Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • Can I Get A Good Paying Job If I Studied International Relations?

    There are only two ‘good’ career paths in the present economy: Medicine and Programming.

    Medicine requires intelligence, reading comprehension, discipline, stamina, and exceptional memory skills. (It is not really mathematically rigorous. And is the last high paying occupation that we can say that of.)

    Programming (at least most of it) requires fairly good reasoning and concentration skills. Pay is immediate but tops out before you exit your twenties and you ‘age’ quickly in the discipline.

    Both fields present good opportunities for college graduates.

    If you want a good paying job with international scope then study quantitative macro economics. Unfortunately, economics requires the most mathematical skill and is one of the most challenging disciplines outside of physics or math – even if it tends to pay better.  If you can’t manage economics then it’s useful to study international finance.

    If you can’t manage finance then marketing research analyst requires basic statistical skills and is an interesting job.

    A legal degree used to be  passport but the market is oversaturated and it is becoming an ordinary job.

    Unlike finance, accounting is too tedious for someone with social and international interests, and is the modern entry level discipline for administrative labor.

    “International Relations” is a code word for ‘Administrative support’ or ‘I will sell telephones soon’. 

    The world has become extremely hostile to administrative and communications positions that have no quantitative and or statistical components to them.

    If you are a female who speaks multiple languages and wants to find a mate outside of her family and social circle it is an expensive but useful way to find one. Otherwise no, it is only a meaningful set of culture studies to prepare one for work in finance, law, tax, shipping, or marketing and without  statistical capability in one of those fields it will not be a ‘good’ job unless you’re counting on ‘luck’ to save you. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/Can-I-get-a-good-paying-job-if-I-studied-International-Relations

  • Janet Yellen Selected As New Fed Chair (2013-14): Would Larry Summers Be A Good Choice For The Next Chairman Of The Federal Reserve?

    (This is an ideological question.  And a loaded question. But I will try to do it justice anyway.)

    Summers is a ‘status quo’ economist with personal relationship with both the president and prominent wall street Democrats.  He is unobjectionable to conservatives since he has said impolitic but true things at times that they agree with. The consensus is that he will not put the country at risk or in painfully controversial debate.

    So he is a capable, mainstream, status-quo economist, with personal relationships with important and powerful people that is politically acceptable to the other side.   And, as such, he will not add volatility to the markets or the political sector, and that is probably a good thing for the people making the decision.

    If you were a mainstream economist facing the possibility of the euro shock, and having a deep understanding of the possibly permanent condition of the US economy, then I would suspect that you would argue that the Fed should take independent action to stimulate the economy even further and to encourage congress to spend like crazy.   But Larry Summers won’t do that.

    If you were a partisan left wing economist like you would be torn since you’d rather have the spending. If you were a democratic leader you want to make sure you keep the white house so you probably want someone who doesn’t create trouble.

    This is probably a fairly accurate answer to the question.

    https://www.quora.com/Janet-Yellen-Selected-as-New-Fed-Chair-2013-14-Would-Larry-Summers-be-a-good-choice-for-the-next-Chairman-of-the-Federal-Reserve

  • Who Are The Most Influential Economists Alive?

    INFLUENTIAL TO WHOM?

    • Economists influence each other.
    • Economists influence other academics.
    • Economists influence policy makers.
    • Economists influence members of the financial system
    • Economists influence business and industry leaders
    • Economists influence the interested public.

    The group of economists who influence each group varies considerably.  In fact those who influence each other are very different from those who influence policy and society. 

    Unfortunately, the economists who write for newspapers are the most influential outside of academia.  Within academia, influence is largely determined by citations, as someone else in this thread has stated.

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE
    Which economists are the most influential?
    Contains opinions by economists themselves.

    https://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-most-influential-economists-alive

  • Who Are The Most Influential Economists Alive?

    INFLUENTIAL TO WHOM?

    • Economists influence each other.
    • Economists influence other academics.
    • Economists influence policy makers.
    • Economists influence members of the financial system
    • Economists influence business and industry leaders
    • Economists influence the interested public.

    The group of economists who influence each group varies considerably.  In fact those who influence each other are very different from those who influence policy and society. 

    Unfortunately, the economists who write for newspapers are the most influential outside of academia.  Within academia, influence is largely determined by citations, as someone else in this thread has stated.

    THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE
    Which economists are the most influential?
    Contains opinions by economists themselves.

    https://www.quora.com/Who-are-the-most-influential-economists-alive

  • YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂 (FB

    YES I’M WRITING A LOT RIGHT NOW. SORRY IF I’M SPAMMING. IT WILL END SOON. 🙂

    (FB is such an awesome substitute for a classroom.) 🙂

    I’m trying to finish my work on reforming Austrianism in the context of libertarianism. And I have only one problem left, and that is this damned point of demarcation between the scientific and real, and the logical and platonic. (And I don’t find it interesting really. I actually find it ridiculous. )

    But I’m close enough that I need only follow bibliographies and read a bit in order to understand the current state of the argument. And as such undermine the attack on skepticism as psychological and moral rather than a description about the universe.

    Mathematical and logical platonism being a substitute for scriptural wonder isn’t actually good for anyone. Because it certainly looks like Hayek was right: The twentieth century was an era of mysticism. He said it was created by Marx and Freud. But at this point I’m going to have to throw in Cantor and Chomsky. With the opposition provided by Nietzsche, and Hayek and any number of finitists. And the absurdity is that this certainly looks like a conflict between the Jewish cultural predisposition for magianism and opposition to land holding norms, and the germanic cultural predisposition for mechanism and the necessity of land holding norms.

    I hate it when these big ideas turn out to be complex silly fantasies that we and our cultures bring with us. The world is quite simple. Even the physics of the universe appears quite simple when we understand it. The complex mystical nonsense, as always, involves some sort of magical anthropomorphization or deification of simple processes, whether they be Religion, Philosophy, Logic or Mathematics. The reality is that the world is not very complicate. We make it complicated. If you go SEARCHING for a way to make numbers and sets infinite you will find it, because any ratio is an infinite expression. But measurements are REAL and finite even if RATIOS can be infinite. Sets are a simplistic function once you separate them from the universe of human knowledge. Of COURSE you can create infinite sets that way. But in human REASON using LANGUAGE that’s not possible. Look at the tricks Godel had to come up with – a variation on Cantor, to make his mystical game come true. But he went LOOKING for it in a platonic universe. Science looks for phenomenon using measurements in the real universe.

    Why we desire the world to seem mystically complex, I think, is so that we can, like every mystic in history, use that pretense to take control over others – power from the presumption of knowledge to invalidate normative statements, even if one cannot provide a replacement answer to it. If instead, we admitted that the world was indeed as simple as it is, then most people who are public intellectuals would have very little to do.

    The world is very simple really. The problem isn’t in collecting the 1500 or so ideas that constitute the entire human conceptual vocabulary. It’s in distinguishing them from the extraordinary number of permutations of error.

    Mysticism is mysticism. Nothing real is infinite. Zero is a symbol that exists when we want to represent the idea of nothing countable. The infinity symbol is a shorthand for ‘I have no idea’: when we want to represent more than is countable. That’s it.

    Platonism is silly.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-24 07:24:00 UTC

  • MORE ON BOETTKE’S HYPOTHESIS (AND CAPLAN’S CRITICISM OF HOROWITZ) : WHY AUSTRIAN

    MORE ON BOETTKE’S HYPOTHESIS (AND CAPLAN’S CRITICISM OF HOROWITZ) : WHY AUSTRIANS ARE’T MAINSTREAM

    Caplan has it correct in his own odd way, as usual. Then he proceeds, as he does with ‘Why I’m not an Austrian’ to contradict himself with the same kind of logical problem he accuses others of making. (In the most famous case, that incentives are more important than calculation. And failing to realize that such a statement is meaningless, since incentives require calculation – the terms are mutually dependent.)

    BARRIER TO ENTRY

    The barrier to entry for quantitative macro economics is higher than the barrier to entry for subjective MORAL politics. Because of this, of course there will be more ridiculous ‘austrian’ advocates than there are ridiculous amoral quantitative macro economists like Paul Krugman and Brad DeLong. And its easier to criticize abuse of an ISLM vs ISMP curves because there isn’t any subjective loading possible. They aren’t’ dependent upon norms. Whereas it’s very easy to criticize abuse of involuntary transfers according to whatever set of norms we have learned over our lifetimes.

