Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • Untitled

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0304418184900344

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 14:45:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119433/if-isis-not-islamic-then-inquisition-was-not-catholic

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 14:44:00 UTC

  • THE MEANING OF “AUSTRIAN” (as I understand it today.) (draft) Note: I’ve wanted

    THE MEANING OF “AUSTRIAN” (as I understand it today.)

    (draft)

    Note: I’ve wanted to put this together for some time, since I have some significant issues with the way that Boettke has written it – even if he has written the best to date. I believe this form of articulation is more analytical and less romantic. But this is still just a draft. And each bullet needs a paragraph of explanation. – Thanks.

    VALUE

    1) Value as incentive to act.

    2) Subjectivity of Value.

    3) Marginal Value.

    4) Opportunity Cost.

    5) Exchange as only test of value and therefore production or consumption

    6) Morality as voluntary exchange. (Propertarianism’s addition: productive, fully informed warrantied, exchange that is free of externality.)

    VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATION OF PRODUCTION

    1) Property. Without property one cannot choose between alternative actions available to him.

    2) Commodity money allows for the evolution of prices.

    3) Prices function as information about what others want and need.

    4) Information provides incentives. Prices make actions and resources commensurable, so that complex choices and planning are possible.

    5) With Property,Money,Prices,Information and Incentives, individuals can voluntarily choose to participate in production.

    6) If many people possess this choice, a polity can evolve the Voluntary Organization of Production. Without these choices, people cannot voluntarily organize production, and must be involuntarily organized. (It is not clear that all people prefer the voluntary organization of production, even if they prefer the rewards of living under a voluntary organization of production.)

    THE ORGANIZATION AND REORGANIZATION OF VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS

    1) Increases in participation in voluntary organization of production increase the division of knowledge and labor and by consequence their participation produces variations in productivity and prices.

    2) People Evolve complex organizations from Sustainable Patterns of Specialization and Trade.

    3) Changes in preferences cause alteration of the existing sustainable patterns of specialization and trade (Reorganization).

    4) Innovation (Discovery) provides incentives to alter the existing sets of preferences, and the existing organizations of production to satisfy those preferences.

    5) Changes in the scarcity of resources (Shocks) alter prices and by consequence alter preferences, and the existing organizations of production change in order to satisfy those changes in preferences.

    6) Changes in innovation, resources and preferences create opportunities for the satisfaction of preferences.

    7) People, and organizations of people, demonstrate flocking and schooling in response to opportunities.

    8) Business cycles evolve from the exploitation and exhaustion of opportunities available in the current organization of production, and the evolution of new opportunities in new organizations of production, and the need for the reorganization of the existing patterns of specialization into new organizations of production. (ie: equilibration is a fallacy of numeracy.)

    INTERFERENCE IN THE INFORMATION SYSTEM, ORGANIZATION, AND CAPITAL

    1) The state distorts information under Keynesian employment policy by flooding the market with cheap money and misinforming individuals as to what actions they should take.

    2) Unnecessary shortages of money also misinform individuals as to what actions that they should take.

    3) Economists and philosophers have not solved the problem of supplying money independent of shortages, (although it appears possible by increasing taxes along with interest rates).

    4) The cost of distortion is an opportunity cost between one possible set of affairs and another possible set of affairs. We just can never recover a lost set of affairs.

    5) Monetary prices may be neutral in the long run, but distortion of those prices produces externalities that are non-neutral.

    6) Distortions impact all capital Human capital (skills), Reproductive capital (family structure and gene pool), Normative Capital (inter-generational habits, values, traditions, myths), and Institutional Capital (Formal institutions, including the law). While economic activity may be easily quantifiable, accounting for gains or losses in the remaining forms of capital are not.

    PROPERTARIAN EXTENSIONS TO AUSTRIAN THEORY

    1) The first means of production is reproduction, and is the purpose for all other production.

    2) The organization of reproduction and the organization of economic production are interdependent, and for one to change so must the other.

