September 18th, 2018 3:24 PM MARKET DEGENERACY [M]arket degeneracy occurs when we tolerate the satisfaction of demand and the taking of profits that come at the expense of normative, traditional, institutional, aesthetic, and informational capital. The fact that you can sell heroin, MSG and SUgar rich foods, virtue signaling of the underclass, or the various equivalents, is a matter of demand, not a judgement of whether the satisfaction of that demand destroys accumulated capital.
Theme: Incentives
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September 18th, 2018 2:47 PM 88% OF PRIME AGE MEN THAT ARE OUT OF THE WORK FORCE
September 18th, 2018 2:47 PM 88% OF PRIME AGE MEN THAT ARE OUT OF THE WORK FORCE, ARE SO BECAUSE OF HEALTH OR CHOICE.
—“Some new research on our of the labor force prime age men: Inactive, Disconnected, and Ailing: A Portrait of Prime-Age Men Out of the Labor Force (ht Noah Smith) This report is intended to enrich our understanding of who these prime-age “inactive” men are. It summarizes evidence from past research and fills out our picture of these men, providing some details about their past and present social and emotional lives. We introduce an under-utilized dataset little-known to economists and sociologists, the “National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions-III,” or NESARC-III. Consistent with other survey data, the NESARC-III indicates that in 2013, 11 percent of prime-age men were outside the labor force. Roughly 45 percent of them indicate that their current situation involves illness or disability. Roughly 15 percent of inactive men are in school, 5 to 10 percent are retired, and another 5 to 10 percent are homemakers or caregivers. About a quarter of prime-age inactive men do not fit any of these categories. Contrary to the common view that most of these men have “dropped out” of the labor force after becoming discouraged by the job market, few prime-age inactive men indicate this to be true, and only 12 percent of able-bodied prime-age inactive men indicate in household surveys that they want a job or are open to taking one. We confirm research by other scholars that a large number of inactive men are unambiguously and seriously sick or disabled. We provide new information, showing that many inactive men have poor physical health, poor mental health, or both. Over one-third of them (and nearly three in five disabled inactive men) are in the bottom quarter, nationally, of both physical and mental health. Inactive men have fewer skills than employed men and live in poorer homes, often relying on public safety nets to get by. Two-thirds of inactive men personally received government assistance in the preceding year. One-third of inactive men have been incarcerated (including nearly half of disabled inactive men). Along with other evidence presented here on mobility-impeding behavior, such high incarceration rates suggest employment challenges.”—
Read more at https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/09/inactive-disconnected-and-ailing.html#vGZ3m1Ip2sUtCWot.99
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Controlling Our Hyperconsumption and Investing It in Better Returns.
September 18th, 2018 11:48 AM CONTROLLING OUR HYPERCONSUMPTION AND INVESTING IT IN BETTER RETURNS. [M]ake women feel safe, and as the eastern europeans say ‘able to be weak’. Which they mean, able to love and feel and free of worry, and they will be their best. “Men work, women love, and this way we serve one another.” The problem is women’s competitive virtue signaling under consumer hyperconsumption is the equivalent of men who are addicted to watching sports but not doing them.
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We just need to restore the family as the primary insurer such that people strug
We just need to restore the family as the primary insurer such that people struggle to produce families as insurers rather than the state as an insurer with poor judgement.
Source date (UTC): 2018-09-16 11:16:00 UTC
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“You predicted the 2020 crash in 2006, right before the 2008 meltdown? Could you
—“You predicted the 2020 crash in 2006, right before the 2008 meltdown? Could you compare and contrast the 2008 crisis with what you see coming, and perhaps how the 2008 housing crash ties in to 2020?”—
1 – In the end all economics like all politics is and must be demographics. That’s the net of it right there.
2 – World demographics on the adoption of consumer capitalism and the exhaustion of western advantage.
3 – Western demographics, immigration, and rates of dysgenia will tip sufficiently to act as last resort.
4 – Since every generation is a reaction to the generation before it, people behave in predictable cycles.
5 – The long wave of generations means the world war generations are gone and the communist generation is almost gone.
6 – People school and swarm to opportunities until disequlibrium requires adjustment of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade because of a sufficient shock to collapse them. There is a relationship between the capital investment, debt load, remaining debt capacity, AND the discovery, forgetting, and learning curves of humans that is measurable in all walks of human life: we are new people about every three to four years: the time it takes to cognitively rehabituate so that we no longer bear the cognitive load of group adaptation to changing conditions. So there is a fairly fixed rate of adaptation that is a relationship between the degree of capital required for any sector.
