Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • Consumer Capitalism? Or Is It Consumer Credit-Ism?


    [W]hy do we refer to our voluntary organization of production as Capitalism when that era ended at least half a century ago –  and call it Consumer Cedit-ism instead.

    Ukrainians are poor because they lack credit. Capitalism is a different social class problem altogether. And by historical standards we don’t really have any capitalists any longer – only people with enough trust to accumulate a lot if credit.  Our rich aren’t really rich enough to do much of anything other than try desperately to stay rich against all odds.

    In the 18th and 19th century, It was easy to amass a little capital and produce consumer goods.

    It was a lot harder to distribute consumer credit to all.  

    Consumer Credit-ism is how we operate our society – capitalism died with the end of the conversion of people from the farm.


  • CONSUMER CAPITALISM? OR IS IT CONSUMER CREDIT-ISM? Why do we refer to it as capi

    CONSUMER CAPITALISM? OR IS IT CONSUMER CREDIT-ISM?

    Why do we refer to it as capitalism when that era ended half a century ago and call it credit-ism instead.

    Ukrainians are poor because they lack credit. Capitalism is a different class problem altogether. And by historical standards we don’t really have any capitalists any longer – inly people with enough trust to accumulate a lot if credit.

    It was easy to amass a little capital and produce consumer goods.

    It was a lot harder to distribute credit to all.

    Consumer credit-ism is how we operate – capitalism died with the end of the conversion of people from the farm.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-08 09:44:00 UTC

  • HOW DO WE OBTAIN LIBERTY? THE ANSWER IS IN TRANSACTION COSTS The answer to the q

    HOW DO WE OBTAIN LIBERTY? THE ANSWER IS IN TRANSACTION COSTS

    The answer to the question of how we obtain liberty is found in transaction costs: At what point are local transaction costs sufficiently suppressed that the remote and explicit costs of a state, no longer preferable to the local costs of everyday existence?

    You would think that this would have been OBVIOUS to a group of philosophers who depend upon economics, and lay claim to the superiority of economics as the means of achieving prosperity, and therefore upon prosperity for the justification of their arguments.

    But instead they get lost in an endless circular discussion of ‘morality’ – in a remembrance-ritual for a church that has abandoned us to universalism and mysticism.

    Whereas, morality is reducible to the evolutionary necessity of prohibiting the imposition of costs on others.

    And where transaction costs determine the demand for an authority in the form of a state to either impose an order, or to prohibit retaliation, or both.

    And where rule of law reliant upon property-en-toto, provide means of resolution of conflicts (retaliation), and therefore a reduction of demand for an authority to impose order, or prohibit retaliation – the state.

    So the only question is, how much suppression of the imposition of costs is necessary for the rational choice between transaction costs of criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial actions, and the payment to an authority that imposes order, metes punishments, and prevents retaliation?

    The answer is, that you’re going to have a society that looks a lot more like classical liberalism than one that looks like anarcho-capitalism.

    In retrospect it’s one of those things that should have been stupidly obvious.

    Apparently the appeal of justifying one’s biases is greater than the appeal of ascertaining necessary causal properties of reality.”

    Justification always rules.

    Curt Doolittle

    Liberty: The Philosophy Of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-08 02:41:00 UTC

  • HOW DOES ONE DEFINE THE MARKET (NOT ‘A’ MARKET)? As far as I know the central di

    HOW DOES ONE DEFINE THE MARKET (NOT ‘A’ MARKET)?

    As far as I know the central distinguishing property of the market is incomprehensibility, such that prices form the only available signals.

    Every alternative that I know of constitutes mere trade, not a market.

    If it isn’t anonymous and complex enough for prices to serve as the only instrument of perception then it doesn’t qualify as a market sufficiently to distinguish the necessary properties of a market from the properties of non market.

    A slave market is indeed a market. It is a market for immoral goods, just like a black market is a market for regulated goods. The morality of the goods and services is immaterial. The only necessary properties of a market are necessary ignorance and therefore a dependence upon prices.

    There are many analogies to a market, most common of which is status signals, mates, information, political influence and favors.

    But the distinguishing features of those analogies to the market is that they are mere trade. Not anonymous speculation based upon prices.

    –“would you say that a local farmer’s market (let’s say kind of a mid-size one, with maybe a few dozen vendors at most) is characterized by the kind of anonymous speculation or epistemic incomprehensibility that you take to be characteristic?”–

    If we describe a hierarchy:

    1) The anonymous price market.

    2) The speculative production market

    3) The opportunistic production market.

