“…. the last time the female labor force participation rate dropped as low as 57.1 percent was in February 1989—24 years ago…..”
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-22 13:55:00 UTC
Form: Quote Commentary
-
CONFIGURING PRODUCTION “Entrepreneurs, through a process of trial and error, fig
CONFIGURING PRODUCTION
“Entrepreneurs, through a process of trial and error, figure out how best to configure production. In this process of ongoing discovery, there can be periods in which workers are unemployed, while the market mechanism tries to figure out how to utilize them.” — Arnold Kling.
I’ve been a supporter of Kling’s argument since he first started talking about it. But in our intellectual climate, an explanation must be reduced to some sort of model so that we are sure that the various causal axis are related in the way that we assume and intuit that they are.
As yet I haven’t seen such a model, or comparison with that model against data. This deconstruction, which involves painfully detailed research, was one of the many ideas that convinced greenspan of the virtue of the entrepreneurial coordination of production amidst fragmentary knowledge by studying the cotton trade.
I feel, that in my work, I am trying to express his argument for PSST in operational language of incentives using propertarian terminology.
(And I’m using PSST in a post that should come out later today.)
https://www.facebook.com/arnold.kling?
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-21 05:18:00 UTC
-
GEORGE ORWELL DISTILLING JAMES BURNHAM We didn’t get socialism. We didn’t get ca
GEORGE ORWELL DISTILLING JAMES BURNHAM
We didn’t get socialism. We didn’t get capitalism. We didn’t get a social democracy. We got an expropriative bureaucracy.
–“Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organise society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands. Private property rights will be abolished, but common ownership will not be established. The new ‘managerial’ societies will not consist of a patchwork of small, independent states, but of great super-states grouped round the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia, and America. These super-states will fight among themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. Internally, each society will be hierarchical, with an aristocracy of talent at the top and a mass of semi-slaves at the bottom.”–
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 13:10:00 UTC
-
“…. democratic politics tends to concentrate benefits and disperse costs, so t
“…. democratic politics tends to concentrate benefits and disperse costs, so that politicians in both parties face very strong incentives to promise current and future benefits without regard to the costs of those promises.
Boettke. Hoppe by less antagonistic means. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 10:39:00 UTC
-
pretty public about the fact that I think Boettke is our best. So this is a sham
http://www.economicthought.net/blog/?p=5163I’m pretty public about the fact that I think Boettke is our best. So this is a shameless plug of the failure of the mainstream to understand Hayek’s contribution. Prices and knowledge are making a slow comeback. Specifically that prices DISTORT knowledge accumulation, not just incentives, and that this process accumulates and is expressed in our theory of the business cycle.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 09:28:00 UTC
-
a profession that earns its salary teaching MBA students could ask for no better
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.kr/2013/10/gene-famas-nobel.html” a profession that earns its salary teaching MBA students could ask for no better result than to find that better knowledge and training lead to better investment management. Too bad the facts say otherwise.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-20 09:25:00 UTC
-
ON CONSERVATIVE LITERATURE (books on rational conservatism) –See reading lists
http://www.propertarianism.com/MORE ON CONSERVATIVE LITERATURE
(books on rational conservatism)
–See reading lists at www.propertarianism.com Then “Reading Lists” from the menu–
My last post was just too narrow so I thought I’d forward this canon on rational conservatism. It doesn’t hold a candle to Libertarian theory because it’s fundamentally an emphasis on the normative rather than political or economic economy. But that’s precisely why we should study it. Conservatives ‘get it’. Even if they can’t talk about it rationally or intelligently. ARATIONAL != IRRATIONAL.
MORE ON THE ANALYTICAL AND HISTORICAL APPROACH
Jerry z Muller :
_Conservatism_
http://www.amazon.com/Conservatism-Anthology-Political-Thought-Present/dp/0691037124/
_The Other God That Failed_
http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-that-Failed-Deradicalization/dp/069100823X
“Us and Them : The enduring power of ethnic nationalism”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63217/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them
“Capitalism and Inequality : What the right and the left get wrong”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality
George H. Nash: _Conservative Intellectual Movement in America_
http://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Intellectual-Movement-America-ebook/dp/B0055PNMQ4
Robert NIsbett : _The Quest for Community_
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1558150587?ie=UTF8&creativeASIN=1558150587
F.A. Hayek : _The Constitution of Liberty_, _The Road to Serfdom_
RESTORATION SCHEMES
Mark R Levin : _The Liberty Amendments_ (Restoration)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Liberty-Amendments-Restoring-American-ebook/dp/B00CO4IP5M
(Levin’s ideas are solid but the Genii is out of the bottle. Secession is the only power we have to force a rewrite, and that would simply lead to organized dissolution.)
Richard M Weaver : _Ideas Have Consequences_ (Philosophy/Ideology)
http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-Have-Consequences-Richard-Weaver-ebook/dp/B00BN4YIGY
(Weaver’s Philosophical attempt at Restoration.)
ON ‘THE FALL’
(Criticism is good. It’s just not an answer to the problem)
Richard Epstein : _How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution_
http://www.amazon.com/Progressives-Rewrote-Constitution-Richard-Epstein-ebook/dp/B004XOZ658/
Whittaker Chambers: _Witness_
http://www.amazon.com/Witness-Whittaker-Chambers-ebook/dp/B0028085JS/
Thomas Sowell : _The Vision Of The Anointed_
http://www.amazon.com/The-Vision-Anointed-Self-Congratulation-Social/dp/046508995X
ON SENTIMENTAL AND ANALOGICAL CONSERVATISM
(What I want to get away from.)
