Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • I THOUGHT THIS WOULD HAPPEN FOUR YEARS AGO Just ruminating. Turning bearish on c

    http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/02/21/even-chinas-economists-are-singing-the-blues/?mod=WSJBlogCHINA – I THOUGHT THIS WOULD HAPPEN FOUR YEARS AGO

    Just ruminating.

    Turning bearish on china is all well and good. But you know, I can’t make heads or tales out of what’s coming out of that country. Not sure how anyone else does. I’m not as good at the data as I am the interpretation of the logic of those that are.

    I can tell you other than the vague feeling that ‘something isn’t looking good here’ no one is very sure what’s going on.

    So, I still don’t feel confident one way or the other. I mean, China is an example of Keynes’ suggestion that we just dig holes and bury money in it. Except they make cities instead of holes. I mean, the really bad part about overbuilding is that infrastructure like that is more expensive to maintain than it is to build, and if it’s built at the same time (American roads) it fails at the same time (like light bulbs).

    So at this point, I’m just confused. The one figure that bothers me most is actually the degree to which China’s economy is managed by foreign entities (70-80%). That means that they aren’t actually adapting at all. And I don’t understand the economy well enough to judge what kind of distortions are in place. I think, from what I see, they are buying density (transition from farming) in exchange for distortion. This actually makes sense believe it or not. And that’s a pretty good use of a command economy. I guess that if they get far enough with the population shift to cities, then they can use consumer credit after that – but only if enough people and institutions develop the skills for trustworthy transactions. And I just don’t see evidence of that yet.

    I don’t underestimate the intelligence of the political class over there.

    So they might be fine with it. But I don’t see how that internal ‘bad’ command-economy run by the state, translates into converting the ‘good’ economy run by foreigners. I just don’t see that. If they go long enough then the natural evolution of people in the cities might take care of it. I suppose that makes some sense. But the rapid personal wealth increases just won’t be there.

    WE ALL CANNOT BE MIDDLE CLASS because not enough of us are productive enough to reach it. We can generate false middle classes for periods (British colonialism, american expansion, postwar america, petro-dollar america, post-communist-credit china). But you can’t ‘fake it’ forever. (No matter what Krugmans of the world like to pretend.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:41:00 UTC

  • MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME (response to ‘economist’s view

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/02/forget-the-minimum-wage-job-losses-its-government-cuts-thatll-getyou-mad.htmlADDING MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME

    (response to ‘economist’s view’)

    NOTE: current macro economic models assumes either (a) a nation state or (b) universalism. But it does not account for moral differences in a heterogeneous polity. My argument is that these models are increasingly predictive under artificially heated economies, and increasingly NON-PREDICTIVE under increasingly normal economies. The rate of change in wealth determines our tolerance for ‘immoral’ behavior. The lower the rate of change, the less tolerance, and the rate of contraction determines the level of intolerance.

    I believe that this is one of the missing ‘laws’ of macro economic analysis.

    Moral heterogeneity is a bad thing. It’s not a matter of race. it’s a matter of morality and identity. Race just happens to influence identity and morality a lot. Less so in the UK than the States for example. Less so in Canada than the UK. For obvious reasons: density and rates of change.

    — POST FOLLOWS—

    –“I love the clarity and consistency of the posts on this blog. But Cosmopolitan morality is not universal. It has a specific ideological origin. And it’s both a luxury good, and a status symbol, and symbol of conspicuous consumption.

    I’ve been arguing since ’06 I think, that people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they will absorb significant personal harm, in order to ‘punish’ cheaters and free riders.

    At present, the financial community is an ally against the state. And the state has very, very bad polling numbers. Trust (polling number on our civil interactions) has declined rapidly since the 60’s along with the increase in our homogeneity of interest.

    So the people in both the USA and in Europe, are rebelling against what they see as ‘immoral’ behavior both by the state, and in the case of Europe, the low trust high corruption southern europeans. And in America, the high trust protestants against the low trust everyone-else.

    ‘We’ are not a family. There is no Cosmopolitan ‘we’. We are an empire.

    Cooperation is very different from redistribution. And redistribution is only tolerable if it does not produce immoral consequences. We can agree to cooperate if we have different objectives. But we cannot sacrifice across trust, family, race and cultural boundaries.

    We can all agree that the means of redistributing money via the financial system instead of directly to consumers is simply an artifact of previous technical limitations – limitations that we no longer have. MMT looks like a partial answer to the problem since we can issue debit cards and accounts to individuals at near zero cost. And we could even eliminate the financial system as a distribution network.

    This has the benefit of making work a means of obtaining luxuries, rather than absolute necessities. And it removes employment from consideration in policy, and instead refocuses us on productivity.

    The problem is, that the only way that will be enacted over moral objection, and over economic constraints, is to eliminate all entitlement programs, and all social service programs, and roll them into the new model.

    The conservatives will go for this solution if it means disbanding interference – including in the labor and social market, by the state.

