Curt Doolittle

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  • What Is The Best Way To Learn Monetary Policy?

    I will give you a little help. There is nothing much to it.

    It is cursory in textbooks for a reason. It’s just no more complicated than maintaing a supply of money that’s high enough that interests rates are low enough, the people spend to consume and spend to invest. And not too high that you cause inflation and destroy everyone’s savings.  That’s it.  That’s all there is.  Lastly, it certainly appears that no matter what governments’ do, when you add money to an economy, you distort the information carried to everyone in the data we call prices. This distortion of information appears to exacerbate the boom and bust cycle. So no matter what you do there are consequences either way.

    The complicated part of monetary policy is that money moves through the economy through a very flexible and very complex network, and every single person in that network has some incentive or other.

    So what there is to understand about monetary policy, isn’t the monetary policy itself, which is really quite simple. It’s how money moves through the network of central banks, investment manks, common banks, investors, business, and consumers. 

    If you start with the treasury issuing notes, and follow the money through to the consumer, then back into the banking system, you will understand it. You will only really understand it though, when you understand human nature pretty objectively.

    If you can overlook the ideology the best book that you will find is Rothbard’s The Mystery of Banking.  That’s how it works.

    Monetary policy is not a problem of macro.  Macro is very simple.  The problem is the multiplicity of routes that money moves through an economy, and the various incentives people have, when all of them possess only fragmentary information and understanding of the entire process. 

    The truth is that we are still in the process of discovering how that process works. Very few people know. And when people think they know, in the end it turns out that they’re often wrong.

    Most of the nonsense you see on television or read in the news is just that.  If you read Mandelbrot, you’ll understand that most activity is noise, not signal, and almost all noise is speculation as changes in the discount rate propagate through the economy.  If you study economics long enough, or read Taleb for that matter, you’ll realize it’s a lot of noise.  Almost all economic activity is a function of demographics, property rights, and education – all of which are amplified by credit.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-monetary-policy

  • ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT AND ACCURATE

    ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT AND ACCURATE

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-29 10:21:00 UTC

  • If You Have Multiple Ideas As Solution To A Specific Problem, How Do You Analyse And Evaluate Them To Identify The Best One For Execution?

    The one that is easiest to sell to a market easiest to extract profits from.

    It’s not rocket science.

    DO NOT SPREAD YOURSELF THIN.

    https://www.quora.com/If-you-have-multiple-ideas-as-solution-to-a-specific-problem-how-do-you-analyse-and-evaluate-them-to-identify-the-best-one-for-execution

  • What Are Some Real Life Examples Of Anarchy On A Large Scale?

    There are none that involve a division of knowledge and labor.  The reason being that human beings are extremely hostile to involuntary transfers, and most humans perceive price competition via the local market – as members of an extended family – as involuntary transfer. They percieve quality variation as acceptable but not price competition.   They are correct in this perception, however. This involuntary transfer creates a virtuous cycle of innovation and price reduction, and greater participation in the market by consumers because of it, so we sanction this involuntary transfer by casting it as a virtue.

    Secondly, increasing the size of a market requires shared investment. People need a means of making this shared investment.  However, people will not make a shared investment if it is open to privatization. Governmnets have the ability to forcibly extract taxes from the market to use to construct infrastructure (largely, city walls and soldiers to defend them) as well as misuse tax money.  But they also have the ability to create legislative directions, which we call laws, to forbid privatization and free riding of these investments. As such these institutions (governments) make it easier to invest in commons (infrastructure) than would be possible without them, due to the pervasive nature of human free-riding, privatization and corruption.

    It is arguable that taxes (fees) of some minimum amount are legitimate fees for preventing free riding on the commons.  However, it has proven very difficult to control the expansion of the commons and the government, and therefore taxes.  As such governments have become instruments of rent-seeking and corruption every time humans have invented them for the purpose of avoiding free-riding and privatization.

    This should be the correct, or at least, most correct answer that we currently know how to provide to the near absence of anarchic social structures: to prevent free riding, which all humans find morally objectionable.

    https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-real-life-examples-of-anarchy-on-a-large-scale

  • LETTER TO MATT B (quite intelligent and literate fellow) Matt… Found you by acci

    LETTER TO MATT B

    (quite intelligent and literate fellow)

    Matt…

    Found you by accident. I was searching for comments on Veblen using google’s filter by advanced language. I suppose that is a compliment from Google on your writing.

