Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • So in my perspective Religion is an anti market education system and taught chea

    So in my perspective Religion is an anti market education system and taught cheaply to people who do not have market influences to shape their ethics, and Education as we understand it evolved to Transition people into market ethics so that they would succeed and understand market ethics (meritocracy), and how they differ from subsistence ethics (equality). And that this separation was rational given that it is very cheap to teach people by lying and allegory and equality, and it is more expensive to teach people by history and calculation, and meritocracy.

    The problem being that none of us are subsistence farmers, and all of us live in the market and have no other choice any longer to return to the fields. The territorial value of the individually farmable earth was maximized long ago.

    So as far as I understand it religion is just a cheap way to enslave people by teaching them sufficient information to survive as agrarians and pastoralists but not enough information, nor the right information, to survive in a market society where we cannot judge our actions by whether they are equal to that of others, but by whether they facilitate exchange with others to whom we are increasingly and eternally unequal.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-24 06:34:00 UTC

  • ( Create demand and the market will respond. Sell and the market will resist you

    ( Create demand and the market will respond. Sell and the market will resist you. 😉 he he he…. You sell crap because you have to. You create demand because you can. )

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-23 19:46:00 UTC

  • RESPONSE TO ‘GOOD’ CRITICISM OF MY FRAMING OF ECONOMIC SCHOOLS To Alex Pareto; T

    RESPONSE TO ‘GOOD’ CRITICISM OF MY FRAMING OF ECONOMIC SCHOOLS

    To Alex Pareto;

    This is an awesome criticism, thank you but is off the mark because it is half true and half false, and one point rather ridiculous. So given that this is exceptionally good criticism lets walk through it and explain why you don’t see what I see. 　 And why I am correct.

    Let’s make four preliminary points that constitute a theory:

    (1) One of the central if not most central propositions in my work is to ignore arguments (excuses) and simply measure advocated changes in capital (what I call ‘property in toto’.) By ignoring all justification and simply looking at outputs we can then back into incentives. By knowing incentives and changes in capital we have a pre-cognitive rather than justificationary explanation of what our ‘genes’ instruct us to do, no matter what excuses we make for our actions. In other words your intentions are meaningless since we can derive your incentives and recommended changes in capital.

    (2) What is the moral intuition of the peoples who select for each of the schools, and why do they self select for other than mainstream keynesian? In other words, given that the tools of analysis are the same, then why do people choose to work in each discipline, and if we look at the papers and books produced by members of each discipline what arguments are they making? Why do people self select into the various disciplines? (The answer isn’t unique to economics, it’s universal to all disciplines.) The answer is selection bias given one’s reproductive strategy and group evolutionary strategy.

    3) There exist only so many known policy levers, in order of their response times: monetary policy, fiscal policy (spending), regulatory and trade policy(including immigration), infrastructure policy (commons), military-strategic policy (trade routes), institutional policy (methods of economic cooperation), normative policy( methods of social cooperation ), human capital policy (education, reproduction, and health care).

    4) The use of each lever of policy includes the seen and unseen, the measured and unmeasured, the illustrated(advocacy) and the ignored (deception). Each lever benefits different constituencies by externality. Each ‘faction’ within the discipline of economics and politics advocates action roughly along this spectrum from the shortest (socialist, to the left leaning, to the classical liberal, to the conservative) in favor of its externality, and the change in capital it is biased in favor of. And we can measure this by the papers and books put out by this group advocating which policies (I have been monitoring this for over twenty years, and I have simply not had the time and focus to pay the 50k it would take to have the research completed in a depth that I felt comfortable. But the data does exist and others have done done work in the area with the general consensus being just what I have said: selection bias.

    Now let’s go onto your criticisms, albeit in a different order.

    (1) —“Keynesian economics attempts to explain “Why are there recessions?” “Why is there unemployment?” Answer: aggregate demand, animal spirits. It has remedies for reducing unemployment, avoiding recessions and stimulating growth. This is fiscal policy.

    Curt’s description that Keynesianism is to paraphrase “increasing consumption to offset the losses caused by misallocation of resources” is not remotely accurate.”—

    Well let’s test this criticism. Because I’m pretty certain I’m right.

