Curt Doolittle

Theme: Class

  • WATCH: RESISTANCE TO SPENDING FROM 2010 People do not want to invest in infrastr

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/build-we-wont/KRUGMAN WATCH: RESISTANCE TO SPENDING FROM 2010

    People do not want to invest in infrastructure in the midst of a class war, even if it’s battles are conducted by policy rather than by violence. People do not have faith in the government. They cannot have faith in the government, because we have too disparate a set of interests.

    You’re approaching the problem from the wrong direction. There is no ‘We” any longer. The use of factions and class warfare to undermine the old class, race and cultural power base was successful.

    If people do not own their government, or feel that it represents them, then it is an external entity. They’re acting as if it is.

    There is no “We”.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:52:00 UTC

  • WATCH – FROM 2010 Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That consti

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/lacking-all-conviction/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

    Every politician in Washington has a constituency. That constituency is profoundly either conservative and/or moderate. Liberals are, and likely always will be, a small minority of the population.

    As a politician in a Democracy, when your constituents of all flavors start calling, contributing to others coffers, and reducing contribution to yours. When key contributors call with displeasure. When mail full of fury piles on your desk. When lobbyists start spending time with the opposing party. When the friends and allies you need to gain political support at home start abandoning you, then you have a certain perception of reality.

    Democracy is not getting what you want. It’s getting what the majority of people want. Not even what the party in control wants. But what the majority of people want.

    The political information system is not ideologically based except in the popular press. It is extraordinarily functional in practice – the construct of alliances of people of different desires and ideals. The political economy is run by donations and relationships. These people know what’s said in the popular press. But they live in the political economy of relationships and donations. That’s their ‘reality’. That is their ‘pricing system’: the information system that they rely upon.

    They are not stupid. They are not cowards. They are pragmatic. And the voters are telling them what they think: that the country is center right. And voting against the previous administration was not voting for this one. And this administration did something few have done, and none should do: pass ideological legislation over the objection of the majority.

    THis congress will fall. And the president will either move toward the center. Or he will be out in two years. And while he is a weak character, he is probably not stupid enough to stay so far left. And he has lost his legitimacy with the populace and as such, oratorical appeals to left agendas will only serve to undermine his power further.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:45:00 UTC

  • WATCH – FROM 2010 (Posted for archival purposes) Small business people? Hardly.

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/soros-obama-and-me/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

    (Posted for archival purposes)

    Small business people? Hardly. That writing provides a limited return is not a measure of its level of consumption by a large number of customers, but a measure of how little people are willing to pay for it.

    The term Mitch is looking for is not “entrepreneur” it is “Schumpeterian Intellectuals”: people who bring about the destruction of capitalism, the market and the prosperity of national competitiveness by undermining both the sentiment of, and capital structure of entrepreneurship.

    Unfortunately, we don’t have special taxes for Shumpeterian market destroyers like we have special taxes on entrepreneurial market creators. But we can fix that. Perhaps we should level the playing field by heavily taxing political, extra-market goods and services, and lowering taxes on apolitical intra-market goods and services?

    Wouldn’t that be a switch? I mean, why should the amount of income be the axis of measurement, rather than the service provided to the market? Under that measure we could confiscate all of Soros’ money, recover our losses from the bloated financial sector, and reduce the media to non-profit status, and make political writing an unprofitable exercise.

    As for putting capital to a better purpose, that’s not yet proven. Soros was not participating in the market for goods and services by creating unemployment and reorganizing that capital. He’s just using remunerative coercion under state protections. And extra-market remunerative coercion at that. A form of coercion made possible only by the restraint of violence by others in order to create the somewhat free market – a restraint he does not himself employ. And while that asymmetry of restraint may not be apparent to your cult of those who are incapable of holding territory and trade routes, or building an durable government, or durable institutions of calculation and cooperation, it is not lost on those of us whose ancestors have done so for a millennia or more.

    It seems odd to me that so many people fail to grasp just how entertaining and enjoyable civil war is for those people who practice militial restraint – often at high personal cost of forgone opportunity. Modern war is a ‘hell’ only for people who fight in the western model. It’s not for warriors, terrorists and raiders. We forget that the reason we cannot conquer the Afghans is in no small part because raiding and killing are actually enjoyable, entertaining, status-enhancing pass times among practitioners. And creating markets and property rights, and philosophy and econometrics, is a poor substitute.

    Then, perhaps some of us should put our capital stock of violence to better use, if in our restraint, we are disabused by men who simply take advantage of our creation – the market. It would be the optimum use of our asset.

    Or those who put their financial capital stock, or political capital stock to such uses, could pay the opportunity cost of restraint, so that we do not have to. And can continue to devote our energies to the proxy of entrepreneurship and company building instead of the more enjoyable and rewarding use of our capital stock of violence.

    🙂

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:42:00 UTC

  • Why on earth would one think that we could create an aristocratic society where

    Why on earth would one think that we could create an aristocratic society where everyone is an aristocrat? It’s a contradiction in terms.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 14:13:00 UTC

  • THERE IS NO ANTI WAR LEFT Yet another in the long list self congratulatory nonse

    THERE IS NO ANTI WAR LEFT

    Yet another in the long list self congratulatory nonsense.

    The left is a kleptocracy. Organized theft.

    It has no principles except theft.

    Wherever and whenever possible.