    The truth test then, is whether people on the left are actually interested in such conversion of the economy and polity, or whether it’s just political power over the productive class. “–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:17:00 UTC

  • BOILING THE HUMAN IN TAX –“VAT is an excellent tax. I can imagine that the [sal

    BOILING THE HUMAN IN TAX

    –“VAT is an excellent tax. I can imagine that the [sales pitch] to business went something like this: don’t worry, we are not taxing you just the consumer. The reality is that claiming even a penny back from Her Majesty is the most tedious, time destroying, unproductive waste of time. Managing all of these receipts is insulting, but I will get every penny back that my accountant allows. Her Majesty is a royal pain in the ass.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 07:27:00 UTC

  • “Socialism aims for poverty, misery and despair. And they achieve it every time.

    –“Socialism aims for poverty, misery and despair. And they achieve it every time.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 07:08:00 UTC

  • Crusoe Economics As The Non-Logic Of The Ghetto

    [I] suppose I can’t say this enough,[callout]Crusoe ethics aren’t ethical at all. They’re another form of obscurantist fraud that white people seem to just soak up like every other form of pseudoscience: Marxism, Socialism, Freudianism, Feminism, Cantor’s infinities, and Postmodernism.[/callout] but Crusoe economics is useful for the analysis of economics between states, but is entirely useless for the deduction of the properties of a social order. It should be obvious by now that Crusoe’s island is an analogy to the medieval ghetto, of a state within a state. The sea constructs the borders and walls of the ghetto. Crusoe ethics aren’t ethical at all. They’re another form of obscurantist fraud that white people seem to just soak up like every other form of pseudoscience: Marxism, Socialism, Freudianism, Feminism, Cantor’s infinities, and Postmodernism. Only white people can be this stupid.

  • Crusoe Economics As The Non-Logic Of The Ghetto

    [I] suppose I can’t say this enough,[callout]Crusoe ethics aren’t ethical at all. They’re another form of obscurantist fraud that white people seem to just soak up like every other form of pseudoscience: Marxism, Socialism, Freudianism, Feminism, Cantor’s infinities, and Postmodernism.[/callout] but Crusoe economics is useful for the analysis of economics between states, but is entirely useless for the deduction of the properties of a social order. It should be obvious by now that Crusoe’s island is an analogy to the medieval ghetto, of a state within a state. The sea constructs the borders and walls of the ghetto. Crusoe ethics aren’t ethical at all. They’re another form of obscurantist fraud that white people seem to just soak up like every other form of pseudoscience: Marxism, Socialism, Freudianism, Feminism, Cantor’s infinities, and Postmodernism. Only white people can be this stupid.

  • Well Mr Fuller. You'Re Wrong. Its That We Don't Need A Job In *Production*- But We Do Need A Job. Everyone Does.

    “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller

    Everyone has to earn a living. Everyone has to have a job. But the compensation for that job, and the job itself may not require that we engage in PRODUCTION in the marketplace. But instead, that we police all society against free riding, we care for and maintain the commons, and provide emergency care and support for one another. If one performs these duties then of course, one is due compensation for them.If one does not perform these duties, or worse, violates them, then one does not earn compensation on the backs of those who do police, care for, support and provide production. Production is not the only valuable activity in society. In fact, it appears, that labor and clerical work are of near zero productive value. As such, we are all of us due compensation for our policing and maintenance of the commons, including the criminal, moral, ethical and material commons. There are ‘negative jobs’. The negative job is to actively police yourself and others against free riding on the backs of others. This is a full time occupation without vacation, days off, or commissions. It does not require that you learn a skill other than moral behavior, and it does not require that you engage in production. It does require that you deny others the ability to engage in criminal, unethical, immoral behavior, or lax or destructive treatment of the commons. Fuller is wrong. We all must have a job. We must be paid for our jobs. But the job of production is increasingly limited to minority of highly productive people. While the job of preventing criminal, unethical, immoral, and destructive behavior is increasingly abandoned by those who suggest that they are due compensation for merely existing. Which simply means that the most degenerate among us have the greatest claim to the productive efforts of others. That cannot be, in an rational or scientific world, considered moral by any stretch of the imagination. Labor has no value in production. But labor has enormous value in the defense of life, liberty and property via the suppression of all criminal, ethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt behavior. Profit from production is a luxury good earned by those with greater talents and ambitions. But that luxury good requires the active suppression of free riding in all its multitude of forms in every part of society: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and corrupt behavior.

  • Well Mr Fuller. You’Re Wrong. Its That We Don’t Need A Job In *Production*- But We Do Need A Job. Everyone Does.