    4) An out group barter market.

    5) An in group barter market,

    6) An in group altruistic market,

    Trade is conducted in each of them. The problem is, when we use the term ‘market’, each of these markets consist of different necessary properties that distinguishes it from the next.

    So, yes, I would categorize it as a market but, I not would classify it as an anonymous and speculative market.

    And this is an important difference in properties for obvious reasons.

    So I am a little cautious of reductio ad absurdum definitions – particularly those that fit ideological biases that matt seems to be attempting to steer clear of.

    Or conversely, if we fail to tie market to prices and prices to sufficient information, then I think the consequential deductions invalidate our definition of a market.

    As another series:

    I can expend on my children.

    I can trade affection on speculation of future care.

    I can exchange with friends and neighbors to balance my inventory.

    I can make something for you for a fee.

    I can sell my surplus to friends and neighbors and travelers.

    I can produce entirely on speculation for those that I don’t know.

    I can buy product from producers on speculation of selling.

    … etc.

    As such, what axis does this series represent? What increases with complexity? What decreases with complexity?

    I have less and less information to work with, and become more and more reliant on prices.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-05 14:34:00 UTC

  • OK. I’m a little out of it at the moment, and I don’t understand this shift… H

    OK. I’m a little out of it at the moment, and I don’t understand this shift… Help?

    —“We think this will be a four to five-year bull-market in the dollar. The whole exchange system is seeking a new equilibrium,” he said. “We think the euro will reach $1.12 to the dollar by next year and will be even weaker than the yen in the race to the bottom.”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-04 10:58:00 UTC

  • I still can’t find a reason why under fiat money, we charge interest on home, co

    I still can’t find a reason why under fiat money, we charge interest on home, condo and apartments constructed and owned by individuals. As far as I know the private mortgage industry is entirely parasitic and is the primary driver of inflation.

    I mean. That’s what it looks like, and I can’t find a competing argument.

    The MMT folks are partly right.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 07:44:00 UTC

  • ON THE SINGLE ENGINE (ANGLO) WORLD ECONOMY I’ve followed Roubini for many years

    http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/us-growth-and-weakening-global-economy-by-nouriel-roubini-2014-10#qijbgttUhPYimsC2.99″—ROUBINI ON THE SINGLE ENGINE (ANGLO) WORLD ECONOMY

    I’ve followed Roubini for many years now, mostly because I think using the same frames of reference (incentives rather than statistics), and so I understand him more clearly than I do most other (correlative) economists. I am never interested in up-sides. That is the job of people with specialized knowledge of sectors, and instead I’m interested in politics and entrepreneurship. And Roubini’s ideas emphasize political and entrepreneurial risk, rather than financial opportunity.

    This is a short but accurate article on the state of the world economy., I tend to follow Roubini Global Economics and George Friedman (See The Next 100 Years George Friedman) and advise those who are likewise interested in the political and entrepreneurial cycle (rather than financial opportunity) to do likewise.

    Here are a few comments from others:

    IT”S TRUE, NOT MORAL, NOT PREFERABLE, BUT TRUE

    —“Roubini is a realist and he is using the basic operating assumptions of the world economy in his analysis. These assumptions include two crucial monetary facts, namely, 1. the status of the US Treasury bill as an unrivaled store of value (a status unaffected by the 2008 crash and all its consequences), and 2. the centrality of the City of London in global currency markets. The US stores value, produces liquidity (through QE and ultra-low policy rates), and consumes other countries’ manufactures with the money. The UK creams off huge profits from the froth of exchange (and their central bank has also produced a good bit of liquidity to keep the financial markets rolling, I might add). Both these functions are systemically necessary to the current pattern of the global economy, and they have have persisted since the mid-1970s with only incremental changes owing mostly to the rise of China and the consequent relativizaton of the importance of Japan. We may find these two crucial operating conditions aberrant from the viewpoint of neoclassical economics, or just plain unjust from the viewpoint of equality between nations, but they exist, they function and so far, they have only been perturbed, not altered, by the tremendous crisis of the last six years.”—

    THE PROBLEM

    My problem with this is that it creates very bad behavior in the world, and that is why the empire must fall.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-03 01:58:00 UTC

  • IMMORALITY IN ECONOMICS In a misguided attempt to conduct economics AMORALLY as

    IMMORALITY IN ECONOMICS

    In a misguided attempt to conduct economics AMORALLY as if it were a physical science, rather than **THE** science of that branch of cooperation that is unavailable to our direct perceptions, economists have in fact, introduced and imposed upon man, particularly western man, systemic immorality. This is the most immoral age. For a reason: because economists and left philosophers made it our most immoral age. And they did it with the pseudoscientific use of statistics, divorced from the actions necessary to produce economic phenomeon. Had Economists understood operationalism and testimonial truth we would not have produced the immoral century.

