Curt Doolittle

Source: Original Site Post

  • How Do Keynesians View Austrian Economics?

    GREAT QUESTION. I WILL TRY TO DO IT JUSTICE. BUT I HAVE TO GO BEYOND THE SCOPE OF YOUR QUESTION TO DO THAT.

    For you to consider yourself an Austrian in ECONOMIC theory, the minimum requirement is to subscribe to 1) the subjective theory of value, 2) the austrian theory of the business cycle and possibly 3) that money is non-neutral. That is all that would differentiate you from a mainstream economist.

    Mainstream economists TEND to argue that macro monetary policy is ‘above’ all of that:

    i) that the business cycle MAY be affected by the government, but that the net result is actually still better than it would be if we constrained the government.

    ii) The idea that we push problems down the road is fine, because in the progressive view, technology will save us in the future. (Really.)  

    iii) that individual benefits are distributed by complex means, so that in the end, it all works our if they take your property and give it to someone else, and increase risk and government debt.

    iiii) Austrian economics is logical, but does not place an emphasis on the empirical, or at least, casts doubt on the empirical statements mainstream economists make. And since economics as a discipline is actually econometrics then this means you have no place in economics departments.

    You would CHOOSE to study Austrian economics only if you either have a) a moral objection to Keynesianism, or b) it violates your observation about human nature, or c) the externalities it will produce accumulate into even more serious problems than the business cycle. (That’s what libertarians argue.)

    The reason some of us tend to choose Austrian economics is because we have a political interest in the long term effects of policy on society. And because we think norms and institutions are not arbitrary.  This category of questions is in the domain of POLITICAL ECONOMY, not really that of monetary economics.  And as such, most of us would recommend that you study Austrian economics in the context of political science, or ethical philosophy, rather than monetary economics, and do so in support of a political science degree where first year macro and micro economics really are sufficient.

    GMU does teach Austrianism and their program is competitive, and their students are sought out precisely for that reason. The developing world, where corruption is a serious problem, also tends to have austrian influence, because it explains at least in part, why these countries remain poor: they don’t have property rights.

    The truth is that in our advanced countries, where we do have at least marginal property rights and limited corruption, Austrian principles are not as important as macro principles.  So I think it is more that Austrianism is an early stage way of looking at the world, and once you’ve succeeded with institutions at the austrian level you can more easily make use of macro institutions without such substantially negative externalities. Although most dedicated austrians (the ideological kind) might disagree with me, I kind of doubt that I’d lose the argument.)  🙂 

    Curt Doolittle
    The Propertarian Institute

    https://www.quora.com/How-do-Keynesians-view-Austrian-economics

  • Why Is Communism Considered Evil By Some People?

    GREAT QUESTION. ILL TRY TO DO IT JUSTICE

    Because Karl Marx made a catastrophic error in basing his system of thought on the Labor Theory of Value, and amplified that with a complete failure to understand the necessity of prices and incentives as information systems – a combination that invalidated everything else he concluded from that point onward.

    This catastrophe would not have mattered, and would have made him little more than the subject of economic ridicule that he is today, except that he wrote ideological works including the Communist Manifesto, that were prescriptions for rebellion, and that formed both the basis of a new pseudo-religion masquerading as a political system. Second this pseudo-religion formed the a model with which the east could react to, and compete with, the disruptive social and political effects of anglo consumer Capitalism under Democracy.

    The east needed an ideological alternative to ‘jump ahead’ of the west. In their societies, democracy could not function because it requires that familial trust and freedom from coercion be extended to all members of society, which was impossible due to eastern cultural retention of family and tribal priorities where trust and freedom from coercion is extended only to family and tribe – and coercion and corruption were pervasive elsewhere.

    While Marx is sometimes given a pass, because his ideas were abused by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong (毛泽东), and the Khmer Rouge, which resulted in the murder 100M people, the fact remains that Communism isn’t possible because human cooperation is impossible in a division of knowledge and labor without the combination of money, prices, accounting, contracts, and the constant desire of people to identify new opportunities and niches to fill in response to changing demand and shocks.

    The reason that the west demonized Marxism was because it was a threat to consumer capitalist society: it was used to militarize countries, it was used as an ideological tool to foment rebellion around the world, and it resulted in more deaths than anything in Human History other than perhaps even the Black Death. So realistically, it deserves to be demonized.


    WHAT WORKS IF MARX DOESN’T?

