Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • DECREASES HAPPINESS But people willingly trade happiness for consumption. Does t

    http://blogs.marketwatch.com/capitolreport/2014/07/18/new-york-city-is-the-most-unhappy-city-in-america/DENSITY DECREASES HAPPINESS

    But people willingly trade happiness for consumption. Does this sound like a drug addiction to you? 🙂 Stimulation over happiness?

    —“That’s according to data coming from a working paper by Harvard professor Edward Glaeser, Vancouver School of Economics professor Joshua Gottlieb and Harvard doctoral student Oren Ziv. They used data collected in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, and then adjusted it for age, sex, race, income and other factors. (Such adjustments are important — women, for instance, are happier than men; the married are happier than single or divorced respondents; and so on.)”—

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-24 01:18:00 UTC

  • The less people compete for status as consumers, the more they compete for statu

    The less people compete for status as consumers, the more they compete for status by other means. While competing for status increases consumption which decreases prices and increases employment, the only reason we need increase employment and decrease prices is because we are engaging in increases in consumer production but not increases in innovation. In other words, there are two kinds of productivity increases: the kind that comes from consumption (population increases) and the kind that comes from innovation (regardless of population increases). So what this means is that we are working very hard to get dumber and more numerous?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-23 08:45:00 UTC

  • ELI ON THE TRUST ECONOMY

    ELI ON THE TRUST ECONOMY

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-22 05:08:00 UTC

  • 10 Economists

    http://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all10.htmlTop 10 Economists

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-20 11:08:00 UTC

  • left yet again predicting capitalisms demise. The resurrection cult at work

    http://newleftreview.org/II/87/wolfgang-streeck-how-will-capitalism-endThe left yet again predicting capitalisms demise.

    The resurrection cult at work…

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-20 11:01:00 UTC

  • ARTICLE ON THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOLD STANDARD

    http://www.coordinationproblem.org/2014/07/yglesias-on-the-gold-standard.htmlGOOD ARTICLE ON THE ARGUMENTS AGAINST GOLD STANDARD

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-18 05:18:00 UTC

  • ARTICLE ON THE CURRENT ECONOMICS OF GAME DEVELOPMENT The world is a lot differen

    http://iveybusinessreview.ca/blogs/lbolukhba2010/2014/07/15/1ups-video-game-studios-keep-dying/GREAT ARTICLE ON THE CURRENT ECONOMICS OF GAME DEVELOPMENT

    The world is a lot different from when I wrote adventure games after work in the 80’s by myself. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-18 05:02:00 UTC

  • Bindner says: July 16, 2014 at 2:03 pm The further takeaway is that electing a R

    http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/2014/07/16/six-takeaways-cbos-new-long-term-budget-outlook/#comment-241060—“Michael Bindner says:

    July 16, 2014 at 2:03 pm

    The further takeaway is that electing a Republican President and Senate is the only thing that can create near term fiscal disaster. Health and the retirement of the boomers is still a concern – but both of those are, in my opinion, due to inadequate replacement levels – a birth dirth.

    The debt percentage is going up, for now, but won’t hit the record anytime soon. That is not a problem as long as Europe and China stay out of the business of selling their debt as a package or buying ours. The continued uncertainty is likely as much about policy. A strong bipartisan budget agreement will likely change that – but is unlikely to occur just yet. This also kills the prospect of long term reform being easy (but that is a fantasy anyway). The baseline itself is also fantasy – as always. Of course, the alternative scenario is just as unlikely. There may not even be a United States in 2039 – we may unite with Europe, and maybe Latin America and Africa by then (indeed, not uniting by then is probably a bad thing).”—-

    Reply to this comment

    Curt Doolittle says:

    July 16, 2014 at 2:38 pm

    Conservatives value norms, nuclear family, and liberty because they have a Durkheimian view of man: that our culture’s economic advantage is the product of high trust created only under self sufficiency, and such self trust must be constructed normatively first and institutionally second, only as a consequence of those norms. And all evidence around the world un all cultures at all points in time confirms this belief. We cannot run private corporations or corporeal states independent of family structure and norms. This is the fendamental fallacy if universalism whether capitalist or socialist.

    The conservatives speak in myth and allegory, but the empirical content if those myths is correct, while the empirical content of macro economic theory converted from Marx byKkeynes in economics and the universalism of the classicals in mathematics both fail correspondence with drminstrated human behavior. We are tribal beings and only pseudoscientific westerners divorce morality ; the necessary rules required of any cooperative species – from the science that purports to mrasure such things. American divisiveness and europesn divisiveness, and add the divisiveness in the world is caused first znd foremost by attempts of states to violate those necessary laws of cooperation: the prevention of free riding is the cause if moral intuitions.

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    – See more at:

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-16 15:00:00 UTC

  • USUALLY I AGREE WITH TALEB (But his suggestion that extreme wealth is analogous

    USUALLY I AGREE WITH TALEB

    (But his suggestion that extreme wealth is analogous to overdoes, well, doesn’t sit well with me.)

    Small problem of measurement on the one hand and acting upon it on the other. Wealth sufficient to circumvent the market or to seek rents, then yes, but otherwise I see no measurement that has meaning. If an individual possessed 80% of the wealth of an economy, if it is employed in the market, not used as credit sufficient to create monopolies, and politically free of rents then it is for all intents and purposes in circulation, and his behavior manageable under the common law. I am pretty sure I can answer all objections. But not in a comment. Wealth is inly a problem if the government lags or impedes the evolution of tactics in an economy. The common law, unlike a government, is not impeded from evolution at the rate of the market.

    As far as I know, representational, majority rule government is the problem blocking evolution under common law. I cant see much evidence of durable families in the economy that are not the product of economic rents on the distribution if liquidity through the financial markets instead of through consumers.

    Government is and remains the problem, not wealth. That is the best answer I can manage, and as far as I know thats the state of knowledge if our art if political economy.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-14 16:25:00 UTC

  • This qualifies as gotta read

    http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Sobel-Relationship-Political-Connections.pdfOk. This qualifies as gotta read.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-14 13:01:00 UTC