Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • ECONOMISTS IN CHINA –“For most academics not in China, it is difficult for them

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/02/the-life-of-a-western-economist-in-china.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29#sthash.BTYhY3GZ.dpufWESTERN ECONOMISTS IN CHINA

    –“For most academics not in China, it is difficult for them to understand the level of scrutiny and monitoring we face on regular basis. Most professors have students assigned to monitor them and security officials approaching many people to report on our behavior. Our email is widely acknowledged, even by students, as being read. While there are some overt obvious forms of intimidation as I have detailed, much of it is also the “deal you can’t refuse” variety. There are no overt threats but the message is clear.”–

    See more at:

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 09:18:00 UTC

  • UKRAINE UPDATE : A LOT GOING ON TODAY. In theory there is a deal. 1) The 2004 co

    UKRAINE UPDATE : A LOT GOING ON TODAY.

    In theory there is a deal.

    1) The 2004 constitution will be restored within 48 hours, and a national unity government will be formed within 10 days.

    2) Constitutional reform balancing the powers of president, government and parliament will be started immediately and completed by December.

    3) A presidential election will be held after the new constitution is adopted but no later than December 2014

    I don’t buy that they will leave Maydan until the president is gone. But if they restore the 2004 constitution. I think he has to resign. As I understand it, they can fire him right away if so. But that doesn’t mean much here, because the locals have even less respect for rule of law than Obama does. “Lie and make it up later” has become as American as it is Post-Soviet.

    The reason being (you have to remember this is the east) that you can’t trust anyone here to hold to an agreement, so the ‘opposition’ will just assume that the president is buying time. Personally I’d raise the stakes. Call the europeans and have them freeze the assets of the Oligarchs. The guy is on the ropes here.

    One of the districts outlawed the President’s Political party today. I expect that will continue.

    EARLY RECONCILIATION IS FAILURE AS I SEE IT

    – Focus on Corruption, not people and power.

    – Replace the presidency with a prime minister.

    – Get reform of the judiciary and police included in the package. (remove current judicial independence which in this country is a bad thing)

    – Create a senate for the formal federation of the regions.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 09:11:00 UTC

  • (Sick as a dog.) Ack. miserable today. no deep thinking possible. just floating

    (Sick as a dog.)

    Ack. miserable today. no deep thinking possible. just floating on the waves of rumor, propaganda, news, academic blogging pretense, and random pseudo intellectual publications. sigh…

    It’s warm outside. LOTS of people in Maydan today. I saw women walking in skirts with bare legs – they are proud and brave. 🙂 Streets are normal but calm – like a holiday. Traffic is muted. Voices are calm. Yesterday was ‘enough’.

    I love these people.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:46:00 UTC

  • I THOUGHT THIS WOULD HAPPEN FOUR YEARS AGO Just ruminating. Turning bearish on c

    http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/02/21/even-chinas-economists-are-singing-the-blues/?mod=WSJBlogCHINA – I THOUGHT THIS WOULD HAPPEN FOUR YEARS AGO

    Just ruminating.

    Turning bearish on china is all well and good. But you know, I can’t make heads or tales out of what’s coming out of that country. Not sure how anyone else does. I’m not as good at the data as I am the interpretation of the logic of those that are.

    I can tell you other than the vague feeling that ‘something isn’t looking good here’ no one is very sure what’s going on.

    So, I still don’t feel confident one way or the other. I mean, China is an example of Keynes’ suggestion that we just dig holes and bury money in it. Except they make cities instead of holes. I mean, the really bad part about overbuilding is that infrastructure like that is more expensive to maintain than it is to build, and if it’s built at the same time (American roads) it fails at the same time (like light bulbs).

    So at this point, I’m just confused. The one figure that bothers me most is actually the degree to which China’s economy is managed by foreign entities (70-80%). That means that they aren’t actually adapting at all. And I don’t understand the economy well enough to judge what kind of distortions are in place. I think, from what I see, they are buying density (transition from farming) in exchange for distortion. This actually makes sense believe it or not. And that’s a pretty good use of a command economy. I guess that if they get far enough with the population shift to cities, then they can use consumer credit after that – but only if enough people and institutions develop the skills for trustworthy transactions. And I just don’t see evidence of that yet.

    I don’t underestimate the intelligence of the political class over there.

    So they might be fine with it. But I don’t see how that internal ‘bad’ command-economy run by the state, translates into converting the ‘good’ economy run by foreigners. I just don’t see that. If they go long enough then the natural evolution of people in the cities might take care of it. I suppose that makes some sense. But the rapid personal wealth increases just won’t be there.