    Social democracy, which is ordinary english classical liberalism with the addition of Keynesian Economic policy, does not include the abolishment of private property, prices, and incentives, instead keeps all of those institutions, while ‘siphoning off as much profit from individuals as it can without killing the cow that feeds it.’

    This seems to be working quite well, except that people do not work hard or long enough, and have now spent both the money that they would have saved during their lifetimes, and the money that the future generations would have consumed. This is a problem of building a Ponzi Scheme dependent on the same perpetual Economic Growth that we saw during Industrialization, but it is not one of the impossibility that Marx fantasized about.

    WHY IS CONSUMER CAPITALISM NECESSARY?

    It is very easy to be China or India and import existing western technology. But when easy opportunities (as we see is happening in China) are fully exploited, the country must turn to domestic consumption, and to domestic innovation. So Totalitarianism is effective in China at creating literacy, and effective in ‘investment’ in infrastructure. The question remains how effective or burdensome that bureaucracy will be when the limits of totalitarian direction are reached, and the society must run entirely on domestic consumption.

    THE VALUE OF TOTALITARIANISM AT EARLY STAGES

    Chinese totalitarianism is useful at this stage because the army can be counted on to enforce policy if the people rebel, but India can’t do the same. While both China and India are empires, India has more systematic corruption and insufficient centralization of power to forcibly implement policy as does China.

    It is possible that China can convert to an innovation country at some point. But it remains a desperately poor country. But the entire issue is that innovation and constant adaptation become the source of prosperity once easily obtained opportunities have been fully exploited.

    CHINA IS A CORPORATIST NOT A COMMUNIST STATE

    (Which would be painfully ironic if not for 100M dead people.)

    There is nothing communist about China at all. China is operated by Confucian rules: as a large, extended-family corporation. And the modern communist party is not communist, or a party, it is a corporation and runs china as a corporation. It satisfies consumers, and it must satisfy consumers because internal frictions would disrupt it if it didn’t.

    In this sense, there is nothing communist about china any longer other than the symbolism, and the disproportionate power of the People’s Liberation Army that still lives by doctrine.

    China is an example of Corporatism. Corporatism works. Because it’s meritocratic.

    Russia is trying to move to corporatism, but culturally is too much of a bridge civilization between east and west, and will have to retain some semblance of democratic rule even if the bureaucracy will remain corporatist.

    The west is having problems with its fantasy of universalism, and social democracy which were invented in a period of temporary economic superiority that no longer exists in a globalized labor force. It is not any more sustainable than is the US military control of trade and petrodollars.

    But that’s a different topic for another time.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-is-communism-considered-evil-by-some-people

  • What Is The Definition Of Religion?

    Starting with the minimal to the maximal:
    Level 1) Myth and Ritual
    Level 2) Myth, Ritual, and Promise
    Level 3) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood
    Level 4) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma
    Level 5) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma, Formal Institution
    Level 6) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma, Formal Institution, Political Influence
    Level 7) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma, Formal Institution, Political Influence, Military Projection of Influence – conquest.

    POSTMODERN DEMOCRATIC SECULARISM IS IN FACT, A RELIGION.
    The fact that we WANT equality to be true, and diversity to be a good, and equality of outcome, is very different from whether it’s possible. Postmodernism has replaced the promise of eternal life with the promise of equality. Neither of which are any more possible than the other.

    We can also argue that scientism is a religion, but that’s too much for this forum. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-definition-of-religion

  • What Is The Definition Of Religion?

    Starting with the minimal to the maximal:
    Level 1) Myth and Ritual
    Level 2) Myth, Ritual, and Promise
    Level 3) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood
    Level 4) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma
    Level 5) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma, Formal Institution
    Level 6) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma, Formal Institution, Political Influence
    Level 7) Myth, Ritual, Promise, Falsehood, Dogma, Formal Institution, Political Influence, Military Projection of Influence – conquest.

    POSTMODERN DEMOCRATIC SECULARISM IS IN FACT, A RELIGION.
    The fact that we WANT equality to be true, and diversity to be a good, and equality of outcome, is very different from whether it’s possible. Postmodernism has replaced the promise of eternal life with the promise of equality. Neither of which are any more possible than the other.

    We can also argue that scientism is a religion, but that’s too much for this forum. 🙂

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-definition-of-religion

  • Propertarian Analysis Is The Analysis Of Spectra, Not Of Nouns – We Did Learn Something From Supply vs Demand Curves. 🙂

    (From FB)

    Curt, what is your opinion about the relation between knowledge and information?