    3) Moral rules are those that prevent parasitism: free riding, involuntary transfer (fraud), and imposed cost (theft and violence), and family structure heavily influences moral rules, which only property rights and law can change.

    4) Voluntary exchange requires the exchange is productive, fully informed, warrantied, and free of externality.

    5) Trust is the word we use for the feeling we have, when transaction costs (risks) of free riding, rent seeking, fraud, theft and violence are eliminated – leaving only error in forecasting of demand as the possible risk.

    6) Trust is developed by increasing the scope of property rights to exclude all actions that make free riding possible, and therefore eliminate transaction costs.

    7) The common (organic) law of property rights, being specific positive assertions of the general negative prohibition on parasitism in order to make cooperation rational, is the only means of scientifically (experimentally) evolving law that corresponds with morality.

    8) It is not clear that savers have a moral claim to appreciation of the value of currency from saving, albeit they do have a claim to against inflation of the currency. It is quite hard to argue otherwise.

    OPPOSITIES: AUSTRIAN (aristocratic) VS PSEUDO-AUSTRIAN (cosmopolitan).

    Austrian theory is broken into two branches: (a)The Cosmopolitan (Jewish) Branch (Mises/Rothbard/Hoppe) and (b) the Aristocratic (Hayekian) Branch (Hayek/Popper and as far as I know, myself).

    It may be novel idea or not, but the difference is largely in the Aristocratic use of the commons and high trust as a competitive strategy, and the cosmopolitan attempt to privatize all commons, and eschew high trust in favor of low trust, as a means of evolutionary strategy that COMPETES with the high trust producers of commons. In other words, the Misesian/Rothbardian if not Hoppeian Austrian branch produces behavior that eschews all commons. For these reasons, the Misesian/Rothbardian/Hoppeian branch is not an Austrian branch but a cosmopolitan competitor specifically articulated as an attack on the high trust aristocratic commons.

    In the early 2000’s I had assumed that I could reunite Mises and Hayek, because I understood that Hayek was speaking politically and Mises individually. But I did not at the time understand that these are competing and mutually exclusive social strategies. That the purpose of the Cosmopolitan strategy was to preserve levantine low trust, and to privatize all possible commons. That the aristocratic strategy is to produce commons because no other group has been able to.

    Hayek may have challenged the view among academics that fascism was a capitalist reaction against socialism. He argued that fascism and socialism had common roots in central economic planning and empowering the state over the individual. But just as we must mobilize one another for war, fascism was an effort to mobilize us against communism. So while it may be true that fascism and socialism possess common roots, but it is also true that war is not a process of exploration as is capitalism – it is a deliberate concentration of all production into fighting. And the fascist war against communism most likely saved the west.

    So, these two branches are not tastes. They are polar opposite propositions. They ask us to choose between levantine low trust morality and aristocratic high trust morality. And that is an easy choice.

    Only warriors can produce aristocracy.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 14:15:00 UTC

  • (It is so much easier to write in Ukraine. No television. No distractions. Nothi

    (It is so much easier to write in Ukraine. No television. No distractions. Nothing else to do but work. I was in the states two weeks and could hardly do anything. I am in Ukraine one day and I do good work.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 13:26:00 UTC

  • (Domain transfer compete. We now own “www.aristocratia.com”. All I need now is t

    (Domain transfer compete. We now own “www.aristocratia.com”. All I need now is time to work on it and get others involved.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 11:26:00 UTC

  • ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS Don’t pay c

    ADVICE TO THE YOUNG (WOMEN): CHOOSING DEGREES FOR LIFETIME HAPPINESS

    Don’t pay college tuition for trade school education. Get a major in something that is the maximum extent of your abilities, and then minor in or take basic courses in your trade.