    “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller

    Everyone has to earn a living. Everyone has to have a job. But the compensation for that job, and the job itself may not require that we engage in PRODUCTION in the marketplace. But instead, that we police all society against free riding, we care for and maintain the commons, and provide emergency care and support for one another. If one performs these duties then of course, one is due compensation for them.If one does not perform these duties, or worse, violates them, then one does not earn compensation on the backs of those who do police, care for, support and provide production. Production is not the only valuable activity in society. In fact, it appears, that labor and clerical work are of near zero productive value. As such, we are all of us due compensation for our policing and maintenance of the commons, including the criminal, moral, ethical and material commons. There are ‘negative jobs’. The negative job is to actively police yourself and others against free riding on the backs of others. This is a full time occupation without vacation, days off, or commissions. It does not require that you learn a skill other than moral behavior, and it does not require that you engage in production. It does require that you deny others the ability to engage in criminal, unethical, immoral behavior, or lax or destructive treatment of the commons. Fuller is wrong. We all must have a job. We must be paid for our jobs. But the job of production is increasingly limited to minority of highly productive people. While the job of preventing criminal, unethical, immoral, and destructive behavior is increasingly abandoned by those who suggest that they are due compensation for merely existing. Which simply means that the most degenerate among us have the greatest claim to the productive efforts of others. That cannot be, in an rational or scientific world, considered moral by any stretch of the imagination. Labor has no value in production. But labor has enormous value in the defense of life, liberty and property via the suppression of all criminal, ethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt behavior. Profit from production is a luxury good earned by those with greater talents and ambitions. But that luxury good requires the active suppression of free riding in all its multitude of forms in every part of society: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and corrupt behavior.

  • Well Mr Fuller. You'Re Wrong. Its That We Don't Need A Job In *Production*- But We Do Need A Job. Everyone Does.

    “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller

    Everyone has to earn a living. Everyone has to have a job. But the compensation for that job, and the job itself may not require that we engage in PRODUCTION in the marketplace. But instead, that we police all society against free riding, we care for and maintain the commons, and provide emergency care and support for one another. If one performs these duties then of course, one is due compensation for them.If one does not perform these duties, or worse, violates them, then one does not earn compensation on the backs of those who do police, care for, support and provide production. Production is not the only valuable activity in society. In fact, it appears, that labor and clerical work are of near zero productive value. As such, we are all of us due compensation for our policing and maintenance of the commons, including the criminal, moral, ethical and material commons. There are ‘negative jobs’. The negative job is to actively police yourself and others against free riding on the backs of others. This is a full time occupation without vacation, days off, or commissions. It does not require that you learn a skill other than moral behavior, and it does not require that you engage in production. It does require that you deny others the ability to engage in criminal, unethical, immoral behavior, or lax or destructive treatment of the commons. Fuller is wrong. We all must have a job. We must be paid for our jobs. But the job of production is increasingly limited to minority of highly productive people. While the job of preventing criminal, unethical, immoral, and destructive behavior is increasingly abandoned by those who suggest that they are due compensation for merely existing. Which simply means that the most degenerate among us have the greatest claim to the productive efforts of others. That cannot be, in an rational or scientific world, considered moral by any stretch of the imagination. Labor has no value in production. But labor has enormous value in the defense of life, liberty and property via the suppression of all criminal, ethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt behavior. Profit from production is a luxury good earned by those with greater talents and ambitions. But that luxury good requires the active suppression of free riding in all its multitude of forms in every part of society: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and corrupt behavior.

  • Well Mr Fuller. You’Re Wrong. Its That We Don’t Need A Job In *Production*- But We Do Need A Job. Everyone Does.

    “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Richard Buckminster Fuller

    Everyone has to earn a living. Everyone has to have a job. But the compensation for that job, and the job itself may not require that we engage in PRODUCTION in the marketplace. But instead, that we police all society against free riding, we care for and maintain the commons, and provide emergency care and support for one another. If one performs these duties then of course, one is due compensation for them.If one does not perform these duties, or worse, violates them, then one does not earn compensation on the backs of those who do police, care for, support and provide production. Production is not the only valuable activity in society. In fact, it appears, that labor and clerical work are of near zero productive value. As such, we are all of us due compensation for our policing and maintenance of the commons, including the criminal, moral, ethical and material commons. There are ‘negative jobs’. The negative job is to actively police yourself and others against free riding on the backs of others. This is a full time occupation without vacation, days off, or commissions. It does not require that you learn a skill other than moral behavior, and it does not require that you engage in production. It does require that you deny others the ability to engage in criminal, unethical, immoral behavior, or lax or destructive treatment of the commons. Fuller is wrong. We all must have a job. We must be paid for our jobs. But the job of production is increasingly limited to minority of highly productive people. While the job of preventing criminal, unethical, immoral, and destructive behavior is increasingly abandoned by those who suggest that they are due compensation for merely existing. Which simply means that the most degenerate among us have the greatest claim to the productive efforts of others. That cannot be, in an rational or scientific world, considered moral by any stretch of the imagination. Labor has no value in production. But labor has enormous value in the defense of life, liberty and property via the suppression of all criminal, ethical, immoral, conspiratorial, corrupt behavior. Profit from production is a luxury good earned by those with greater talents and ambitions. But that luxury good requires the active suppression of free riding in all its multitude of forms in every part of society: criminal, unethical, immoral, conspiratorial, and corrupt behavior.