    Francesco, I am very skeptical of these definitions. For example, 1) Deduction, Induction and Abduction all describe the process of deduction but with decreasingly available information. 2) Knowledge, Information, Data, and Phenomena, likewise describe only our decreasing confidence in any theory’s or set of theories’ correspondence with the tools of observation available to us. The 3) correspondence between theory and Information that is necessary for personal action, that which is necessary for political action (coercion), and that which meets the standard of logical truth, is likewise a spectrum. And I see any point on those spectra as semi arbitrary unless applicable to a given question. And I see arguments to ‘truth’ often illogical in application for this reason, due to the methodological vanity of the speaker. But I am working hard right now to solve this problem, so that I can pull libertarian theory out of the french rationalism that Rothbard buried it in, into the anglo empirical from whence it came.

  • Propertarian Analysis Is The Analysis Of Spectra, Not Of Nouns – We Did Learn Something From Supply vs Demand Curves. 🙂

    (From FB)

    Curt, what is your opinion about the relation between knowledge and information?

    Francesco, I am very skeptical of these definitions. For example, 1) Deduction, Induction and Abduction all describe the process of deduction but with decreasingly available information. 2) Knowledge, Information, Data, and Phenomena, likewise describe only our decreasing confidence in any theory’s or set of theories’ correspondence with the tools of observation available to us. The 3) correspondence between theory and Information that is necessary for personal action, that which is necessary for political action (coercion), and that which meets the standard of logical truth, is likewise a spectrum. And I see any point on those spectra as semi arbitrary unless applicable to a given question. And I see arguments to ‘truth’ often illogical in application for this reason, due to the methodological vanity of the speaker. But I am working hard right now to solve this problem, so that I can pull libertarian theory out of the french rationalism that Rothbard buried it in, into the anglo empirical from whence it came.

  • The Problem Of Competence – The Value Of Critical Rationalism : Skeptical Empiricism, Or What We Call ‘Science’.

    [T]hose who try to master fields usually end up with the Socratic opinion that ‘I don’t know anything (for certain)’. We have simply collected large sets of examples that we know do not work. But this knowledge informs us. If we cannot know much of anything, then why would we create a political system that depends upon our presumption of knowledge? I’m trying to create a political model that facilitates the presumption that we know nothing, and that people will remain desperately imperfect with fragile virtues, rather than assumes that we know anything at all, and can create a system, or people who are indeed virtuous. The scientific method, under critical rationalism bothers me a bit, and I’d like to be sure that Skeptical Empiricism isn’t an improvement on it. But in the balance between science and reason, science appears to win hands down. In the battle between critical rationalism and positivism, critical rationalism wins hands down. Despite the Krugman-DeLong Liberal fantasy that the quantitative measures are in deed measures of what they assume, rather than the noise created as England and America have violently imposed anglo universalism under ‘free trade’ around the world. This is particularly troubling because free trade benefits the most advanced technologist. It is not ‘fair’, it simply produces a virtuous cycle. But it is not a natural cycle, and it’s only possible to enforce as long as anglo culture and institutions are supported by anglo-american (cum Roman) military power. This cannot be sustainable – on purely demographic grounds. [S]o Keynesian noise is not signal. It is just a selection bias that favors Leftist Dunning Kruegerists like Krugman, DeLong, Stiglitz and Thoma. At least, that’s my working hypothesis.

  • The Rate Of Technological Change Determines The Value Of Different Models Of The State

    [T]he totalitarian system, whether it’s the military or the communist system, is very useful for doing very simple things: fighting wars, imposing education, imposing some system of property rights, and building infrastructure. These are processes of execution, not of invention, research and development in consumer goods. But the totalitarian system cannot improve affairs when there is no understanding of what it must to to approve affairs. The totalitarian system cannot administrate what it does not understand, and it can only understand what is simple and preexisting. The individualist system is superior for invention. It improves affairs. It is scientific not ideological, because science is simply trial and error. For this reason the individualist model is superior when you do not know what to do, because the resource which we call technological knowledge, has been exploited into applications that are beyond the grasp of any group of individuals. If your civilization ‘falls behind’ or becomes ‘calcified by bureaucracy’ then totalitarianism (or revolution) are useful tools for fixing it. But individualism will always out-innovate totalitarianism because it places no prior (input based) constraint on the individual actors in the population. We tend to think in terms of a mixed economy in which the state should focus on execution while the private sector focuses on invention. But our government is not constructed to facilitate this behavior. Its incentives are as Hoppe has shown, to consume cultural, civic, and resource capital as fast as possible in order to maintain power. This doesn’t mean it’s not POSSIBLE to create a mixed government. It’s just not possible to do so under representative democratic republicanism in a heterogeneous polity where each generation possesses the illusion of their own genius, instead of possessing the wisdom that they are members of a cycle reacting to a chain of prior cycles, and that their preferences, beliefs and attitudes, are predictable. It’s the technology that isn’t predictable.

