can leave ‘Truth’ and ‘Austrian Econ’ behind me.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-27 05:22:00 UTC

  • INFORMATION SYSTEM IS NOT WELL BEHAVED AND LINEAR My fundamental interest is ins

    https://www.academia.edu/9865619/Understanding_Financial_Instability_Minsky_Versus_the_AustriansOUR INFORMATION SYSTEM IS NOT WELL BEHAVED AND LINEAR

    My fundamental interest is institutions and law, but I geek-out when someone helps me better understand economics by providing a language for concepts we fail to understand sufficiently to articulate alone. (I love this paper. Maybe it just appeals to my niche interests, but it’s awesome.)

    —“The conventional economic paradigm is thus not the only way economic interrelations can be modeled. Every capitalist economy can be described in terms of sets of interrelated balance sheets. At every reading of the balance sheet the financial instruments can be interpreted as generating two sets of time series: the liabilities generate payment commitments, and the assets generate expected cash receipts. Balance sheets relations link yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows: payment commitments entered in the past lead to cash payments that need to be executed now as well as future cash payments, even as liabilities are taken on now that commit future cash flows. In this structure the real and the financial dimensions of the economy are not separated: there is no so-called real economy whose behavior can be studied by abstracting from financial considerations. This system, linking yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows both financially and in terms of the demand for and supply of goods and services, is not a well-behaved linear system. Furthermore, the presumption that this system has an equilibrium cannot be sustained. This modeling of the economy leads to a process in time that generates a path that can fly off to deep depressions and open-ended inflations, even in the absence of exogenous shocks or strange displacements. In this model money is never neutral. (Minsky ibid. 78)”— Ludwig van den Hauwe

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 08:57:00 UTC

  • You can teach nearly anyone Austrian economics, and only a limited number of peo

    You can teach nearly anyone Austrian economics, and only a limited number of people monetary economics. Besides, Austrian economics is, at least in its empirical wing, a moral discipline, and Keynesian economics is not. The citizenry does not want or need to be better informed about the abuse of the monetary system. They need to be better informed about how it should not be abused, and how they should expect governments to behave, and what institutions that can improve their way of life.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 07:54:00 UTC

  • “Minsky’s theory, however, comprises a “two price” model which is of a very diff

    —“Minsky’s theory, however, comprises a “two price” model which is of a very different distinctive nature. According to Minsky, there are really two systems of prices in a capitalist economy – one for current output and the other for capital assets. When the price level of capital assets is high relative to the price level of current output, conditions are favorable for investment; when the price level of capital assets is low relative to the price level of current output, then conditions are not favorable for investment, and a recession—or a depression—is indicated. Business cycles result from a dance of these two price levels, even as the price of a unit of money is fixed at one. (Kregel 1992, 87; Minsky 1986 [2008], 160”— Ludwig van den Hauwe

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 07:19:00 UTC

  • OUR WEALTH OF VIOLENCE –“We invest our violence in the corporation, where the a

    OUR WEALTH OF VIOLENCE

    –“We invest our violence in the corporation, where the anticipated return is higher than it would be otherwise. If that return is negative, then we liquidate our investment and use it to create a superior state of affairs.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-26 00:00:00 UTC