    WE ALL CANNOT BE MIDDLE CLASS because not enough of us are productive enough to reach it. We can generate false middle classes for periods (British colonialism, american expansion, postwar america, petro-dollar america, post-communist-credit china). But you can’t ‘fake it’ forever. (No matter what Krugmans of the world like to pretend.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:41:00 UTC

  • (personal) (appreciation) Thank you Kirill Latish for meeting with me this morni

    (personal) (appreciation)

    Thank you Kirill Latish for meeting with me this morning, despite the chaos here in Kiev. Despite my possibly contagious state. Despite the difficulty you must have had in getting to our office. I was overwhelmed by the number of technical problems you solved. I was further overwhelmed by your management of the work load. Awed by your selection of priorities and mastery of the material. As always, your intelligence is only matched by your character. And I am lucky to have met you in this life, and luckier still to work with you as a partner in our crazy business adventure. And privileged to have you as a friend. Thank you so much for letting me ‘have the rest of the day off sick’. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:27:00 UTC

  • “Russia is a state seeking legitimacy by establishing a culture. Ukraine is a cu

    –“Russia is a state seeking legitimacy by establishing a culture. Ukraine is a culture seeking legitimacy through statehood.”–Roman Skaskiw

    Genius. Quotable.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:19:00 UTC

  • MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME (response to ‘economist’s view

    http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/02/forget-the-minimum-wage-job-losses-its-government-cuts-thatll-getyou-mad.htmlADDING MORALITY BACK INTO ECONOMICS – ONE POST AT A TIME

    (response to ‘economist’s view’)

    NOTE: current macro economic models assumes either (a) a nation state or (b) universalism. But it does not account for moral differences in a heterogeneous polity. My argument is that these models are increasingly predictive under artificially heated economies, and increasingly NON-PREDICTIVE under increasingly normal economies. The rate of change in wealth determines our tolerance for ‘immoral’ behavior. The lower the rate of change, the less tolerance, and the rate of contraction determines the level of intolerance.

    I believe that this is one of the missing ‘laws’ of macro economic analysis.

    Moral heterogeneity is a bad thing. It’s not a matter of race. it’s a matter of morality and identity. Race just happens to influence identity and morality a lot. Less so in the UK than the States for example. Less so in Canada than the UK. For obvious reasons: density and rates of change.

    — POST FOLLOWS—

    –“I love the clarity and consistency of the posts on this blog. But Cosmopolitan morality is not universal. It has a specific ideological origin. And it’s both a luxury good, and a status symbol, and symbol of conspicuous consumption.

    I’ve been arguing since ’06 I think, that people DEMONSTRATE by their actions that they will absorb significant personal harm, in order to ‘punish’ cheaters and free riders.

    At present, the financial community is an ally against the state. And the state has very, very bad polling numbers. Trust (polling number on our civil interactions) has declined rapidly since the 60’s along with the increase in our homogeneity of interest.

    So the people in both the USA and in Europe, are rebelling against what they see as ‘immoral’ behavior both by the state, and in the case of Europe, the low trust high corruption southern europeans. And in America, the high trust protestants against the low trust everyone-else.

    ‘We’ are not a family. There is no Cosmopolitan ‘we’. We are an empire.

    Cooperation is very different from redistribution. And redistribution is only tolerable if it does not produce immoral consequences. We can agree to cooperate if we have different objectives. But we cannot sacrifice across trust, family, race and cultural boundaries.

    We can all agree that the means of redistributing money via the financial system instead of directly to consumers is simply an artifact of previous technical limitations – limitations that we no longer have. MMT looks like a partial answer to the problem since we can issue debit cards and accounts to individuals at near zero cost. And we could even eliminate the financial system as a distribution network.

    This has the benefit of making work a means of obtaining luxuries, rather than absolute necessities. And it removes employment from consideration in policy, and instead refocuses us on productivity.

    The problem is, that the only way that will be enacted over moral objection, and over economic constraints, is to eliminate all entitlement programs, and all social service programs, and roll them into the new model.

    The conservatives will go for this solution if it means disbanding interference – including in the labor and social market, by the state.

    The truth test then, is whether people on the left are actually interested in such conversion of the economy and polity, or whether it’s just political power over the productive class. “–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 08:17:00 UTC

  • BOILING THE HUMAN IN TAX –“VAT is an excellent tax. I can imagine that the [sal

    BOILING THE HUMAN IN TAX

    –“VAT is an excellent tax. I can imagine that the [sales pitch] to business went something like this: don’t worry, we are not taxing you just the consumer. The reality is that claiming even a penny back from Her Majesty is the most tedious, time destroying, unproductive waste of time. Managing all of these receipts is insulting, but I will get every penny back that my accountant allows. Her Majesty is a royal pain in the ass.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 07:27:00 UTC

  • “Socialism aims for poverty, misery and despair. And they achieve it every time.

    –“Socialism aims for poverty, misery and despair. And they achieve it every time.”–

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 07:08:00 UTC

  • is why ordinary people with video cameras make a difference. It is one thing to

    http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/844777/This is why ordinary people with video cameras make a difference. It is one thing to hear numbers. It is another to see people slaughtered from a distance.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-02-21 07:05:00 UTC