Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • CONSENSUS, INTENT, TABOO AND SACRED VS INCENTIVES AND INSTITUTIONS : ANOTHER INE

    CONSENSUS, INTENT, TABOO AND SACRED VS INCENTIVES AND INSTITUTIONS : ANOTHER INEQUALITY

    (very good piece)

    We humans are usually much happier once we figure out that “consensus and intent” are possible only for small groups, and beyond that scale we must construct protocols (processes) and incentives (information) via institutions (formal institutions) such that it is unnecessary for individuals to constantly exist in conflict between incentives for self interest and the goals of the organization and the polity.

    There are certain “taboos and sacredness” that it is possible to instill pedagogically. But the more rational and educated the human the less taboos can be used to restrain him from making exceptions that he can justify by his reason. The lower the intelligence of individuals, the more they rely upon intuition, upon the information that they obtain from others, and upon intuitions of ‘sacred and taboo’. So the more educated the populace, the more complex the division of knowledge and labor, the more necessary are incentives and institutions and the lower value there is to “consensus, intent, sacredness and taboo”.

    We require formal institutions. The pricing system is our most important formal information system. It tells us everything we need to know about our condition related to that of others, and tells us what we we should be doing to serve others whether we want to do it, or can do it, or not. It is our most important information system. Morality and ethics captured in the law prohibits a spectrum of “free riding” (the violation of the contract for logical participation in cooperation) from the criminal, to the ethical, to the conspiratorial, to the moral. We are left to our own devices to prevent conquest. Army, Religion and Credit are our most common defenses.

    The failure of the sentimental, lesser mind, is not to grasp this basic spectrum whereby humans are materially unequal in their abilities an there frames of reference, and therefore in their means of action. The lower you are on the scale, the more consensus, intent, taboo, and sacred, and the more you depend upon others for knowledge necessary for action. The higher you are on the scale the more you depend on reason, incentives, justification, institutions and abstract information to make your decisions independently of those who rely upon their peers.

    This pattern means that the exceptional people are always trying to outwit the less, and therefore, invent new economic means which those below them adopt and later benefit from. We tend to think only in terms of technology and consumption, and not behavior as technology. But rational innovations can easily be adopted by repetition and habituation and from that we develop the sacred and the taboo.

    As such the rational and scientific solution to the problem of creating commons is, as the british did, privatization of administration of the commons so that institutions and rules and incentives can suffice where consensus, intent, taboo and sacred cannot.

    The enlightenment error is everywhere. We are not equal. We are not similar, and that is why we form a division of knowledge and labor. We cannot ask each other to operate by the same consensus, intent, taboo and sacredness. Because we unequally make use of peers versus non-peer, abstract, information.

    The conservatives say this in moral language that is so arational it is impossible to disassemble. But they have made sacred this set of ideas. And that is how they function.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-10 03:00:00 UTC

  • How To Rapidly Become A Billionaire

    (seriously) (worth reading) [I]t’s been done. Secret? Threaten a big company’s revenue stream or customer base, by providing a service better than they do. Why is that possible? Internal incompetence of bureaucracies. Why? Because brands always seek to facilitate the brand with tangential value rather than deliver a product or service in the most excellent way possible for consumers regardless of brand. Almost all companies make this mistake, Apple and Microsoft included. Dropbox should never have had a chance. But every other large organization failed by trying to “leverage”. That is a fallacy. Beats threatened Apple. Multiple companies threatened Facebook. Unfortunately management falsely understands the leverage as risk mitigation rather than risk amplification. Make it excellent. Threaten them over their mistakes. That is how you become a billionaire in short fashion. Thankfully I don’t care to be more than a millionaire. I do my threatening of paradigmatic fallacies with political philosophy and for me that is a greater reward.