7 – The business cycle exists and the austrians are right that they continuously extend if interfered with. This plot (trajectory) is relatively obvious.
8 – Consumers are literally running out of accumulated entertainment capital to consume. They have been for some time. Much of the expansion of the 90s and 2000’s was expansion of homes to keep the economy generating demand, and use of technology to enable increases in the consumption of entertainment. That inventory is exhausted.
9 – The technological curve of monetary policy appears to have been exhausted, and the next choice is not settled in policy as to whether to use direct redistribution to consumers (me, galbraith, mmt folks), or to let the government spend it instead (every left economist there is.)
10 – The technological curve of the transistor’s influence is almost exhausted, as was electricity’s, steam, and water power before it.
11 – organizing people by markets requires marginal differences in capital and the human capital reserves to make use of them. Those reserves are just about exhausted.
12 – low hanging fruit of hydrocarbons exploitation has been exhausted; movement of labor has been exhausted; the clerical automation is close to exhausted, and the financialization has led to fragility dependent on hyperconsumption, but consumption of what? We are no longer, and have not for many many years, been enabling underused european human capital, but importing consumers by financing credit in exchange for drastic declines in human capital as is evidenced in the data.
13 – There is, as I understand it, a relatively long curve between the current technological basis of civilizations, and the next predictable curve which is artificial intelligence, end of oil dependence, and genetic modification. I cannot yet imagine how the economy will organize to produce the same kind of multiples we have been producing since 1830 by the movement of labor from less productive to more, when we will now be in the position of moving labor into less and less productive ends. This means that the bottom has returned to dead weight, and the central problem going forward
14 – The way I predicted the economy when I was in my 30s and 40’s was studying the relationship between technological opportunities that could be seized by consumers and industry, right down to what was on the shelves in big box stores. And then predicting the life cycle those offerings. (I mean, how much better can a video game get?) The reason is that we have spent the past 200 years moving people into the middle class (meaning living in, able to consume in, and to own property, in the market economy.) But what do people have left to consume that is a marginal im provement? NOTHING BUT AESTHETICS AND STATUS SEEKING IDENTITY. Which is precisely what we are seeing. Urbanites using fashion because consumption of middle class goods is no longer status provisioning.
All of these things can be predicted on a series of overlapping curves on a timeline with ‘loose’ accuracy. Once you consider all of those curves at the same time the interplay of dependency becomes fairly obvious, and you can ‘feel’ how the sentiment will evolve. By 2006 I had that set of curves in my head. Which is why I was within 30 days of 2008. (but wrong on china). And I’ve been right about the cycle so far. Trump was a wild card and now i suspect that actions against him will produce movement that accelerates the cycles.
Now am I all that special? no. There was a fairly well known niche movement in the 90’s and 2000s (contrarianism) that was tracking these cycles, and making predictions. I am not really sure why, given that those were correct and that the austrians were correct, why this isn’t still under discussion other than the overwhelming embarrassment of the economic community, and its movement from broad to near predictions, and the current worldwide civil war between globalists and nationalists has taken attention from prediction of long waves, to simply winning the near term battle.
Source date (UTC): 2018-09-15 23:19:00 UTC
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THE ECONOMICS OF WHITE PRIVILEGE by Eli Harman Critics note that white privilege
THE ECONOMICS OF WHITE PRIVILEGE
by Eli Harman
Critics note that white privilege is unearned & conclude that it is therefore undeserved. But I have to pay for my white privilege, when it is… https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=294212841175613&id=100017606988153
Source date (UTC): 2018-09-15 20:35:02 UTC
Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1041062858090532866
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THE ECONOMICS OF WHITE PRIVILEGE by Eli Harman Critics note that white privilege
THE ECONOMICS OF WHITE PRIVILEGE
by Eli Harman
Critics note that white privilege is unearned & conclude that it is therefore undeserved. But I have to pay for my white privilege, when it is extended to me, by not abusing it. E.g. if I’m not followed around by security, I’m being given an opportunity to steal.
To maintain my white privilege of not being followed by security, for myself and others, I have to pay the *opportunity cost* of foregoing opportunities to steal. Evidence suggests that enough white people are willing to pay for this privilege, in this way, to maintain it.