  • The Rate Of Technological Change Determines The Value Of Different Models Of The State

    [T]he totalitarian system, whether it’s the military or the communist system, is very useful for doing very simple things: fighting wars, imposing education, imposing some system of property rights, and building infrastructure. These are processes of execution, not of invention, research and development in consumer goods. But the totalitarian system cannot improve affairs when there is no understanding of what it must to to approve affairs. The totalitarian system cannot administrate what it does not understand, and it can only understand what is simple and preexisting. The individualist system is superior for invention. It improves affairs. It is scientific not ideological, because science is simply trial and error. For this reason the individualist model is superior when you do not know what to do, because the resource which we call technological knowledge, has been exploited into applications that are beyond the grasp of any group of individuals. If your civilization ‘falls behind’ or becomes ‘calcified by bureaucracy’ then totalitarianism (or revolution) are useful tools for fixing it. But individualism will always out-innovate totalitarianism because it places no prior (input based) constraint on the individual actors in the population. We tend to think in terms of a mixed economy in which the state should focus on execution while the private sector focuses on invention. But our government is not constructed to facilitate this behavior. Its incentives are as Hoppe has shown, to consume cultural, civic, and resource capital as fast as possible in order to maintain power. This doesn’t mean it’s not POSSIBLE to create a mixed government. It’s just not possible to do so under representative democratic republicanism in a heterogeneous polity where each generation possesses the illusion of their own genius, instead of possessing the wisdom that they are members of a cycle reacting to a chain of prior cycles, and that their preferences, beliefs and attitudes, are predictable. It’s the technology that isn’t predictable.

  • What Is Post-modernism?

    POSTMODERNISM IS AN ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT TOTALITARIANISM DESPITE THE FAILURE OF SOCIALISM IN THEORY AND PRACTICE BY PROMOTING A NEW SECULAR RELIGION THROUGH REPETITION OF DESIRABLE BUT FALSE AND IRRATIONAL STATEMENTS AND REJECTING REALISM, SCIENCE AND HISTORY – THE PROMISE OF EQUALITY AS THE EQUIVALENT TO THE PROMISE OF LIFE AFTER DEATH.

    Postmodernism is a sophisticated set of ideas constructed to account for the failure of Socialism, both ideological and ‘scientific’ in theory and in practice, by changing the  values associated with the language and symbolism of realism (truth is objectively knowable by scientific means) and the nature of man (equality, diversity), and morality ( moral relativism).

    The same Left that traditionally promoted reason, science, optimism and equality for all – has now switched to themes of anti-reason, anti-science, double standards, and cynicism  But why? Because with the failure of socialism it has adopted the strategy of abrahamic and zoroastrian religions which involves reciting blatant falsehoods in by repetition, peer pressure and indoctrination: that multiculturalism and diversity are ‘good’, and that equality of outcome rather than opportunity is desirable and possible, despite the contrary theory and evidence. That norms – morals, ethics, and manners – have no meaning or value. That all cultures are relative except european, which is bad.  That men and women are equal, but men are bad.

    This ideology, like Marxism, is present largely in liberal arts departments, despite being rejected by STEM and Economics departments where science retains it’s superiority over anti-realism (and where IQ’s are significantly higher.)

    Thorough attempts have been made by Heidegger and Rorty in particular, to attempt to create a non-rational language for discussing experience in subjective terms, rather than objective.

    However, despite the failure of these intellectual endeavors, ideological Postmodernism has in fact been adopted as the religion of the state, left intellectuals, and liberal arts graduates at all levels.

    However, genetic science, neurobiology, anthropology, and economics continue to counter ideological postmodernism with scientific realism with scholars in each field continuing to undermine these attempts to construct a secular religion of anti-scientific irrationality without the burden of mysticism.

    The best way to explain postmodernism today, is the philosophical equivalent of christianity as was used against Roman pragmatism: the promise of magic to motivate the masses.




    From Stephen Hicks – Explaining Postmodernism.
    Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition): Stephen R. C. Hicks: 9780983258407: Amazon.com: Books

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-post-modernism