    I love your poetic language. I appreciate it. I appreciate it for its associations if not its imprecision. I have too scientific an understanding of man to agree with the actuality or possibility of what you write, but it does not mean that if it were possible I would not rather live in such a world. I would. But advocating for the impossible is not within my character or aspirations.

    We have feelings for reasons. Most of them are positive toward plenty, cautious toward cooperation, negative toward scarcity, and vividly against involuntary transfers, by cheating, fraud or theft. In this sense, humans are rational creatures in so far as their abilities and cognitive biases permit them to be – and prospect theory seems to best describe our behavior.

    But while nature guaranteed our progeny and perpetuation with oxytocin that provides us with good feelings from care-taking, that hormonal response is an insufficient method by which to provide people with incentives – in no small part because the distribution of sensitivity to these hormones varies considerably between individuals, groups and genders. The math is just against it.

    That is the virtue of commercial consumption. In tribal society one set of stimuli evolved, and that is the one we naturally accomodate to. In early urban society, religions allows us to form uniform normative codes of action, across familial boundaries by relying on a non existent but allegorical family structure. In legal societies, these norms evolved into rules, where even some counter-intuitive rules can be enforced by threat of punishment. But neither care-taking, tribal, religious, or legal incentives provide us with sufficient incentive to act on risky ventures, and moreover, sufficient incentive to act in competition, and in the service of one another, in anticipation of long term benefit, as do credit and consumption. Further, consumption makes it possible for us to avoid the hard work of compromise that comes from the necessity of living in communal groups. This is why people choose spatial sovereignty – living independently with the ability to consume, instead of with others where compromise is necessary. In fact, we could argue that people demonstrate this preference at all times wherever it is economically possible – because they see the majority of human cooperation as rent-seeking, or free-riding not cooperation.

    So I work in the world of *is* and *must* trying to solve political problems within those limitations. But that does not mean I wouldn’t rather live in your *ought* world if it were possible. I would.

    Affections.

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-23 13:46:00 UTC

  • Happy birthday! Thanks for making the lives of your friends better by being you.

    Happy birthday! Thanks for making the lives of your friends better by being you. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-03-03 07:29:00 UTC

  • ‘WEIRDNESS’ (UNIQUENESS) OF WESTERNERS – AND AMERICANS IN PARTICULAR (You Should

    http://www.propertarianism.com/menu/reading-list/THE ‘WEIRDNESS’ (UNIQUENESS) OF WESTERNERS – AND AMERICANS IN PARTICULAR

    (You Should Read This Post. It’s a reply to the Pacific Standard article at the end of the post.)

    Dear Ethan Walters:

    Welcome to the Uncomfortable Enlightenment (or the Dark Enlightenment).

    History, Economics and Anthropology have addressed this issue for decades:

    RICHARD DUCHESENE: The Uniqueness of Western Civilization

    MARIjA GIMBUTAS: (Everything she has written)

    SAMUEL HUNTINGTON: Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress.

    KAREN ARMSTRONG: The Great Transformation

    (Or See the reading list at: propertarianism.com/menu/reading-list/)

    We’ve learned that our enlightenment view of humanity is flawed. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power from the landed aristocracy and the church, by the emerging middle class of northern european merchants.

    That political change may have been necessary in order to create the industrial society that we live in. However, the aristocratic view of man and mankind was accurate. And our ‘enlightened’ view of the perfect natural man if only ‘set free’ is simply an error. Man is an animal that must be trained to participate in one society of another.

    Our ‘progressive’ view of humanity is flawed as well. The purpose of that vision was to justify the taking of political power by women and the working classes. The ‘progressive view’ was put forth by Marx and Freud.

    But as Friedrich Hayek said, the trend in 20th century political ideology, which was the product of Marx and Freud, will eventually be seen as a new era of mysticism – with no basis in fact. In fact, counter-to-fact.

    And that will mirror the warnings of most of the great historians: Toynbee, Gibbon, Braudel, Spengler, Quigley, Durant, Burnham, McNeil, Keegan. That we are unique and unique for circumstantial reasons, and that all of science and reason are the product of our uniqueness.

    It has only been since the progressive ideology has become received wisdom due to the ‘revisionist history’ put forth by the last generation of academics, and then followed by the collapse of western economic uniqueness, that we have begun to see scientists, and a new generation of academics begin to undermine that ideological view of man.

    Welcome to the “Dark Enlightenment”: We are unequal and Western Civ is Unique and impossible to replicate.