    PRAXEOLOGY

    I’ve consistently criticized Praxeology – which is a narrower discipline than austrian economics, because it does not treat opportunity costs as real costs, and as such, both Mises’ and rothbard’s deductions from it are mistaken – because they do not account for the cost of norms, and as such, they assume that the market is sufficient for the constraint of norms – or at least sufficient to constrain norms to the point where private property is possible because of high trust. And Mises and Rothbard are wrong on this. And because they are wrong, the entire libertarian movement has tried to base the justification for private property on natural law, argumentation, and abstract morality rather than something scientific and explanatory of all moral codes – as I have done.

    NORMS, TRADITIONS AND TRUST AS CAPITAL

    I don’t put a lot of stock in Austrian ‘Economics’ because it’s frankly all been assimilated by the profession. It’s that the long term consequences to norms and institutions have NOT been incorporated into the mainstream profession, and are treated as irrelevant. While in Austrian terms, norms are not – particularly if we include Hayek.

    It turns out that norms are VERY important. They are the most expensive kind of capital a nation can build. Norms are a living monument. Thats’ why younger civilizations with less scientific maturity have trouble creating them.

    So I tend not to make Austrian versus the Mainstream a question of empirical science, but a distinction in WHAT MUST BE MEASURED in order to make sure that we are in fact creating rather than consuming or destroying capital. This is not an argument over method per se. The progress in the empirical method, do more to the contribution of Experimental Psychology than to economics in my opinion.

    I criticize the mainstream for not measuring changes to normative (informal capital) because it is convenient to ignore it, and by ignoring it they justify both the progressive and statist agenda.

    The problem is that it is very difficult to measure such changes to norms, traditions, and other factors that we tend to bundle into the abstract but somewhat measurable distinction between TRUST and CORRUPTION. Or, what is more accurately described as the extension of the familial (kinship) trust, to others (non-kin) by the suppression of all involuntary transfers except market competition, and the systemic enforcement of warranty to prevent fraud by omission.

    GENES AS CAPITAL

    As a member of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’, I consider a gene pool a form of capital. I also think that Austrianism, like Aristocracy (and what we call Conservatism) implicitly favors beneficial market-based eugenics, while progressivism implicitly favors destructive dysgenics by not allowing families to concentrate capital behind productive genes, and transferring reproductive ability from better genes to worse genes.

    SUMMARY

    So Austrianism is flawed because it has a low barrier to entry, because praxeology as articulated is false, and has led libertarianism into catastrophic errors even Hoppe has only marginally been able to rescue it from.

    But Austrianism is useful in that it a) allows us to test the rationality of actions and incentives, b) makes visible involuntary transfers c) tries to account for increases or decreases in informal institutional capital d) implicitly represents the conflict between dysgenic and eugenic reproduction that is the natural conflict between male and female reproductive strategies. And as such Austrianism helps us understand why there is political discord, and provides us with clues, that I have made use of, to provide explanatory power in politics, that is not provided by correlative macro mathematics.

    —————–

    (For Reference)

    —————–

    BOETTKE’S HYPOTHESIS WHY AUSTRIANS ARE NOT MAINSTREAM

    “Verbal logic is not adequate to explain economic relationships. In the absence of formal logic, one cannot really test propositions. In other words, syntactic logic matters more than semantic logic.” (Hypothesis H4)

    AND

    “Science is not about absolutes, but about refutation. If AE is about (apodictic) certainty, then it is not a science, but a pastime.” (Hypothesis H5)

    Well I disagree with AE as apodictic unless it’s complete. As I’ve written elsewhere it’s not complete. However, if expressed as complete, then it’s possible to propose means of falsification. And “m not sure it isn’t possible to model. Just very, very difficult, because we need much, much more data than we have today. Tis is where experimental psychology comes in.

    In this sense, AE has a higher bar, because it tries to provide greater explanatory power than mainstream economics.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-24 07:03:00 UTC

  • BOETTKE’S HYPOTHESIS WHY AUSTRIANS ARE NOT MAINSTREAM “Verbal logic is not adequ

    BOETTKE’S HYPOTHESIS WHY AUSTRIANS ARE NOT MAINSTREAM

    “Verbal logic is not adequate to explain economic relationships. In the absence of formal logic, one cannot really test propositions. In other words, syntactic logic matters more than semantic logic.” (Hypothesis H4)

    AND

    “Science is not about absolutes, but about refutation. If AE is about (apodictic) certainty, then it is not a science, but a pastime.” (Hypothesis H5)

    Well I disagree with AE as apodictic unless it’s complete. As I’ve written elsewhere it’s not complete. However, if expressed as complete, then it’s possible to propose means of falsification. And “m not sure it isn’t possible to model. Just very, very difficult, because we need much, much more data than we have today. Tis is where experimental psychology comes in.