  • How To Rapidly Become A Billionaire

    (seriously) (worth reading) [I]t’s been done. Secret? Threaten a big company’s revenue stream or customer base, by providing a service better than they do. Why is that possible? Internal incompetence of bureaucracies. Why? Because brands always seek to facilitate the brand with tangential value rather than deliver a product or service in the most excellent way possible for consumers regardless of brand. Almost all companies make this mistake, Apple and Microsoft included. Dropbox should never have had a chance. But every other large organization failed by trying to “leverage”. That is a fallacy. Beats threatened Apple. Multiple companies threatened Facebook. Unfortunately management falsely understands the leverage as risk mitigation rather than risk amplification. Make it excellent. Threaten them over their mistakes. That is how you become a billionaire in short fashion. Thankfully I don’t care to be more than a millionaire. I do my threatening of paradigmatic fallacies with political philosophy and for me that is a greater reward.

  • CORRECTING THE LIBERTARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST CORPORATIONS Corporations are collec

    CORRECTING THE LIBERTARIAN ARGUMENT AGAINST CORPORATIONS

    Corporations are collections of people insured by the state in order to decrease the risk of legal attacks on one hand and increase employment, wealth and taxes on the other.

    Unfortunately, for historical reasons, this legal protection and corporeal terminology evolved rather than insurance and economic terminology.

    As such, most of the political rhetoric regarding corporations as analogies for people are empty verbalisms.

    The correct amalogy is public-private investments in order for the state to encourage risk taking by insuring owners against legal risk.

    This turns out to be useful during early capitalism, but decreesses in value as wealth increaees.

    Public private partnerships are useful and necessary means of producing commons which are later fully privatized.

    No populace has SURVIVED economic competition without this strategy.

    The evolutionary failure is in not privatizing (uninsuring) these entities once one has a functioning economy.

    This is another example of the confusion caused by conflating administrative law and insurance functions and economic policy in a single governmental body.

    If instead we used insurers and insurer paid legal processes, and loser-pays we could achieve the same effect.

    However, the libertarian logical fallacy is that such public private partnerships are not nevessary for the initial production of an economy and the organic development of laws that facilitate risk taking.

    We are correct that this insurance should be withdrawn at some point, and that it had gone too far. But we are wrong to assume that it is not competitively necessary for a polity to generate a high trust, high velicity economy.

    Westerners invented most capitalist law. But once law is invented, it can be restated and reformed without its historical linguistic and cultural baggage.

    This is the problem: the empty verbalism of organic development using governments mixing functions of administrative law, insurer, producer of commons, and economic policy.

    As such many if our arguments are empty verbalisms not attempts at institutional reformation.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-07 01:09:00 UTC