    In this case I’m referring to a young relative of mine that I love who is too smart for the career she has targeted. I would suggest that if you are a woman and can handle the nursing curriculum then whether or not you choose to be a nurse you can always downgrade if you can’t hack the program. If you do hack it, the entire healthcare field is open to you. Furthermore you can get an advanced degree such as Nurse Practitioner, and and within this generation, nurses will approach doctor salaries. NP is a great career for a smart woman who wants to participate in care-taking fields.

    I will also put out that when you are a young woman you are probably very ignorant about the world, and certainly too ignorant of the world to know in high school what career you should follow. And to make matters worse, you also have raging hormones in your body making you extremely sensitive to care-taking stimuli. By the time you are in your late twenties to mid thirties these hormones will decline in influence and you will care very much more that you are working with people who think about the world the way that you do, and are interesting than you will about care taking of yet another of the same problems that you have seen a thousand times. You can let your hormonal influences in youth determine your mid and late life circumstances, but if you do you will end up as one of the many unsatisfied people in the world who dreams of being what else she could have been.

    In general if you want to have the most fulfilling life, you should always try to operate at the limits of your ability, and associate with people at that same limit. You will constantly make each other better. If you associate with people who have 95-105 IQ’s they are ‘normal’, but if you associate with people 105-115, it’s a very different world you will live in. For example, in the medical field, doctors are usually above 125, and often much higher, while almost all workers in medical administration and service are below 100. If you want to know why doctors act the way they do it’s because it’s very frustrating to talk to people more than 15 points different from you. You don’t see it usually in your education system, but as you mature, you rapidly understand that at 15 points is a standard deviation, and that our social classes (if not our economic classes) are structured by IQ, and that it is much more rewarding for you to work with the people at the top of your spectrum rather than with people below it.

    Next, in the same vein, when you are young, and female (with lower dominance than males) the idea of managing people is harder to imagine than doing a job that does not require a lot of collaboration. But if you are smart, then the only rewarding job as you mature is that which requires a lot of collaboration. If you are smart enough that bad customer service, organizational disorder and inefficiency bother you, and wise enough to understand that people must do things differently because they are each equipped differently, then it is wise to look at careers with management responsibility.

    If you don’t like what this says to you then I am sorry for you – because life will teach you this lesson even if you do not want to learn it. Associate with the best people you can. That means the people who constantly challenge you to improve yourself. You will make them better and they will make you better.

    The opposite is also true. If you associate with people less able than you are, in a career that is less challenging than you are capable of, you will be both socially and occupationally bored, and constantly frustrated by what you see as pervasive incompetence and error. And you will rapidly find yourself a prisoner of that little world in which you have walled yourself.

    Money is not everything. Once you make over 60K, happiness does not improve – you just buy more expensive houses, cars, clothes, and ‘stuff’. But this is a misleading statistic. Because once you make over say, 90K, the quality of people you associate with on a daily basis increases dramatically. Fulfillment in life comes from your family, your friends, but the people you spend the most time with are those at your work. So just as you would be careful with friends, careful selecting a mate, it is wise to be careful selecting a line of work where you are with people who fulfill you rather than frustrate you.

    If you are smart – smart enough to graduate in the upper 10 or 20% of your class, make sure that you are not consigning yourself to your parent’s social class, and the kinds of careers that are easily understood among your family, friends and associates. If you live in NYC or SF you are more aware of the many careers available. If you live in a small town somewhere rural you are not. It helps to read help wanted advertisements in big cities if you want to understand the world. Employment offers are the map of the world as it is. Whatever people tell you is largely mythology.

    So my advice to everyone at every level of ability is to shoot for the most complex degree in one of the most complex fields with the greatest quantitative demands that you can handle. And to consider trade school your last option. You can always switch from harder degree to less hard degree. But if you work hard you will not. But if you are going to pay that much money for an education, do not pay for trade school expecting a college education. It’s a recipe for debt and an unsatisfying life.

    Affections.

    Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 10:47:00 UTC

  • CONTRA JAN LESTER’S THEORY OF LIBERTY? I AM NOT SURE YET. (edited and expanded f

    CONTRA JAN LESTER’S THEORY OF LIBERTY? I AM NOT SURE YET.