    (a) in every group there are innovations in positive solution and negative criticism (leaders) those who apply and advocate them, and ordinary laborers (researchers and teachers). So do we categories groups by their similarities or by their differences? (Smith, Buchanan, Cowen,Schumpeter vs Gary Becker, Coase, and Friedman vs Stiglitz, Delong, and Krugman vs Mises/Rothbard/Lachman). What cognitive and moral biases, and cultural and class biases do these groups demonstrate?

    (b) Why would you want to interfere with unemployment, and why would you want to interfere with recessions, unless it is to increase consumption? Well there is no answer other than consumption(Demand). (This is where i find your criticism ‘ridiculous’ since it is not logically refutable as far as I know.)

    (c) Now look at the record of Keynesians and their tax policies compared to chicago and austrians: Keynesians offer the search for pareto optimums of taxation. Yet what do Austrians and Freshwaters do: they search for nash equilibriums. What is the difference between the jewish austrian school(zero commons) and the christian austrian school(limited commons) even today – and how does that differ from the freshwater school(insured commons). And how does that differ from the keynesian school (maximized commons). And then how do we test the changes in capital (property-in-toto) and the voluntary changes and involuntary changes in capital? Well, we list what the group cherry-picks. In other words, what do people measure? And what externalities do they include or ignore?

    Well, as far as I know, only the fascists even attempted to account for all capital. The jewish austrians favor the creditor, the christian austrians tries to balance it in law, and the chicago school favors the creditor only in as much as it is offset by attempts to equilibrate against shocks caused by asymmetries of information and the stickiness of prices, contracts, and networks of sustainable specialization and trade.

    And so far, I can’t find any fault with my hypothesis.

    (2) —“”The mengerian school attempted to construct a DESCRIPTIVE social and political science from economic evidence.”

    All of the “schools” of economics do both positive (i.e. “descriptive”) and normative economics. There’s nothing “mengerian” about positive economics.”—

    (a) Are we identifying schools by their similarities or by their differences? (And is even having to ask that question “ridiculous”?)

    (b) What time preference do they favor by what levers they favor and what externalities they values as discount or premium??

    (c) Which schools test the MORALITY of policy actions by the volition of the individual (Nash Equilibrium) and which schools test the MORALITY of policy actions by the aggregate change (Pareto optimum)?

    (d) if you take the top 10-20 members of any of the schools and research their ethnic, cultural, class and religious histories, how do their biases differ? And do those biases reflect their gender, class, ethnic group evolutionary strategies?

    (e) Which schools account for (either directly or indirectly) the cost of policy in intellectual, resource, institutional, cultural, normative, familial, and genetic capital? In other words, which groups ignore which changes to what capital?

    (3) —“”Saltwater School (new york), attempting to maximize consumption by policy” Keynesians are not trying to “maximise consumption”, they are trying to maximise GDP. And secondly, this is not the defining feature of Keynesianism. Macroeconomics is about producing good rates of growth and avoiding recessions. Even Austrians in practice agree with this, though they don’t like the GDP metric. What separates macroeconomists isn’t their goals, it’s how they believe it’s best to achieve these goals.”—

    Now, i’m sorry, but this falls into the “ridiculous” camp again. And how do we maximize GDP(income statement)? And why would you maximize GDP vs capital (balance sheet), and how do you insure that you are in fact achieving what you’re measuring? (I know the answer you know. Where has the productivity gone? It’s gone. Where has it gone?)

    You see, this is the difference between talking about ‘ideals’ and ‘reals’, and between ‘reals’ and ‘actions’. And this is what Mises discovered but failed himself to understand. That subjective testing of rational action is the only test of MORAL action (reciprocity). And that any other action is redistributive. And that there is a very great difference between the insurance of the polity against asymmetry and shocks that preserves ability to plan and thereby preserves reciprocity (Chicago) and attempts to maximize the income statement (gdp) at the expense of capital (the balance sheet). Which is what most large companies do all the time to obscure their financial positions. My favorite being that they consume market potential in order to increase current revenue. Or they maximize revenue at the cost of research and development necessary to maintain market share and market potential. (And they maximize rents for that matter). Which is precisely what governments do with the capital that they do not measure. (Immigration being the current method of long term theft.)

    CLOSING

    OK. So now please try to refute the theory as presented.

