Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • The Mere Mortal's Journey To Economic Literacy

    1) -The Single Idea-
    Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt : Economic thought, unlike Moral thought, asks us to think about equilibrating consequences, and opportunity costs. If you understand the “one lesson” of the broken window fallacy, then that teaches you economic thinking in a nutshell.

    2) –The Application of The Single Idea To The Civic Society–
    Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell : Basic Economics applies this single principle.

    3) –The Application of the Single Idea To Production Distribution and Trade–
    Principles of Micro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Micro Economics textbooks deal with patterns of cooperation (business).

    4) –The Application of the Single Idea To Monetary, Fiscal, Industrial and Social Policy–
    Principles of Macro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Macro economic textbooks deal with the impact of fiscal policy (government spending) and monetary policy (issuance of new money or credit) on the economy, in the government’s effort to keep us all busy.

    5) –The “Missing Link”: The Operations of the Financial System that connects political policy with production, distribution and trade.–
    Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and;
    Nial Ferguson’s History of Money

    The book that is missing between Micro and Macro, I do not think has yet been written, which is how the financial sector services the relationship between micro and macro. I think that book has not been written. In the meantime Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and Nial Ferguson’s History of Money, are the best and most accessible works. (Others might disagree). Rothbard was a terrible philosopher, but his works on money and banking are still the best I have found.

    6) –The Study Of Applications, Eddy’s And Flows-
    Most advanced (niche) applications of economics are useful for professionals, but not terribly meaningful for citizens.

    Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t get this stuff in high school.

  • The Mere Mortal’s Journey To Economic Literacy

    1) -The Single Idea-
    Economics in One Lesson, by Henry Hazlitt : Economic thought, unlike Moral thought, asks us to think about equilibrating consequences, and opportunity costs. If you understand the “one lesson” of the broken window fallacy, then that teaches you economic thinking in a nutshell.

    2) –The Application of The Single Idea To The Civic Society–
    Basic Economics, by Thomas Sowell : Basic Economics applies this single principle.

    3) –The Application of the Single Idea To Production Distribution and Trade–
    Principles of Micro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Micro Economics textbooks deal with patterns of cooperation (business).

    4) –The Application of the Single Idea To Monetary, Fiscal, Industrial and Social Policy–
    Principles of Macro Economics, by Greg Mankiw : Macro economic textbooks deal with the impact of fiscal policy (government spending) and monetary policy (issuance of new money or credit) on the economy, in the government’s effort to keep us all busy.

    5) –The “Missing Link”: The Operations of the Financial System that connects political policy with production, distribution and trade.–
    Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and;
    Nial Ferguson’s History of Money

    The book that is missing between Micro and Macro, I do not think has yet been written, which is how the financial sector services the relationship between micro and macro. I think that book has not been written. In the meantime Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking, and Nial Ferguson’s History of Money, are the best and most accessible works. (Others might disagree). Rothbard was a terrible philosopher, but his works on money and banking are still the best I have found.

    6) –The Study Of Applications, Eddy’s And Flows-
    Most advanced (niche) applications of economics are useful for professionals, but not terribly meaningful for citizens.

    Personally, I don’t understand why we don’t get this stuff in high school.

  • Why Is It Many Times Cheaper To Send Physical Mail Across The Ocean Than An Electronic Money Transfer?

    Because the government subsidizes and insures physical mail that is hard to steal, and less desirable to steal, using low skilled labor when handling mail, while private industry absorbs risks and the cost of semi-skilled manual labor to manually process wire transfers that are unprofitable, and easily fraudulent, and highly desirable to steal, but without which they cannot continue business operations. 

    In other words, wire transfers are both more desirable and easier to steal than physical goods, and once stolen are unrecoverable. And they don’t want to process them so they keep the cost as high as possible.

    The cost of wire transfers is due to the insurance cost of theft by retailers.  Imagine instead that the post office shipped and delivered envelopes of money, and how the behavior of the post office would change. 

    That is why it is cheaper to send hard-to-exchange goods, than exchange goods.  And why it is more cost effective to steal money than stuff you have to sell or pawn.

    This is why Bitcoin (BTC) are better and cheaper means of wire transfers.  The intermediaries in the chain of handling are not exposed to risk – just you.

    Everyone argues that BTC is helpful for the high end of the market, and I totally disagree. The primary virtue of BTC is in its application to solutions for the poor – who pay high costs because the marginal value of each unit of currency is more expensive for them than for everyone else.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-many-times-cheaper-to-send-physical-mail-across-the-ocean-than-an-electronic-money-transfer

  • Why Is It Many Times Cheaper To Send Physical Mail Across The Ocean Than An Electronic Money Transfer?