    Western civ is the product of individualistic aristocratic egalitarianism caused by indo european battle tactics learned as pastoral radiers. Objectivity, debate and science, and the unique western solution to the problems of politics and market are the product of the need to obtain consent from other peers, rather than obey a chosen leader.

    Then, the church created individual property rights, and created the universalism which led to the high trust society when it tried to break up the noble families, outlawed cousin marriage, and gave women property rights. Western high trust is a produced within the Hanjal line and the Lotharingian kingdom at the bottom, and the english and scandinavians at the top.

    Manorialism: or the ownership of land, and the need for men to demonstrate their conformity and reliability, as well as participate in military when needed, in order to gain access to land, created the protestant ethic. It encourage the working classes to adopt the ethics of the nobility.

    Chivalry provided a means for men regardless of land-holding to demonstrate their socials status through service -which is a unique means of status achievement we thing of as ‘heroism’ that no other society has in such abstract, non-familial terms.

    The need to ‘keep the east at bay’ using the germans, and therefore preserving german militarism was a intentional choice of the catholic countries. The western high trust society is the product of this aristocratic egalitarian individualism.

    Culture is a set of property definitions, property rights, relying upon myths, traditions and rituals to propagate those rights. It is a set of rules for sending status signals. Status signals are those things that we imitate because they give us better access to mates and opportunities. Property definitions vary from the individual to the commons on one axis, and administration of it from the individual to the state on the other. Cultures matter. Our culture matters most. Cultures are not equal, and ours was (not is) unique.

    Northern European (protestant) Americans (at least to some degree) carry this ancient aristocratic tradition with them today. It isn’t well understood that the anglo-celtic and german populations were about equal in america until the progressive strategy to take over ‘white’ america through immigration was put in place in the 60’s. (But that’s why American english speech is flatter than UK english – it’s merged with the flatter german tonal structure.)

    Americans did not have an ‘aristocracy’ or a landed church to rebel against. There was no opportunity like in europe to create a popular “US vs Them”. We retained our distaste for government, where the europeans saw themselves as taking over the government from the aristocracy and church. Instead, it became feminists and the lower classes against white protestant male culture. This is one of the reasons why other cultures think our male-female relations are ‘businesslike’ rather than intimate and affectionate.

    And quite contrary to the revisionist progressive historians, it was not luck that made we westerners successful in our ‘great divergence’. The west was a poorer, less numerous people on the edge of the bronze age who used technology, cooperation, speed and strategy to give their inferior numbers the advantage against an east that was always more brutal, totalitarian, numerous and wealthy.

    Americans have the lock on the world’s speculative capital, because we are the people least likely to abuse it through various schemes of privatization. In abstract terms, we own the stock market. and the Brits own the Bond market. The brits lend and the americans risk. You can trust an english speaker or one of the varieties of german speaker with your money. But you pretty much can’t trust anyone else in the world. And that is a cultural value that runs back 4500 years.

    We westerners apologize for our conquest and colonialism, but we have spent the past five hundred years dragging humanity out of ignorance, mysticism, totalitarianism and dirt-scratching crushing poverty, hunger and disease. We should not feel guilty for it. We should instead, require others thank us for it. For while we did it sloppily at times, we did it none the less.

    (In essence, that’s the Dark Enlightenment philosophy.)

    http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

    Source date (UTC): 2013-02-26 03:29:00 UTC

  • What Is The Most Effective Yet Efficient Way To Get Rich?

    Read “millionaire mind” and “millionaire next door”.

    Statistically speaking: run a small business. Sell it to a larger business.

    Create balance sheet wealth.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-effective-yet-efficient-way-to-get-rich-2

  • Response to A Criticism of Libertarianism by “Dave” at “Cydoniansignal”

    In response to : http://cydoniansignal.com/2013/12/03/libertariancritiqu/ I can’t respond to all criticisms of libertarianism (there actually aren’t that many). But if I can use them to illustrate something or other I do. Most of the time, the criticisms are from those who lack the knowledge to render the criticism that they levy. There exist legitimate criticisms of libertarianism, and I list a few of them in this response, but rarely are they mentioned.

    gh t

  • Yo Kurt, tell me if you see this guitar for sale dirt cheap anywhere; all i know

    Yo Kurt, tell me if you see this guitar for sale dirt cheap anywhere; all i know is that it’s from behind the Iron Curtain a few decades ago.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-12-01 15:05:00 UTC