    Thanks again for the good criticism. Usually what I find is … a waste of my time. And this gave me the opportunity to educate.

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-23 10:11:00 UTC

  • REALITY 1 – Identity tests categories. 2 – Logic tests internal consistency. 3 –

    REALITY

    1 – Identity tests categories.

    2 – Logic tests internal consistency.

    3 – Action tests correspondence. (space, time, and causality)

    4 – Rational action tests incentives – rational choice consistency.

    5 – Reciprocity tests moral – rational exchange consistency

    6 – Full accounting and limits test scope consistency.

    7 – Narrative by analogy to perception describes reality – coherence (total consistency)

    Reality is explained by narrative, and the narrative survives falsification by identity, logic, action, reason, reciprocity, and scope.

    We test statements about the world by deflating each dimension and testing each for consistency.

    Each sub dimension can only be tested by use of the next dimension.

    The only native skill we possess is the test of “differences”. Because our brains use samples of inputs in combination with memory to predict results and alert us through new stimulation to the differences.

    Our brains sample senses, provide certain services, the hierarchical (distilled) result of which are combined (conflated) through memory and backward propagation into ‘experience’.

    It turns out that except in rare cases we ‘experience’ a fairly accurate model of the physical world – but an absurdly inaccurate model of the social world, and completely nonsensical model of our personal value to that world. All of which are precisely what is necessary to survive as sentient (feeling of changes in state) and conscious (self aware) life form when possessed of uncomfortable knowledge in a universe of consistent risk.

    This is a much more simple way of explaining Hume, Kant, and the Phenomenologists.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-22 19:57:00 UTC

  • It’s not the same for women who have value in their reproduction and caretaking,

    It’s not the same for women who have value in their reproduction and caretaking, but for men, in the post-animal-labor era, we have no value whatsoever if we cannot compete and climb the dominance hierarchy and therefore attract a woman’s reproductive and caretaking interest.

    IQ and lack of Impulsivity are the result of neotonic selection of females by males, and selection of males with demonstrated ability to climb the dominance hierarchy by females.

    The problem is that females tend to select poorly without education and men select with less discrimination without regulation by other males.

    IQ is the single most important cause of everything good in society

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-22 06:57:00 UTC

  • WHAT ARE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS? I’ve written exte

    WHAT ARE THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS?

    I’ve written extensively on this and I’ll make a few (possibly unpleasant) but clarifying points to explain why Today’s “Austrian School” is to the original “Mengerianism”, what Today’s “Liberalism” is to the original “Classical Liberalism”: an ‘appropriated term’. And Misesianism has little if anything to do with Mengerianism other than the most trivial inclusion of marginalism.

    THE SHORT VERSION

    If we are talking about the Mengerian revolution, there are no shortcomings, and those insights as of 2008 appear to have been fully incorporated into mainstream economics.

    If we are talking about how mainstream Austrians practice economics today, by the successors to both the Mengerian and Misesian ‘branches’ of the Mengerian revolution, we have one insight that is not incorporated into mainstream economics: the test of the ethics and morality of economic statements by construction a ‘proof of possibility’: that any such proposition can be demonstrated by a series of both rational choices and tests of reciprocity. Mainstream Economists rely on Rawlsian (left) ethics and Pareto optimums, where Austrian Economists would rely on Classical Liberal ethics, and each solve for solutions under those ethical constraints.

    If we are talking about the propaganda put out by the Rothbardians then that’s something altogether different, and has nothing to do with either of the above.

    But let’s go into some detail.

    THE SCHOOLS

    The Mengerian school applied the insights of calculus to economics, producing marginalism, and as a consequence, subjective value, and as a consequence overthrew the historical error of the labor theory of value.

    The mengerian school attempted to construct a DESCRIPTIVE social and political science from economic evidence. In contrast to the Chicago school which attempts to produce policy under rule of law – meaning ‘without human discretion’; and in contrast with the Saltwater School (new york), attempting to maximize consumption by policy – meaning ‘arbitrary rule’.

    So the Austrian, Chicago, and New York schools of economics pursued very different ‘limits’ and ‘methods of decidability’ (categories and values) in their investigation of economic phenomenon, and for very different reasons. Instead of all of these schools pursuing ‘economic science’ it is more accurate to say that they each practice the application of economics to politics in three different ways.