    Because the government subsidizes and insures physical mail that is hard to steal, and less desirable to steal, using low skilled labor when handling mail, while private industry absorbs risks and the cost of semi-skilled manual labor to manually process wire transfers that are unprofitable, and easily fraudulent, and highly desirable to steal, but without which they cannot continue business operations. 

    In other words, wire transfers are both more desirable and easier to steal than physical goods, and once stolen are unrecoverable. And they don’t want to process them so they keep the cost as high as possible.

    The cost of wire transfers is due to the insurance cost of theft by retailers.  Imagine instead that the post office shipped and delivered envelopes of money, and how the behavior of the post office would change. 

    That is why it is cheaper to send hard-to-exchange goods, than exchange goods.  And why it is more cost effective to steal money than stuff you have to sell or pawn.

    This is why Bitcoin (BTC) are better and cheaper means of wire transfers.  The intermediaries in the chain of handling are not exposed to risk – just you.

    Everyone argues that BTC is helpful for the high end of the market, and I totally disagree. The primary virtue of BTC is in its application to solutions for the poor – who pay high costs because the marginal value of each unit of currency is more expensive for them than for everyone else.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-it-many-times-cheaper-to-send-physical-mail-across-the-ocean-than-an-electronic-money-transfer

  • Question: —“Curt, does Bitcoin meet this Criteria? Is Bitcoin superior to Gold

    Question: —“Curt, does Bitcoin meet this Criteria? Is Bitcoin superior to Gold in terms of means of exchange?”—

    Steven,

    Interesting question. Lets look at the list.

    1) Scarcity (no. as long as people want them we can create more of them at a constant rate – the problem is actually the opposite: requiring constant adjustment to the weights to require enough work to maintain consistent value. Otherwise we could produce them infinitely without cost.)

    2) Commodity Utility. (no. it has no intrinsic use.)

    3) Non-perishability (no. because like the stock market they require infrastructure for redemption.)

    4) Volume and weight to value ratio (yes)

    5) Nearly universal convertibility (not yet, and until we get to 10 second blocs, which kind of defeats the purpose, I suspect we wont get there.)

    6) Functional unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange. (not yet. Not enough volume).

    UNDERSTANDING THAT BITCOIN ISN’T MONEY – IT’S FRACTIONAL SHARES OF THE BITCOIN NETWORK.

    A bitcoin consists of a fractional share of stock in the bitcoin network. What separates the shares of stock in bitcoin from shares of stock in other publicly and privately traded stocks, is (a) that one need not go through a clearing house (anyone with a wallet can clear an exchange), and (b) that one can sell a fractional portion of a share of his stock (a bitcoin).

    Just as any other business can fail, so can the bitcoin network. It is fully open sourced, fully transparent organization, operated by pretty good incentives, but that does not mean it cannot fail, and that those shares cannot be worthless. (In fact, it’s just as likely as not.)

    BItcoin provides low transaction costs. And I suspect that it will result in a lower cost means of transferring money, rather than as money itself.

    Now, I know a lot about the subject of what is money and what isn’t. Technically speaking, bitcoins are fractional shares of stock usable under some conditions as a money substitute that we call token money, for the purposes of decreasing transaction costs.

    It is an ingenious way of funding a business. It is however, not ‘money proper’. Or, in classical language ‘money in the narrow sense’.

    (Of course, that won’t stop a zillion imbeciles from spewing nonsense at me but that’s the reality of it.)

    It is very unlikely that anything will surpass gold as a currency of last resort. And in truth, the currency of the reigning world powers will except under shocks, always be a better store of value than gold because prices are harder to manipulate than the price of gold, since governments work hard to insure that they are the exclusive manipulators.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-08-22 14:21:00 UTC

  • If You Could Only Own One Libertarian Treatise, Which One Would You Choose: ‘human Action’,â  ‘man, Economy, And State’, Or ‘the Constitution Of Liberty’?

    Human action is a work of pseudoscience through chapter 15, and after 15 is fully integrated into mainstream economics.  So it is not useful.  Mises failed to discern that economics, like physics and mathematics was subject to an epistemic requirement for operational definitions. And while he intuited something close to correct, he was unable to solve it, and first cast praxeology as a ‘science’ without reliance upon the scientific method – which by itself is a definition of a pseudoscience, and second, stated that all of economics was deducible from the first principle of human action. Also demonstrably false, and solidifying his work as pseudoscientific.  The correct answer in operational terms is that if any empirical observation in economics cannot be reduced to a sequence of rational human actions, then it cannot in fact be ‘true’.   The first 15 chapters are an elaborate attempt to justify his fallacy.

    Man economy and state ignores, and like all of Rothbard’s works,  intentionally attempts to undermine the western competitive cultural advantage that northern europeans, by virtue of constructing the only high trust society, are the only people on earth capable of constructing commons.  So, this book is actually half correct – bureaucracy leads to despotism.  And half deception: that does not mean that the organized construction of commons and the prevention of free riding upon or consumption of those commons is not a strategic competitive advantage, or that commons cannot be produced through alternative means.  It is an elaborate fallacy on the scale, if not quality, of Freud’s psychology, Marx’s Capital, Cantor’s sets and Mises’ Praxeology.