    But we did. And it’s my job and that of others to end it – forever.

    Economics must be the study of morality or it is the imposition of immorality.

    Unless you are an immoral advocate of theft, immorality and dysgenic then you there is no counter argument.

    (Do you see how I am correcting Mises and Hoppe yet?)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-01 06:29:00 UTC

  • AN ANALYSIS OF THE STATE OF ECONOMICS (reposted from economics group) (possibly

    AN ANALYSIS OF THE STATE OF ECONOMICS

    (reposted from economics group) (possibly profound for students of economics)

    Why Stiglitz? He is a critique of BOTH Friedman AND the neo-Keynesians. So why is he important in my view? Even if he hasn’t solve ‘the big problem’? Because there isn’t a problem to be found, or a solution in where they’re searching for one.

    THE BROADER PICTURE

    But the take away from all of the recent economic debate, is that we have not solved the Austrian question of the business cycle (does government make it worse), or the Western Conservative question of the relationship between genetics and norms, and whether **any and all economic propositions** that do not account for genetic and normative differences are false. (And dysgenic for that matter.)

    The progressive moral sentiments (female reproductive strategy – survival of offspring regardless of merit) and the conservative sentiments (male reproductive strategy – competitive families and tribes) are currently at war in politics, because by the introduction of women into the polity, the government no longer represents families with homogenous if paternal interests, but government has become a venue for the competition between not only races and classes, but also between male/meritocratic and female/dysgenic reproductive strategies.

    This is the reason for the failure of democracy: while law must be practiced with individuals, the state must be practiced with families. The introduction of women into the government rather than into their own house of government, was as destructive as the dissolution of the differences between the monarchy, landed nobility, middle class businessmen (the commons), and our failure to add a house of proletarians (dependents).

    With these two acts under the fallacy of equality of interest and ability we eliminated the possibility of government to function as a market between families with dissimilar economic interests, and instead, made it a venue for the conduct of oppression by one group of interests over another.

    There are no adequate compromises, because as structured, current economics and politics produce undecidable propositions that we mistakenly assume are a problem which further analysis will solve by providing us with pareto optimums.

    But this is an equivalent to the search for the philosopher’s stone, or the alchemical conversion of lead into gold. It is merely an exercise in collecting more data, of greater precision without adding insight.

    The fact of the matter is that the enlightenment project has been a scientific success and a political failure – we cannot improve upon the family, the market, and houses of government that conduct exchanges of commons’ between classes of different material ability and interests.

    We need not search for non-existent (platonic) Pareto Optimums. We must merely conduct exchanges needed to produce Nash equilibria that are calculable by individuals of their own volition. This will restore some eugenics to the society ad the expense of the lower classes. But that is to the benefit of all mankind even if it is not something everyone wants to hear, because it deprives them of the cheap status signal of looking down upon others and feeling higher by the mere existence of the inferior and unfortunate, rather than having to take risks and actions necessary to produce something by their own ability and hands.

    There is nothing for economists to discover except this principle.

    (I’ll be here waiting having tea with Hegel, when they do.)

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    RANKINGS OF ECONOMISTS

    Ranking of economists by citation.

    https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.nbcites.html

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-01 06:17:00 UTC

  • QUESTION: “Who is more prominent economist?” (E.S.L. Question) Economist? I am a

    QUESTION: “Who is more prominent economist?” (E.S.L. Question)

    Economist?

    I am always unsure what people are referring to. Today that label largely refers to an econometrician, the way mathematics refers to a mathematician: as a methodologist. But I think when we ask most questions of economics, we are asking about who is the best political economist, or social scientist, because econometrics (measurement) is really not all that interesting except as a methodology for addressing one of the following domains:

    …………………………………….Mathematician………………………………

    ………………………………………………|………………………………………….

    …………………………………….Econometrician………………………………

    ………………………………………………|………………………………………….

    Political Economist…………………..|………………..Monetary Analyst.

    Social Scientist………………………..|………………..Financial Analyst.

    Legal Philosopher…………………….|………………..Investor……………

    Public Intellectual…………………….|………………..Entrepreneur…….

    There are a very small number of econometricians contributing to each of the above domains. If we look at citations it’s surprising how small the number is.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-01 04:59:00 UTC