    Austrian (Virginia):

    The production of institutions that eliminate frictions, allowing the greatest cooperation among peoples in a market economy. This, under the assumption that interferences in the economy were unwise, and would merely increase the severity of future corrections. (The Conservative Position)

    Freshwater (Chicago):

    The use of monetary policy to insure the economy and the polity against the unavoidable corrections that occur whenever certain combinations of opportunities, organizations, talents, and resources are disrupted either incrementally or by shocks, by the discovery of formulae that allowed rule of law to persist, yet insure people against harm. This, under the assumption that while interference in the economy was a moral hazard, a violation of rule of law, and would spiral into increasingly worse forms of harm, that the value of limiting shortages, insuring against shocks, was better than the consequences of not doing so. (The Classical Liberal Position)

    Saltwater (New York):

    The use of fiscal (spending) policy (debt) for the purpose of maximizing consumption and therefore overall wealth – under the assumption that any harms caused by the misallocation of organizations, talents, and resources to exhausted opportunities, would provide greater interim benefit that would compensate for any future harms. (The Leftist Position) (Krugman, Delong et al)

    This spectrum: Austrian (Social Science/conservative), Chicago (Rule of Law/classical), New York (Arbitrary Rule/progressive) also reflects Time Preference: Long, Medium, and Short term. Which in turn reflects class and gender moral biases (Mature Male, Maturing Male, and Female). Which in turn reflects institutional emphasis: i) Austrian: Demographics, educational policy, formal and informal institutional policy. ii) Industrial policy, Trade Policy, Monetary Policy, iii) Monetary, fiscal policy, and redistributive policy.

    At this point in time, Mengerian insights are fully incorporated into mainstream economics – although until 2008, the mainstream resisted the hypothesis that all attempts to correct the economy through monetary policy produced cumulative distortions of increasing duration. At this point that matter is settled, and the Mengerian insights have been incorporated into Mainstream thought.

    UNSOLVED QUESTIONS IN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS

    -Economics (Money)-

    There is clear benefit to recording, analyzing and publishing economic information that prevents malinvestment (or misuse of investment funds). There is clear benefit to managing the money supply as long as it does not create malinvestment. It is not clear that savings should be conducted with the same currency as the commercial currency. It is not clear that savers have a right to appreciation of a commercial currency at the expense of others any more than they have an obligation to absorb losses. And given that the value of insuring the money supply against shortages that might minimize consumption and investment, How do we manage the money supply? What basket of targets do we use? Is it moral (or wise) to allow interest on consumer credit issued from the Treasury when it is not any longer de facto insured by banks? (My answer is ‘no’ – it’s predatory on a scale that the most extractive of despots could not dream of). Is any of our policy or economics meaningful in an era where liquidity can be provided directly to consumers via debit cards from the treasury and the consequences immediately measured regardless of financial sector and entrepreneurial sector estimates of the future ending the zero interest rate problem, and ending the problem of cheaper money reinforcing and expanding patterns of malinvestment.

    -Government (Production of Commons)-

    It is increasingly clear that the silicon valley model of investment is indistinguishable from the christian monarchies under the combination of local rule of law and federal church sanction, in the same way the chinese model of government is indistinguishable from the management of a fortune 50 conglomerate. And it is increasingly clear that both of these models are superior to the results of 20th century democracy. The difference is that the Han are a single sub-race (extended family), as Europeans were until the present. While the silicon valley model is closer to the Cosmopolitan, for the same reason: silicon valley does not have to insure itself, it’s territory, or its currency So we can see three future political models: the homogenous kin-corporate (chinese), the homogenous kin-private, and the ‘borderland’ diverse non-kin private (silicon valley).

    THE MISESIAN INSIGHT – AND DOWNFALL

    Mises was creative, and had read a great deal of the work of contemporaries – which is why his ideas are not his but others (Weber, Simmel). He had a very clear if not the clearest – understanding of money. But had a very poor understanding of mathematics and science. And was not very clear on the broader intellectual movements that had preceded him, or were current.

    So while Mises discovered and articulated “economic operationalism”, he conflated mathematics (axiomatic declarations, and proofs of possibility) with science (theoretical observations, and survival from criticism) into a pseudoscience of Praxeology – in which he claimed all economic research should be performed operationally.