Some groups aren’t willing to forego opportunities to steal reliably enough to make the privilege of not being followed around by security worth giving them. By whining about white people getting this privilege (saying it’s unfair) they’re trying to obtain it at a discount.
The demand is basically that whites conduct all business and interactions with non-whites on ingroup terms. But this is not worthwhile if they are not ingroup, and won’t treat us as ingroup, by the standards we demand of ingroup members. It’s a parasitic demand.
The only other way to be uniform and “fair” (as these parasites define fairness) would be to conduct business & interactions w/*everyone* (even fellow whites) on low trust, out-group terms (have security follow everyone) but this is not optimal. It’s costlier for ingroup members.
I didn’t “earn” my white privilege. But I do pay for it, every time I am extended it and don’t abuse it, such as when I am not followed by security and nevertheless refrain from stealing. Payment of those *opportunity costs* is what maintain that privilege for myself and others.
Are all whites trustworthy and all non-whites untrustworthy? Certainly not. But it certainly pays to employ different risk management strategies with different groups, according to the risks, statistically, that they present. Accordingly, different out-groups get different terms.
Asians get better out-group terms in white societies than blacks, & whites get better out-group terms in Asian societies than blacks, even if none get ingroup terms, because whites and Asians are lower risk and higher benefit, relative to blacks. It’s not just ingroup/out-group.
There are 2 kinds of blacks who object to being mistrusted, the untrustworthy, b/c it makes it harder to abuse trust, & the trustworthy, for whom it’s costly & embarrassing to be lumped w/the former. But if we can’t tell the difference, demanding not to be lumped is unreasonable.
There are 3 main, honest, productive, ways to minimize the cost of being associated with an untrustworthy group.
1) Signal, with speech, dress, mannerisms, etc, to distinguish & differentiate yourself.
2) Offer more positive value.
3) Suppress the parasitism of your own group.
Don’t demand ingroup terms from outgroups. It is NEVER worthwhile to extend you those terms, and those demands are always dishonest and parasitic. But by employing the methods above, you can obtain better out-group terms from others for your group.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that ingroups and out-group are generally defined according to kinship because closer kinship makes trust and altruism, the mechanisms of ingroup privilege, evolutionarily self enforcing (they reward and propagate other instances of your genes.)
Conversely, kinship also makes defection, non performance, & irreciprocity (the basic mechanisms of out-group parasitism) evolutionarily unstable & self-punishing (they punish & therefore diminish & handicap other instances of your own genes.) This is why ingroup is kingroup.
Source date (UTC): 2018-09-15 16:34:00 UTC
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The Economics of White Privilege
by Eli Harman Critics note that white privilege is unearned & conclude that it is therefore undeserved. But I have to pay for my white privilege, when it is extended to me, by not abusing it. E.g. if I’m not followed around by security, I’m being given an opportunity to steal. To maintain my white privilege of not being followed by security, for myself and others, I have to pay the *opportunity cost* of foregoing opportunities to steal. Evidence suggests that enough white people are willing to pay for this privilege, in this way, to maintain it. Some groups aren’t willing to forego opportunities to steal reliably enough to make the privilege of not being followed around by security worth giving them. By whining about white people getting this privilege (saying it’s unfair) they’re trying to obtain it at a discount. The demand is basically that whites conduct all business and interactions with non-whites on ingroup terms. But this is not worthwhile if they are not ingroup, and won’t treat us as ingroup, by the standards we demand of ingroup members. It’s a parasitic demand. The only other way to be uniform and “fair” (as these parasites define fairness) would be to conduct business & interactions w/*everyone* (even fellow whites) on low trust, out-group terms (have security follow everyone) but this is not optimal. It’s costlier for ingroup members. I didn’t “earn” my white privilege. But I do pay for it, every time I am extended it and don’t abuse it, such as when I am not followed by security and nevertheless refrain from stealing. Payment of those *opportunity costs* is what maintain that privilege for myself and others. Are all whites trustworthy and all non-whites untrustworthy? Certainly not. But it certainly pays to employ different risk management strategies with different groups, according to the risks, statistically, that they present. Accordingly, different out-groups get different terms. Asians get better out-group terms in white societies than blacks, & whites get better out-group terms in Asian societies than blacks, even if none get ingroup terms, because whites and Asians are lower risk and higher benefit, relative to blacks. It’s not just ingroup/out-group. There are 2 kinds of blacks who object to being mistrusted, the untrustworthy, b/c it makes it harder to abuse trust, & the trustworthy, for whom it’s costly & embarrassing to be lumped w/the former. But if we can’t tell the difference, demanding not to be lumped is unreasonable. There are 3 main, honest, productive, ways to minimize the cost of being associated with an untrustworthy group. 1) Signal, with speech, dress, mannerisms, etc, to distinguish & differentiate yourself. 2) Offer more positive value. 3) Suppress the parasitism of your own group. Don’t demand ingroup terms from outgroups. It is NEVER worthwhile to extend you those terms, and those demands are always dishonest and parasitic. But by employing the methods above, you can obtain better out-group terms from others for your group. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that ingroups and out-group are generally defined according to kinship because closer kinship makes trust and altruism, the mechanisms of ingroup privilege, evolutionarily self enforcing (they reward and propagate other instances of your genes.) Conversely, kinship also makes defection, non performance, & irreciprocity (the basic mechanisms of out-group parasitism) evolutionarily unstable & self-punishing (they punish & therefore diminish & handicap other instances of your own genes.) This is why ingroup is kingroup.