    In this sense, AE has a higher bar, because it tries to provide greater explanatory power than mainstream economics.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 11:17:00 UTC

  • END OF THE CHINESE MIRACLE : AND A FEW POINTS ON THE PRIORITIES OF THE DIFFERENT

    http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/recognizing-end-chinese-economic-miracleTHE END OF THE CHINESE MIRACLE : AND A FEW POINTS ON THE PRIORITIES OF THE DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT

    I despise macroeconomic positivism.

    The way I look at economic data is ALWAYS in the context of A) DEMOGRAPHICS, B) GEOGRAPHY C) INSTITUTIONS AND NORMS D) TECHNOLOGY, and E) HISTORY. ONLY within that context does macroeconomic information represent ANYTHING other than NOISE as first BRITAIN’s and then the USA’s Military and Political machine, drive unnatural (meritocratic) behavior into the world economy.

    One organization that consistently provides me with that macro information in which to interpret the macroeconomic noise, so that I can select rare SIGNAL, is STRATFOR. I read everything Friedman puts out. It’s priceless work. And STRATFOR is a valuable intellectual asset for the west if not for humanity.

    Most of us who predicted the crash in 2008 (I was only off by about 90 days) and those of us who have been predicting the Chinese crash (I was off by three years) generally work not with the noise of macroeconomic data, but macroeconomic data tends to inform us about the progress of demographic and institutional change. In the end however, demographics, geography and institution determine economics with technology the disruptive factor that causes change. An organization like STRATFOR helps us interpret macroeconomic noise, pull the signal, and understand what MUST happen over the longer term.

    Now, a gene pool and its culture is a long term investment strategy. And return on perishable commodity speculation is a short term strategy. And return on short term capital imbalances is yet another. Each of us focuses on some different portion of the time scale.

    The different economic factions, from austrians at one end, to monetarists, to Keynesians, to modern monetary theorists at the other, all look at the world through different time frames, because their priorities are different. A modern monetarist tends to see us all as peak life consumers supported by natural and stable momentum, and an austrian as an extended family with shared norms, in a complex and fragile system. Like any other discipline, once you master it, you realize just how ignorant and stupid we all are – and are usually humbled by that experience. You realize that the masculine view of the world is to build a tribe that is better than others, and the female view of the world is to give her children the greatest opportunity to spread her genes. That these two strategies are in conflict is troublesome – but a wise step on evolution’s part. But this competition shows up everywhere in political and economic life. And we tend to see intellectual endeavors in politics and economics as a quest for a universal truth. But it isn’t. It’s a conflict – at best a balance – between the male and female reproductive strategies. And economics at one end or the other, austrian or modern monetary theorist is little more than another example of that conflict – not of truths, but of preferences.

    Most countries do not communicate directly, but through professional communication organizations with personal relationships: think tanks. That most countries would rely on this network is pretty obvious from the differences in incentives between bureaucrats, politicians, and intellectuals. And countries communicate with the least distortion when their intellectuals communicate directly, and the politicians and bureaucrats can make use of the knowledge and relationships between intellectuals. For China and America this is doubly true.

    I am not operating at the level where I have those politically influential connections. Partly because my time preference is very, very long. I’m a pretty ‘male’ male. I care about my tribe. And that’s the domain of politics, ethics, and political economy, not macro economics – which is, for a gene pool, just noise.

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 07:42:00 UTC

  • Why Is Income Redistribution Such A Problem For Republicans? Provide Data And Any Other Quantitative Evidence.

    INCOME REDISTRIBUTION IS A PROBLEM FOR EVERYONE

    Otherwise we wouldn’t have a 1% movement.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-income-redistribution-such-a-problem-for-Republicans-Provide-data-and-any-other-quantitative-evidence

  • Why Is Income Redistribution Such A Problem For Republicans? Provide Data And Any Other Quantitative Evidence.

    INCOME REDISTRIBUTION IS A PROBLEM FOR EVERYONE

    Otherwise we wouldn’t have a 1% movement.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-income-redistribution-such-a-problem-for-Republicans-Provide-data-and-any-other-quantitative-evidence