    He confused the Moral and Legal (justificationary), with the True and Scientific (survival from criticism).

    Praxeology – Economic Operationalism – is a method of testing rational choice and moral reciprocity in economic propositions when people are possessed of information heavily weighted by prices, and when they are rational actors, working from simple stacks of priorities. Just as is Intuitionistic Mathematics, Operational Language in the Sciences, and Operationism (the newest application of operationalism) in Psychology.

    But this is logically and empirically false.

    People act irrationally because of a set of cognitive biases and fragmentary information;

    People decide preferences on networks not stacks – meaning Mises did NOT – like Menger – rely on the calculus, and worse, he used a very narrow interpretation of marginal utility – that humans decided by a stack of values, rather than the sum of the weights of a set of values.

    Prices are but one factor of economics and prices decline rapidly in interest after commodities. People purchase heavily on signal value, not investment or commodity value.

    Empirical measurements can in fact identify economic phenomenon not rationally identifiable by rational construction (ie: sticky prices).

    What appear to be cumulatively immoral actions by the state can (in some circumstances) produce superior returns that do not violate the material interests of risk takers dependent upon intertemporal calculation.

    So it’s somewhat tragic, that in the science in which Operationalism is most important, and Mises’ discovery of Economic Operationalism, approximately coincided with Popper’s invention of Falsification, Poincare’s Criticism of Cantor, Brouwer’s Intuitionism (mathematics), Bridgman’s Operationalism (physics), and Hayek’s later discovery that the empirical common law is both the origin of the empirical method, and the only scientific means of governance: Nomocracy – Rule of Law.

    And that because all these thinkers failed to grasp that they had formed a movement, and that this movement’s value culminated, not in mathematics – but in economics. Because Science is but a moral discipline by which together we seek to remove ignorance, error, bias, and deceit. And that economics is the discipline in which pseudoscience is most harmful to us and mankind, if for no other reason than the consequences of our folly and deceit are both profound, and distant.

    THE CULTURAL ARTIFACTS OF THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENTS

    We all bring our culture’s methodologies to the intellectual table, and Mises brought conflationary jewish law to the table. All the enlightenment era thinkers have done so – and still do. We tend to use the names of philosophers rather than the Operational names of their methodologies but we can illustrate the drag of intellectual traditions on the enlightenment by stating the method: The anglo empirical-legal-protestant, the french moral-catholic, the german rationalist-prostestant, the russian literary-orthodox, and the jewish-conflationary-legal.

    The only deflationary method was the original: the anglo empirical-legal. ‘Science’ in the ancient world, like science in the later medieval and early modern, evolved out of the practice of competitive, testimonial, evidentiary, empirical, common Law.

    The problem for the anglos has been that contracts presume equality under the law, and this assumption led to the utopianism of ‘an Aristocracy of Everyone’. Just as the French a ‘Family of Everyone (dressed up in aristocratic clothing)’, Just as the German ‘An Army of Pious Duty of Everyone’, Just as the Jewish led to a ‘Wandering Separatism of Everyone’.

    The ‘Vienna’ intellectual group – “Austrians” housed two very different sets of thinkers: The Christians who were German and Polish: the Mengerians, and the Misesian, who was Jewish and from L’viv Ukraine.

    Both regions were in then ‘Galacia’ under the control of the Austrian Empire. At that point in time L’viv was one of the most populous jewish cities in europe as well as the ‘borderlands’ (where russians allowed jews to settle).

    The categorization of Mises as a member of Menger’s Austrian school has been the subject of disagreement and still is – in the past, justifiably criticized as ‘jewish economics’.

    Methodologically, Misesian thought relies upon jewish thought, just as much as Mengerian thought relies upon Germanic.