    (edited and expanded for clarity)

    The history of the term liberty and corresponding concept of liberty is what it is. The history of property is what it is. The history of law is what it is. The history of cooperation, family and production are what they are. The history of criminal, unethical and immoral behavior are what they are. We define these terms many ways but the common element that they share is the prohibition on free riding (morality) or the prohibition on involuntary transfer (various forms of fraud and indirection), and prohibitions on the imposition of costs (various forms of crimes against life and property).

    The only difference between the criminal, ethical, and moral spectrum, and the historical definition of liberty, is whether the actions are criminal, unethical, and immoral violations precipitated by non-government actors against whom we can retaliate or request resolution of the dispute, OR whether they are precipitated by members of the monopoly we call bureaucracy, government and state, against whom we cannot retaliate.

    We can define liberty as it has been throughout time (freedom from governmental interference in our thoughts, actions, relations and property.) I think attempting to redefine it is merely an attempt at verbalism. Rationalism has nothing to add but justification.

    At this point, I am still stuck with the same problem I have been since Lee Waaks suggested Jan Lester’s work to me: that I see that he has correctly identified the causal property of morality as imposed costs. (But costs imposed against what?) But that I don’t really see that his ‘theory of liberty’ holds any meaning or if it’s an empty verbalism (confusion and conflation). But then again, I am not sure that I understand his point.

    For example, I think this is a nonsensical statement: Lester’s theory of liberty –“is pre-propertarian because we need a theory of liberty *before* we can know how society should be “arranged” to maximize liberty.”–

    That’s like saying we need the head of a coin before we can have a tail of it. It’s not possible. You cannot have a coin with one side anymore than you can have good without evil, morality without property, and liberty without a state.

    We evolved property prior to government and the state – we had to. Otherwise cooperation is not evolutionarily beneficial but parasitic. Which is why our instincts and cognitive biases are so exaggerated in such cases.

    Liberty cannot exist without government – only morality can – unless you are redefining liberty as morality. Which I suggest that he is doing as a word game to avoid addressing that morality and property evolved prior to the state, and as such prior to liberty.

    Liberty is a state in which we experience the the absence of immoral action by state actors, just as a condition of morality is the a state in which we experience the absence of immoral action by non-state actors. Immorality and morality are instinctual biases that evolved along with cooperation. Immorality and Morality can and must refer to in-group actors violating the necessary terms of cooperation: the prohibition on parasitism (imposed costs, free-riding, involuntary transfer).

    In order to state a cost is something to bear, we must state what it is bears the cost. We cannot bear a cost unless we possess property. We may, prior to the state, define property normatively rather than legally, and we may not even produce a name for it (although all languages I know of contain the idea of possession) but legal definitions again exist post-government and post-state, but property exists prior to state, or cooperation is not possible – and it clearly has been.

    I am fairly sure this set of assertions is irrefutable. Which is why I assume that I do not understand Lester’s argument. Otherwise I would outright criticizing him for empty verbalism – word games, if not simply conflation and confusion.

    It is unscientific of me to assume I am correct, and that he errs, rather than to assume I fail to understand. However, logic and evidence are what they are: unless he can answer this objection he is using rationalism for precisely the reasons I am trying to reform the use of rationalism in politics and ethics: because it is too easy to employ rationalism as a means of obscurantist justification of presumed conclusions. Actions (operations) are the only means of avoiding word games. It is still surprising to me that a theory of human action should be expressed in rationalism, the purpose of which, as far as I know, is, and always has been, justification.

    His argument, at least in my current state of ignorance, appears to be a series of errors of verbalism, and my criticism remains: that there is nothing to be had here other than that he has correctly identified morality and is merely confusing morality with liberty, where morality must, as property must, be antecedent to any concept of liberty. I mean must, as in it is impossible otherwise.