    The Constitution of liberty is an historical and scholarly work demonstrating that the only known means of preserving freedom is through a constitution of private property rights and the organic evolution of the common law.   Hayek’s failure in his work, was his reliance on what was know in his day, and his insufficient emphasis on the scope of property rights, original intent,  and strict construction, nor the institutional means of maintaining those three constraints.  Unfortunately for all three authors, computer science would rescue the world from platonism, where logic, math, science, and economics had failed: the existence proof, and our ability to promise that we make true statements.

    Of these three the only book of value is the Constitution of Liberty.  The rest is simply

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

    https://www.quora.com/If-you-could-only-own-one-Libertarian-treatise-which-one-would-you-choose-Human-Action-Man-Economy-and-State-or-The-Constitution-of-Liberty

  • Why Is Gold Or Silver Precious In The First Place? I Would Say That Rice Is Precious.

    I will improve Paul Frank’s statement slightly:
    1) Scarcity
    2) Universal Utility.
    3) Non-perishability
    4) Volume and weight to value ratio (and therefore transportability)
    5) Nearly universal convertibility.
    6) Functional unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange.

    Very few goods meet this criteria. Silver and gold are pretty much the only goods that do meet this criteria.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-gold-or-silver-precious-in-the-first-place-I-would-say-that-rice-is-precious

  • If You Could Only Own One Libertarian Treatise, Which One Would You Choose: ‘human Action’,â  ‘man, Economy, And State’, Or ‘the Constitution Of Liberty’?

    Human action is a work of pseudoscience through chapter 15, and after 15 is fully integrated into mainstream economics.  So it is not useful.  Mises failed to discern that economics, like physics and mathematics was subject to an epistemic requirement for operational definitions. And while he intuited something close to correct, he was unable to solve it, and first cast praxeology as a ‘science’ without reliance upon the scientific method – which by itself is a definition of a pseudoscience, and second, stated that all of economics was deducible from the first principle of human action. Also demonstrably false, and solidifying his work as pseudoscientific.  The correct answer in operational terms is that if any empirical observation in economics cannot be reduced to a sequence of rational human actions, then it cannot in fact be ‘true’.   The first 15 chapters are an elaborate attempt to justify his fallacy.

    Man economy and state ignores, and like all of Rothbard’s works,  intentionally attempts to undermine the western competitive cultural advantage that northern europeans, by virtue of constructing the only high trust society, are the only people on earth capable of constructing commons.  So, this book is actually half correct – bureaucracy leads to despotism.  And half deception: that does not mean that the organized construction of commons and the prevention of free riding upon or consumption of those commons is not a strategic competitive advantage, or that commons cannot be produced through alternative means.  It is an elaborate fallacy on the scale, if not quality, of Freud’s psychology, Marx’s Capital, Cantor’s sets and Mises’ Praxeology.

    The Constitution of liberty is an historical and scholarly work demonstrating that the only known means of preserving freedom is through a constitution of private property rights and the organic evolution of the common law.   Hayek’s failure in his work, was his reliance on what was know in his day, and his insufficient emphasis on the scope of property rights, original intent,  and strict construction, nor the institutional means of maintaining those three constraints.  Unfortunately for all three authors, computer science would rescue the world from platonism, where logic, math, science, and economics had failed: the existence proof, and our ability to promise that we make true statements.

    Of these three the only book of value is the Constitution of Liberty.  The rest is simply

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute
    Kiev Ukraine

    https://www.quora.com/If-you-could-only-own-one-Libertarian-treatise-which-one-would-you-choose-Human-Action-Man-Economy-and-State-or-The-Constitution-of-Liberty

  • Why Is Gold Or Silver Precious In The First Place? I Would Say That Rice Is Precious.

    I will improve Paul Frank’s statement slightly:
    1) Scarcity
    2) Universal Utility.
    3) Non-perishability
    4) Volume and weight to value ratio (and therefore transportability)
    5) Nearly universal convertibility.
    6) Functional unit of account, store of value, and medium of exchange.

    Very few goods meet this criteria. Silver and gold are pretty much the only goods that do meet this criteria.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-gold-or-silver-precious-in-the-first-place-I-would-say-that-rice-is-precious

  • Keynesianism -> Restated Marx = “Dishonest Socialism” Rothbardianism -> Restated

    Keynesianism -> Restated Marx = “Dishonest Socialism”

    Rothbardianism -> Restated Hospers = “Dishonest Libertarianism”

    Source date (UTC): 2014-08-21 23:07:00 UTC