Curt Doolittle

Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

  • RULES

    http://www.inequality.is/PARETO RULES

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-17 01:27:00 UTC

  • ZOMBIE BANKS (Like Japan’s Zombie Corporations) (Like American Zombie social pro

    http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-s-zombie-banks-and-the-current-recession-by-daniel-grosEUROPE’S ZOMBIE BANKS

    (Like Japan’s Zombie Corporations)

    (Like American Zombie social programs.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-15 11:24:00 UTC

  • THE INTELLECTUAL DEBATE IS CHANGING, BUT TOO LATE It’s received wisdom among ort

    THE INTELLECTUAL DEBATE IS CHANGING, BUT TOO LATE

    It’s received wisdom among orthodox economists, that immigration is ‘good’. but the truth is, that it’s good for the upper classes, and bad for anyone else, and it’s only good in the abstract over the very long run.

    I’ve been arguing this same point for years, and I include in my arguments the cost of institutional conformity and increased frication and trust.

    The USA’s immigration history is also a received wisdom that isn’t true. Catholics and Jews had precisely the impact on freedom, civic virtue, manners, morals and ethics, that the protestants worried about. (Yes, it’s true.) Values aren’t arbitrary or neutral.

    THE ECONOMIC ARGUMENT TO THE BENEFIT OF IMMIGRATION IS FALSE for everyone except government employees and financiers. For everyone else it’s theft.

    http://cis.org/immigrant-gains-native-losses-in-the-job-market-2000-to-2013

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-11 20:50:00 UTC

  • I SAID: NO STAR TREK 🙂 A horror story instead. The new normal: Its normal. A se

    http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/07/08/horror-story-rude-awakening-awaits-western-economies/LIKE I SAID: NO STAR TREK 🙂

    A horror story instead. The new normal: Its normal.

    A series of windfalls is a series of accidents. And the USA has had many windfalls.

    We thought windfalls were a new normal that was the result of our virtues. We built a social, political and economic system that cannot meet its promises.

    Now we pay the price for boomer idiocy.

    http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2013/07/08/horror-story-rude-awakening-awaits-western-economies/?mod=WSJBlog

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-09 04:14:00 UTC

  • PERSPECTIVE “Less than 0.25 percent of all the companies listed in the world rep

    PERSPECTIVE

    “Less than 0.25 percent of all the companies listed in the world represent around half the market capitalization, a less than minuscule percentage of novels on the planet accounts for approximately half of fiction sales, less than 0.1 percent of drugs generate a little more than half the pharmaceutical industry’s sales — and less than 0.1 percent of risky events will cause at least half the damages and losses.” – Taleb

    Average people and average things don’t really ‘matter’. It’s the radical outliers that make the difference. Because they actually make a difference.

    The economy is much scarier and fragile than absurd positivist progressive economists argue.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-07 10:49:00 UTC

  • Only 47% of Adults Have Full-Time Job All we have done is replace men in service

    Only 47% of Adults Have Full-Time Job

    All we have done is replace men in service and clerical labor with women. In doing so created the single mother family unit as the most influential voting block. And increased inequality by increasing the vast number of single income single parent households at one end and double income double parent households on the other.

    The nuclear family is the only “equality” possible. :).

    http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/05/only-47-americans-have-full-time-job

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-06 05:45:00 UTC

  • STUDENT LOANS If you want to fix student loans, the incentives in the university

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324688404578541372861440606.htmlFIXING STUDENT LOANS

    If you want to fix student loans, the incentives in the university system are currently perverse, and you can’t fix student funding without fixing university incentives.

    1) zero interest. Any amount. Six total years of coverage. This process can be repeated every ten years for lifetime performance.

    2) The amount is paid back as a payroll deduction over thirty years at fixed, x% of income . (This effectively reduces the student cost to zero, but doesn’t allow students to abuse it.)

    3) Colleges and Universities must use 100% of the money for undergraduates ONLY for the undergraduate program, only for undergraduate departments, only for undergraduate teachers who teach, and many not use any for research, sports, or for their endowment. Undergraduate departments must perform as teaching departments not reserach departments, and all publication requirements for teaching professors must be removed. No exemptions or devices for circumvention in theory or practice. Limit administrative overhead costs to 20%. And that will take care of the economics of the system, and make sure our students have the best professors in the world.

    4) Since all financial barriers are removed, then remove all quotas, and require domestic students receive full access prior to foreign students.

    Most of these are Sowell’s ideas.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-02 10:55:00 UTC

  • The American economy is the housing economy, right? There isn’t really any recov

    The American economy is the housing economy, right? There isn’t really any recovery on the productive side. There is just a recovery in housing prices, and taxes on housing? (I think I”ve got that right… )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-01 11:28:00 UTC

  • WHY DONT FIRMS IN TROUBLE RAISE PRICES? They should. But…. (Cross posted from

    WHY DONT FIRMS IN TROUBLE RAISE PRICES? They should. But….

    (Cross posted from reply on Econlog)

    Firms rarely trade in commodities and benefit from the anonymity associated with commodities. They work in a network of established customers and distributors all of whom are more knowledgable about the relative strength of the firm in relation to its competitors than are members of the firm itself. (Yes, really.)

    If your failure is an internal one ( a well known tech harware manufacturer had incentives to keep costs down which later nearly killed the company as venors started absndoning the paltform because it was too difficult to learn the many minor differences) then if your brand supports the price you can do it and use the money to correct the problem.

    But the real problem is this: a very. Small number of people in any organization provide the entire marinally competitive difference, and if those people feel the company will fail they will leave. (We have pretty good data on this now. ). If knowledge of even short term failure leaks into the organization itself the consequences for quality, priductivity, retention, access to credit, will produce a deterministic result.

    Firms do raise prices in duress. (Microsoft prior to Vista for example. ) I advise it all the time in order to prune unprofitable customers when companies are under duress. You just cant get away with it for that long.

    Positivistic error/error of induction: assuming quantities contain sufficient information for other than commodities, when commodities are unique in this condition.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-01 07:22:00 UTC

  • “For the countries that in the no-migration counterfactual would have higher pop

    “For the countries that in the no-migration counterfactual would have higher population welfare losses are larger in the short run. The reason is that, besides the loss of remittances, the wave of newly returned migrants is absorbed through the creation of new firms with below-average productivity.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-01 05:44:00 UTC