    The question is not liberty but morality. How do we get state actors to act morally?Otherwise the properties of individual moral action and the properties of state action are not identical. Since the state consists of individuals this seems illogical, and therefore a mere verbalism.

    Maybe I don’t understand. Maybe there is something I don’t see. I just think it is unlikely. I am pretty sure my arguments are bulletproof (as usual lol).

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 09:57:00 UTC

  • ON SILICON VALLEY BUST —“Right now you’ve got private companies raising $200,

    http://online.wsj.com/articles/venture-capitalist-sounds-alarm-on-silicon-valley-risk-1410740054GURLEY ON SILICON VALLEY BUST

    —“Right now you’ve got private companies raising $200, $400, $500 million. If you’re in a competitive ecosystem and you raise that amount of money, the only way you use it—because these companies are all human-based, (they’re not, like, building stores)—is to take your burn up. … And I guarantee you two things: One, the average burn rate at the average venture-backed company in Silicon Valley is at an all-time high since ’99 and maybe in many industries higher than in ’99. And two, more humans in Silicon Valley are working for money-losing companies than have been in 15 years, and that’s a form of discounted risk. … In ’01 or ’09, you just wouldn’t go take a job at a company that’s burning $4 million a month. Today everyone does it without thinking.”—

    Well, I have been through the 69, 73, 81, 91, 01, and 07 cycles as a youth through my business-owning parents, a young entrepreneur, and a mature entrepreneur. I have ‘muscle memory’ – I have not forgotten these experiences. And I am highly sensitive to the effect on businesses (my own included) of overheated markets, which, as Gurley states, drive up costs (rents in San Francisco), as well as the impact on myths (“Startups do this so we should too”).

    Although as an Austrian (Hayekian, not Misesian), I also understand that some of these misallocations of capital distort the labor market in positive ways such as encouraging the education of and attracting engineers, while in other cases they are negative, such as attracting men to home construction (which is enjoyable but unskilled labor) instead of skilled labor which may be less enjoyable but is both independently sustainable, and internationally competitive. Once a man loses the opportunity to enter a field at a young age he can never recover it.

    I am hoping to do a capital rase in 2015, and this overheated market is making me very nervous about selling into a cold investment cycle. On the other hand, I built a business wherein all I will ask of investors is to fund going to market, not research and development. And I have intentionally engineered the organization to operate on eastern european costs, rather than San Francisco costs. As such it will be impossible for us to burn money at San Francisco rates (the $4m a month number Gurley refers to). Human capital and physical plant costs are just not the same here, and the distribution of our product (as Atlassian has demonstrated) is not one that requires a large sales force. Yes, Oversing, for any large organization, may require some consultation, consisting mostly of configuration and training, but that is also a benefit, because services in the ERP space are highly profitable. It is hard to invest in service organizations but very easy to invest in combined product and service organizations. So hopefully, even if I have played the cycle poorly by expecting to be done with version one earlier than I thought, I think we should be fine. I mean, at the top end, we will burn in a year what a lot of startups are burning in a month, and our potential for success is reasonably ascertainable, and the exit strategy is obvious and controllable.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 09:29:00 UTC

  • American in-group dating bias is up about 25% or more this year, (or conversely,

    American in-group dating bias is up about 25% or more this year, (or conversely, out-group dating is down) and the spread continues to expand. The exception being Asian women for both white and asian men, and white men in general. The numbers are distorted believe it or not by lower dislike of blacks by whites than dislike of blacks by asians and latinos. I’m getting most of this second and so I haven’t seen the data. And what I suspect, is that the numbers are being driven largely by increases in Latino and Asian populations on the west coast, both of which demonstrate more stratification in mating preferences than whites. But net of the data trend is that we overwhelmingly mate in-group.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-15 07:34:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/books/review/francis-fukuyamas-political-order-and-political-decay.html?_r=0

    Source date (UTC): 2014-09-14 17:03:00 UTC