    -Deflation vs Conflation-

    Western Deflation (Competition:Institutions) vs Semitic Conflation (Monopoly:Religion)

    While one of the hallmarks of western civilization is deflationary truth, and as a consequence, deflationary disciplines (mathematics, science, law, morality, literature, religion), deflationary institutions (divided govt), Mises, in the Jewish tradition, ( in the Abrahamic tradition in general) conflated morality, law, mathematics and science into ‘praxeology’ and his arrogance ( not unlike Marx) prevented him from acknowledging his failure until late in life, when he acquiesced to economics being a mixture of empirical and operational but he still did not draw the conclusion that had been made by Weber, Brower, Bridgman, if not Popper: that the ‘truth’ is discovered by the market competition between the scientific method’s attempt to deflate reality down into operations (laws), and the test of whether an intermediate theory survives construction from laws (axioms).

    Given that we know the first principles of social science: rationality and reciprocity we can test all economic propositions even though due to categorical plasticity due to substitution effects.

    Given that we do not know (yet) outside of perhaps chemistry, the first principles (operations) of the physical universe – because the universe cannot ‘choose’ it is fully deterministic (even if so casually dense it is not predictable through measurement) and we must be able to describe the physical universe in mathematics as proof of construction instead.

    This is only possible because mathematics is correlatively descriptive of external phenomenon, even if it is internally fully operational (real).

    So mathematics provides a good substitute for the operations of the universe – until we know the first principles of the universe.

    Which is what our friend Mr Wolfram’s (ack) ‘new science’ (confusing a logic and a science again) is: the study of the consequences of operations, INSTEAD of the DESCRIPTION of the consequences of operations using mathematics.

    CLOSING

    So it is better to say that Mises created a ‘jewish heresy’ or branch of the Vienna school, and that followers have used the marxist strategy of a) ‘appropriating terms’ (austrian school), b) ‘heaping of undue praise’, c) ‘straw man criticism as a vehicle for pseudoscientific propaganda’, d) ‘pseudoscientific or pseudo-rational argument (justificationary apriorism, praxeology as a science exclusive of empirical science rather than that scientific propositions require survival of the tests of both empirical consistency and operational consistency), d) vociferous evangelism, and voluminous propagandizing (‘gossip’).

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine.

    *I know this might be heavy reading but it’s very important, and profound.*

    —-

    NOTE: This facebook Page contains a series of articles that cover his position in intellectual history in detail. (See Facebook Page for Scientific Praxeology-Economic Operationalism)

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-21 18:58:00 UTC

  • ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REFORMATION (NOTE: I’m going to point out the obvio

    https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/yuchtman/Noam_Yuchtman_files/rr_draft.pdfTHE ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REFORMATION

    (NOTE: I’m going to point out the obvious for you: that just judaism “tied up intellect in mysticism” such that jews contributed nothing to human civilization despite their literacy; and just as today, islam ‘tied up intellect’ in vast ignorance and superstition deception, destroying four great civilization to date; that the catholic church ‘tied up intellect, resources, and economies. And that just as Constantine’ and Justinian’s purpose was to undermine the western aristocracy in favor of the same persian tyranny that seduced alexander; the church incrementally attempted to undermine the aristocracy and replace it with Persian god-kings. And this is the reason that the church granted property rights to women, and forbid inbreeding: so that they could undermine the land holdings of the great families, and incrementally acquire through a host of schemes fifty percent of the european farmlands. I have come to see the church as the most insidious institution whose few claims of virtue were nothing more than taking credit for what would have occurred earlier had they continued the spread of roman literacy and law rather than church superstition and ignorance.)

    –“The Protestant Reformation, beginning in 1517, was both a shock to the market for religion and a first-order economic shock. We study its impact on the allocation of resources between the religious and secular sectors in Germany, collecting data on the allocation of human and physical capital. While Protestant reformers aimed to elevate the role of religion, we find that the Reformation produced rapid economic secularization. The interaction between religious competition and political economy explains the shift in investments in human and fixed capital away from the religious sector. Large numbers of monasteries were expropriated during the Reformation, particularly in Protestant regions. This transfer of resources shifted the demand for labor between religious and secular sectors: graduates from Protestant universities increasingly entered secular occupations. Consistent with forward-looking behavior, students at Protestant universities shifted from the study of theology toward secular degrees. The appropriation of resources by secular rulers is also reflected in construction: during the Reformation, religious construction declined, particularly in Protestant regions, while secular construction increased,especially for administrative purposes. Reallocation was not driven by pre-existing economic or cultural differences.”– Via Tyler Cowen

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-20 16:30:00 UTC

  • PRIVATE SCHOOLS (NEIGHBORHOODS) PREVENT BADS — “The critical problem with priv

    PRIVATE SCHOOLS (NEIGHBORHOODS) PREVENT BADS

    — “The critical problem with private schools, is that you admit intelligent kids but how have you changed them?”— Grant Wiggin (Education Author)

    Well this presumes a few falsehoods.