    At least this amateur has advisors that have explained what will happen to americans if Iran succeeds in establishing itself as the core state of islam.

    So now the simpleton who like all left ideologues, is forced to confront the reality that conservatives are just boring pragmatists.

    By becoming a pragmatist himself.

    I hate this drivel.

    Let iran rise and america decline. If youre stupid enough to follow the left then you deserve to descend. Ti have our middle class evaporate, then our upper class follow.

    The only equality is poverty.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-08 12:06:00 UTC

  • (COMMENT) CLASS IN POSTMODERNISM (LITERATURE) You know, I don’t read ‘literature

    (COMMENT) CLASS IN POSTMODERNISM (LITERATURE)

    You know, I don’t read ‘literature’ any longer. I lost it. It’s all nonsense now. I just see structure, intent, character. It all feels tedious and mechanical. Like a lot of work for little reward. When, I can skim five papers on some subject and maybe get a gem out of one of them.

    And I’m taking this lovely little class in Postmodernism. Why? Because, honestly, I ‘get it’ in the sense that I understand it’s methods, processes, arguments and consequences.

    But I actually don’t ’empathize’ with it. I can’t even begin to have any emotional attachment to it whatsoever. It’s just IMPOSSIBLE to suspend disbelief. It’s worse that reading a trashy horror novel that’s predictable.

    It’s like a play written by a narcissist about a tragedy of his own creation.

    Experiences aren’t rare or unique except to the solipsist, to whom each of his own experiences is dramatically novel, and needing of expurgation.

    Marx does’t tell us anything other than capitalism is so productive that we are each of us almost irrelevant to each other as economic entities. He doesn’t say that this is good, because we get everything so cheaply that the poorest of us lives better than kings of old.

    If you want to fix alienation, then just ask, what you do with the time you used to use working and struggling? We freed women from household labor. Wasn’t that enough? Men from physical drudgery. WTF.

    SO YOU”RE BORED? SO YOU”RE POOR?

    Ok. Well lets fix the fact that you’re bored and poor.

    But you have the choice to be bored and poor and fat and comfy and unfulfilled because of capitalism.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-31 12:31:00 UTC

  • HEILBRONER You know, I read ‘The Worldly Philosophers’ many years ago. And I tho

    HEILBRONER

    You know, I read ‘The Worldly Philosophers’ many years ago. And I thought that given his style and sympathy for Marxism that I’d read his book on Marxism.

    And I would really like to say something intelligent here. But the fact of the matter is, that the guy is a great historian. And he doesn’t understand economics AT ALL.

    I mean. I can’t even read it. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

    Ack.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-31 11:52:00 UTC

  • AND GOVERNMENT ABILITY TO ALTER IT: none. This poses a serious problem. To accep

    http://www.epi.org/publication/a-decade-of-flat-wages-the-key-barrier-to-shared-prosperity-and-a-rising-middle-class/INEQUALITY AND GOVERNMENT ABILITY TO ALTER IT: none.

    This poses a serious problem. To accept market outcomes as given, and then try to offset the structural imbalances embedded therein through tax and transfer policy alone, is a fundamentally limited strategy. As those outcomes become increasingly unequal, as has been the case over the last three decades, such a strategy implies yearly increases in redistribution through the tax code and transfer system, something our political system will not support even once we return to functional politics. The uniquely influential role of money in American politics limits this strategy even further.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-27 09:24:00 UTC

  • NATIONALISM Higher Tribalism Returns – now that universalism is unmasked as an a

    NATIONALISM

    Higher Tribalism Returns – now that universalism is unmasked as an attempt to obtain status without producing anything. The Vision of the Anointed finally fades.

    (The boomers can’t die fast enough.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-26 14:57:00 UTC

  • “My theory … revolves around the role of the news media. The media are a liber

    http://themonkeycage.org/2013/08/22/a-theory-of-the-importance-of-very-serious-people-in-the-democratic-party/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+themonkeycagefeed+%28The+Monkey+Cage%29SMART

    “My theory … revolves around the role of the news media. The media are a liberal, Democratic-leaning institution. This can be seen, for example, from surveys of journalists (the last one I saw showed Democratic reporters outnumbering Republicans 2-1) or political endorsements or various other studies. It is my impression that the news media lean left but the public-relation industry leans right.

    “Anyway, my point here is that the Republican party has a lot of resources, including much of big business, military officers, and organized religion. They don’t need the news media in the way that the Democrats do. And, I suspect one reason why Very Serious People are important for Democrats is that they are respected by the media. The Republicans can put together a budget that is mocked by major newspapers and nobody cares. But if the Democrats lose the support of the New York Times, they’re in trouble. Hence the asymmetry in seriousness. One might say that the Republicans are hurt by a similar asymmetry with regard to social issues, in that they can’t ignore the support of the religious right or talk radio. Although this is a bit different: the so-called Very Serious People pull the Democrats toward the center, while social issue groups pull the Republicans to the right.

    “To put it another way, each party has a coalition of financial interests and political activists that are important in staffing the party and shaping its goals. The Democratic party’s balance has changed: in recent decades, with the decline of labor unions, various segments of industry such as high-tech have become important, also there are doctors and lawyers and newspapers. These are all groups that will tend to favor centrist, status-quo, what Krugman might call “very serious” policies.

    “I think this could/should be studied more systematically (ideally in some sort of comparative analysis with data from many countries).”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-08-26 01:46:00 UTC