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The Economics of White Privilege
by Eli Harman Critics note that white privilege is unearned & conclude that it is therefore undeserved. But I have to pay for my white privilege, when it is extended to me, by not abusing it. E.g. if I’m not followed around by security, I’m being given an opportunity to steal. To maintain my white privilege of not being followed by security, for myself and others, I have to pay the *opportunity cost* of foregoing opportunities to steal. Evidence suggests that enough white people are willing to pay for this privilege, in this way, to maintain it. Some groups aren’t willing to forego opportunities to steal reliably enough to make the privilege of not being followed around by security worth giving them. By whining about white people getting this privilege (saying it’s unfair) they’re trying to obtain it at a discount. The demand is basically that whites conduct all business and interactions with non-whites on ingroup terms. But this is not worthwhile if they are not ingroup, and won’t treat us as ingroup, by the standards we demand of ingroup members. It’s a parasitic demand. The only other way to be uniform and “fair” (as these parasites define fairness) would be to conduct business & interactions w/*everyone* (even fellow whites) on low trust, out-group terms (have security follow everyone) but this is not optimal. It’s costlier for ingroup members. I didn’t “earn” my white privilege. But I do pay for it, every time I am extended it and don’t abuse it, such as when I am not followed by security and nevertheless refrain from stealing. Payment of those *opportunity costs* is what maintain that privilege for myself and others. Are all whites trustworthy and all non-whites untrustworthy? Certainly not. But it certainly pays to employ different risk management strategies with different groups, according to the risks, statistically, that they present. Accordingly, different out-groups get different terms. Asians get better out-group terms in white societies than blacks, & whites get better out-group terms in Asian societies than blacks, even if none get ingroup terms, because whites and Asians are lower risk and higher benefit, relative to blacks. It’s not just ingroup/out-group. There are 2 kinds of blacks who object to being mistrusted, the untrustworthy, b/c it makes it harder to abuse trust, & the trustworthy, for whom it’s costly & embarrassing to be lumped w/the former. But if we can’t tell the difference, demanding not to be lumped is unreasonable. There are 3 main, honest, productive, ways to minimize the cost of being associated with an untrustworthy group. 1) Signal, with speech, dress, mannerisms, etc, to distinguish & differentiate yourself. 2) Offer more positive value. 3) Suppress the parasitism of your own group. Don’t demand ingroup terms from outgroups. It is NEVER worthwhile to extend you those terms, and those demands are always dishonest and parasitic. But by employing the methods above, you can obtain better out-group terms from others for your group. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that ingroups and out-group are generally defined according to kinship because closer kinship makes trust and altruism, the mechanisms of ingroup privilege, evolutionarily self enforcing (they reward and propagate other instances of your genes.) Conversely, kinship also makes defection, non performance, & irreciprocity (the basic mechanisms of out-group parasitism) evolutionarily unstable & self-punishing (they punish & therefore diminish & handicap other instances of your own genes.) This is why ingroup is kingroup.
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Don’t Complain About People Following Incentives
[D]on’t complain about people following incentives, and specifically don’t ask people to believe in a presumed good rather than exploit a possible incentive. Change the incentives. The more you subsidize something the more you will get.