    1) It isn’t clear at all that we can improve critical thinking skills. We can only prevent the adoption of bad habits.

    2) It isn’t clear that you can improve a child’s future through education, you can only prevent something from going wrong if you don’t educate him or her.

    In other words, despite all objections to the contrary: IQ, Conscientiousness(Industriousness), and Stability(neuroticism), determine the intellectual capacity of your child, and his or her lifetime potential. Your job is to give him or her the same tools as everyone else, while doing as little damage as possible.

    3) Public schools, at least since the relaxation of discipline in the 1960’s, produce a lot of environmental ‘bads’. In particular the reduction of physical movement, exercise, and competition.

    4) So the purpose of private schools is not to produce any particular good, but to prevent the many, many, BAD things that are a byproduct of the public education system.

    The same is true for schools, neighborhoods, cities, and nations: the problem is not in producing goods. It is in eliminating bads. And the bads are quite easy to find: they’re the people who do bad things.

    Among these people are the majority of leftists who want to outsource the cost for one another’s lack of agency rather than rid the neighborhood, school, polity, and nation of those who lack it.

    This is the fundamental difference between aristocracy and priesthood: The action/aristocratic reduction of the underclasses and the upward redistribution of aggregate reproduction empowering their profiting from advancing meritocracy, and the gossiping/priestly-casts reduction of the middle classes and downward redistribution of production empowering their profiting from advancing equalitarianism.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-16 13:19:00 UTC

  • It is rational to take drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, fried food, sugar, and lethar

    It is rational to take drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, fried food, sugar, and lethargy. It is rational to take gifts, hand outs, subsidies, rents, and extortions. It’s rational to choose myth over literature, literature over history, history over philosophy, philosophy over law, law over engineering, engineering over science, and science over mathematics. It is rational to tell white lies, grey lies, black lies, and to evil lies. It is rational to beg, steal, rape, murder, plunder, and war.

    So in the choice to believe in god or gods, it is counter intuitive to choose gods. In the choice to choose gods or science it is counter intuitive to choose science. in the choice between narrative and calculation it is counter intuitive to choose calculation. In the choice between lie and truth it is counter intuitive to choose truth.

    When engaged in deception of the self or others it is rational to state the non-demonstrable rather than the demonstrable.

    Pascal’s wager is inaccurate. “It is only rational to hedge a belief in gods if one thinks and acts as if none exists.”

    The purpose of religion is anti-social: to prevent you from reason. Only a demon would demand and command as Jehovah.

    —“Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.”— Aurelius (a Stoic)

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-16 12:07:00 UTC

  • CAPITALISM VS SOCIALISM VS MIXED ECONOMIES? (well intentioned fools) Capitalism

    CAPITALISM VS SOCIALISM VS MIXED ECONOMIES?

    (well intentioned fools)

    Capitalism refers to the allocation of property to individuals providing incentives and the possibility of calculation.

    Socialism refers to the allocation of property to the state, eliminating incentives and the possibility of calculation.

    Mixed economies solve the problem of allocation of proceeds of cooperation under capitalism, by forcible redistribution of the proceeds largely using progressive taxation.

    Mainstream economists debate the degree of ‘takings’ that would achieve a pareto optimum, but evidence is that competition from the restoration of globalization under global consumer capitalism is lowering the maximum possible level of taxation, and that increased opportunity for extra-economic strategic expansion, may lead to wars, which is putting pressure on defense expenditures as well.

    For this variety of reasons, real incomes from other than financialization have been in constant decline as the world equilibrates, and just as conservatives feared, the left has created a moral hazard through expansion of the underclass in order to generate demand to compensate for the general decline in the distribution of productivity and its rewards.

    I always find well intentioned fools well intentioned. But we do not choose our governments. They are chosen for us by external circumstances, and we either adapt well to those circumstances or we do not.

    Source date (UTC): 2017-07-15 11:47:00 UTC