Before about 1990, the scientific knowledge did not exist to support conservatism. And the speculation generated by the pseudo-sciences of the 19th century by Marx, Freud, Cantor, The Frankfurt School, the American Marxist Movement, and the American-European Postmodern movement, were successful, particularly in the 1970’s in creating anti-rational ideas in the masses via universities.
Leo Strauss : _History of Political Philosophy_
Russell Kirk : _The Conservative Mind_
____________ : _The Politics of Prudence_
http://www.amazon.com/The-Politics-Prudence-Russell-Kirk-ebook/dp/B0055PKEX8
Michael Oakeshott (everything)
Ostwald Spengler : _The Decline of the West_
Francis Yockey : _Imperium_ (romantic vision of totalitarian recreation)
GOING FORWARD – REFORMATION CONTINUES
The connection between christianity, high victorian language, germanic manners, and our morally loaded aristocratic poetry and literature, is still present in these works. We have, slowly, converted most of our language to that of science, models and the study of incentives and cognitive abilities and biases. We have learned a great deal, slowly, about the institutions, traditions, memes, morals, ethics, manners, myths and metaphysics of western civilization. But most importantly, we have learned enough about political economy, and the influence of norms on that political economy, to discuss ‘the pagan and christian west’ in ratio-scientific rather than ratio-philosophical terms.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 15:33:00 UTC
-
MULLER : IS THE MARKET MORAL? (Important Propertarian Concept: Market And Morali
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/is-the-market-moral-JERRY MULLER : IS THE MARKET MORAL?
(Important Propertarian Concept: Market And Morality)
Yes the market is moral in the universal. No it is not in the particular. BUT lets look at this a little more deeply.
Muller is the author of THE DEFINING intellectual work on Conservatism. It was his work that convinced Jonathan Haidt that there was more than one moral code. Both is book _Conservatism_ and his Teaching Company Lectures, are the first and most important discussion of conservatism in rational and moral terms.
Conservatism, like libertarianism, has produced a landscape littered with trite entry-level works that are little more than pop entertainment, or statements of personal enlightenment. And there are only a handful of authors who produce more than sentimental, allegorical, or historical works. And that is because conservatism, still, remains an habituated moral philosophy, not a rationally articulated one – Something some of us are trying to change. Muller changed that with _Conservatism_.
**This particular essay shows however, that even Muller still does not grasp the market as the REPOSITORY into which we have transformed ALL immoral action. It is the ONLY place we allow immorality. And that is because the market produces virtuous consequences as an output of that instinctively immoral activity: competition. The negative feedback to the producer creates the incentive for the producer to improve his or her wares, or to price them more cheaply. It creates a squirrel cage wheel of increasing quality and decreasing prices.
The market has made LIFE outside of the market, increasingly moral. The virtue of the immoral process of the market, produces virtuously moral longer term outcomes in terms of prices, quality and choices.
But more importantly, it does not require we eliminate our attempts to outwit each other. It simply gives us a single virtuous venue in which to do it. And the consumer always wins, no matter what bet he places.**
WHAT YOU SHOULD READ
_Conservatism_
http://www.amazon.com/Conservatism-Anthology-Political-Thought-Present/dp/0691037124/
_The Other God That Failed_
http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-that-Failed-Deradicalization/dp/069100823X
“Us and Them : The enduring power of ethnic nationalism”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63217/jerry-z-muller/us-and-them
“Capitalism and Inequality : What the right and the left get wrong”
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138844/jerry-z-muller/capitalism-and-inequality
WHERE HE IS WRONG
The Mind and Market
The Jews and Capitalism
His failure is perhaps our own failure to articulate property, property rights, reproductive strategy, the mind, moral intuitions and moral codes as the cause of both ‘the mind and market’ and the near universal condemnation of jewish morality despite their success in the market.
No one is perfect. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-19 09:04:00 UTC
-
GETTING CLOSER : INFECTION AND THE MIND The dopamine theory of evolution has alw
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infectious-behaviorBRILLIANT: GETTING CLOSER : INFECTION AND THE MIND
The dopamine theory of evolution has always seemed the most plausible to me. Partly because our adaptation to Malaria seems somehow related to intelligence. Partly because the relationship between dopamine and histamine. And partly because of the relationship between allergies, depression and ARTISTIC (not autistic) behavior. And the relatively recent work that suggests that depression and schizophrenia are points on a spectrum disorder that seems to have some impact on weakening white matte, and inflammation that breaks the blood brain barrier.
There is a little part of me that thinks that the dopamine related process of adaptation was not quite as successful as other selection processes, and we’ve been asymmetrically able to repair it over time because of geography and population density.
Anyway, I’m hopeful that we will get very close to understanding just what it is that gives us this inflammation in our systems, and causes many of these autoimmune diseases that attack or as a byproduct, destroy our nervous systems.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-18 11:53:00 UTC
-
ON EDUCATION (Brilliant. Concise) Caplan is the best critic of expensive and ine
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/10/the_iron_laws_o.htmlCAPLAN ON EDUCATION
(Brilliant. Concise)
Caplan is the best critic of expensive and ineffective university educations.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-18 08:29:00 UTC