  • A Propertarian Solution To Getting Consumers Money To Spend

    A PROPERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THE COMING MOBS OF PITCHFORKS – A BETTER WAY OF GETTING PEOPLE MINIMUM INCOME (READ THIS) (IMPORTANT PIECE) See http://topinfopost.com/2014/06/30/ultra-rich-mans-letter-to-my-fellow-filthy-rich-americans-the-pitchforks-are-coming (regardless of your political persuasion, you should read this. because it’s the best existing answer to the social problem of post-agrarian capitalism). [T]his might sound like a criticism, but it’s not: he “gets it” sentimentally, he doesn’t get it economically, or institutionally, because he’s not knowledgeable enough to ‘get it’ economically or institutionally. But the fact that he expresses his ideas sentimentally, is more USEFUL than expressing them economically or institutionally. Because people will not understand the importance of the economic and institutional arguments. The institutional problem we face with engaging in systematic dependency-creating redistribution is giving everyone the right incentives, rather than those that encourage the expansion of the government, which is a parasite on consumers and producers alike. The economic problem we face with creating institutionalized redistribution is doing it without doing more damage to the complex system of information provided by prices and wages. We forget too easily that capitalism refers to the *voluntary organization of production* in contrast to the various involuntary means of organizing production. The reason why capitalism produces prosperity and socialism doesn’t is because under the voluntary organization of production people have both the incentive to work and producers the ability to make rational plans under ever-changing conditions. Under socialism, people have the incentive not to work, or to work as little as possible, and it is impossible to rationally organize production to serve the desires of other producers and consumers. So capitalism isn’t a matter of preference, it’s a matter of necessity. But here is the rub – and the solution. [W]hen our governments were invented, people worked in an agrarian society where our productivity was marginally indifferent, and determined not so much by our abilities, but whether we controlled our breeding, and whether we had the discipline to work hard. Today, disconnected from the productivity of the land, no longer farmers, no longer farm workers, even if we want to work, many of us cannot, because we can do nothing productive enough to participate in production under the voluntary organization of production. But this is logical a mistake we’ve inherited from our agrarian past. The most important part of making the voluntarily organization of production possible, is respecting other people’s property rights, and respecting the commons, and not increasing the expenses that others must bear for your existence in the world. That is why the west is wealthier than the rest – the high trust society. But respecting property – forgoing pleasures, and policing other so that they also forgo pleasures that would make the voluntary organization of production difficult and expensive if not impossible – is a form of work. If you respect property, the commons, and do not increase the costs that others must bear to support you, and police the behavior of others so that they respect property rights too, then you are in fact, working in production. You are working to produce the law, order and property rights that make the voluntary organization of production possible. The high trust society is just as important to the voluntary organization of society as are the resources that go into that production. As such, we must pay people for that work that they do, or we are failing to pay them for their participation in the production of the necessary conditions under which we can voluntarily organize production using the information provided by the pricing system, and our individual incentives to work in order to increase our consumption. [T]his is the “missing” moral argument for redistribution that is economically sound, and institutionally sound, that we have been searching for since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700’s in England (and which Marx got terribly wrong at the cost of 100M lives, and which Keynes also got terribly wrong, which has cost us again, possibly, the economic health of western civilization.) The economically sound, and institutionally safe method of accomplishing this wage payment for constructing the social order that is necessary for the voluntary organization of production under the pricing system is to (a) redistribute money directly from the treasury to consumers via debit cards (b) base the amount of the distribution on monthly sales taxes collected, and eliminate as much of the income tax structure as possible, if not all of it, and (c) construct that payment as a non-guaranteed commission such that the more people in the work force, the less there is to go around (d) give it to everyone. (e) remove all employment laws, discrimination laws, minimum wage laws and the like (f) make it as much as we can economically tolerate (f) eliminate all other redistributive and controlling government programs and organizations and add that to the payment. (g) and lastly, and perhaps equally as importantly, use direct-from-treasury lending on all single-home single-owner mortgages, and single owner business properties at zero interest rate over 15 years. (g) As Galbraith and I both argued before his death, refinance and write down all mortgages against the treasury and pay them off over 30 years. There is no reason that an investor has the long term right to the interest on a mortgage at public expense. (And yes I have worked through the consequences to institutional investors. This bypasses institutional investors by eliminating the need for them.) Why this set of solutions? Because this (1) makes employment a preference not a necessity, and therefore not subject to regulation, (2) encourages everyone to limit the scope of government and maximize personal take home giving producers and consumers the same interest in keep ing the parasitic state as small as possible (3) doesn’t interfere with the pricing structure by artificially pricing labor and distorting the international price of american products and services. The macro economic importance of this point is greater than the importance of the first two. (4) also this solution would force the population to resist all immigration other than that which increases productivity, and depress the current fictionalization. (5) eliminates the class warfare in government by giving us exactly the same interest. (6) most importantly, it eliminates the majority of the financial sector, by pushing money directly to consumers and causing the banks to compete for consumer savings, rather than construct predatory consumer credit schemes, as we distribute money from the treasury down through the banking system. The impact of this on dismantling the influence of the financial sector on political and world affairs is something that if understood is more profound than the evolution of fiat currency in the first place. I wish I had time to give this the treatment it’s worthy of, but it will have to do for now. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine

  • A Propertarian Solution To Getting Consumers Money To Spend

    A PROPERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THE COMING MOBS OF PITCHFORKS – A BETTER WAY OF GETTING PEOPLE MINIMUM INCOME (READ THIS) (IMPORTANT PIECE) See http://topinfopost.com/2014/06/30/ultra-rich-mans-letter-to-my-fellow-filthy-rich-americans-the-pitchforks-are-coming (regardless of your political persuasion, you should read this. because it’s the best existing answer to the social problem of post-agrarian capitalism). [T]his might sound like a criticism, but it’s not: he “gets it” sentimentally, he doesn’t get it economically, or institutionally, because he’s not knowledgeable enough to ‘get it’ economically or institutionally. But the fact that he expresses his ideas sentimentally, is more USEFUL than expressing them economically or institutionally. Because people will not understand the importance of the economic and institutional arguments. The institutional problem we face with engaging in systematic dependency-creating redistribution is giving everyone the right incentives, rather than those that encourage the expansion of the government, which is a parasite on consumers and producers alike. The economic problem we face with creating institutionalized redistribution is doing it without doing more damage to the complex system of information provided by prices and wages. We forget too easily that capitalism refers to the *voluntary organization of production* in contrast to the various involuntary means of organizing production. The reason why capitalism produces prosperity and socialism doesn’t is because under the voluntary organization of production people have both the incentive to work and producers the ability to make rational plans under ever-changing conditions. Under socialism, people have the incentive not to work, or to work as little as possible, and it is impossible to rationally organize production to serve the desires of other producers and consumers. So capitalism isn’t a matter of preference, it’s a matter of necessity. But here is the rub – and the solution. [W]hen our governments were invented, people worked in an agrarian society where our productivity was marginally indifferent, and determined not so much by our abilities, but whether we controlled our breeding, and whether we had the discipline to work hard. Today, disconnected from the productivity of the land, no longer farmers, no longer farm workers, even if we want to work, many of us cannot, because we can do nothing productive enough to participate in production under the voluntary organization of production. But this is logical a mistake we’ve inherited from our agrarian past. The most important part of making the voluntarily organization of production possible, is respecting other people’s property rights, and respecting the commons, and not increasing the expenses that others must bear for your existence in the world. That is why the west is wealthier than the rest – the high trust society. But respecting property – forgoing pleasures, and policing other so that they also forgo pleasures that would make the voluntary organization of production difficult and expensive if not impossible – is a form of work. If you respect property, the commons, and do not increase the costs that others must bear to support you, and police the behavior of others so that they respect property rights too, then you are in fact, working in production. You are working to produce the law, order and property rights that make the voluntary organization of production possible. The high trust society is just as important to the voluntary organization of society as are the resources that go into that production. As such, we must pay people for that work that they do, or we are failing to pay them for their participation in the production of the necessary conditions under which we can voluntarily organize production using the information provided by the pricing system, and our individual incentives to work in order to increase our consumption. [T]his is the “missing” moral argument for redistribution that is economically sound, and institutionally sound, that we have been searching for since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700’s in England (and which Marx got terribly wrong at the cost of 100M lives, and which Keynes also got terribly wrong, which has cost us again, possibly, the economic health of western civilization.) The economically sound, and institutionally safe method of accomplishing this wage payment for constructing the social order that is necessary for the voluntary organization of production under the pricing system is to (a) redistribute money directly from the treasury to consumers via debit cards (b) base the amount of the distribution on monthly sales taxes collected, and eliminate as much of the income tax structure as possible, if not all of it, and (c) construct that payment as a non-guaranteed commission such that the more people in the work force, the less there is to go around (d) give it to everyone. (e) remove all employment laws, discrimination laws, minimum wage laws and the like (f) make it as much as we can economically tolerate (f) eliminate all other redistributive and controlling government programs and organizations and add that to the payment. (g) and lastly, and perhaps equally as importantly, use direct-from-treasury lending on all single-home single-owner mortgages, and single owner business properties at zero interest rate over 15 years. (g) As Galbraith and I both argued before his death, refinance and write down all mortgages against the treasury and pay them off over 30 years. There is no reason that an investor has the long term right to the interest on a mortgage at public expense. (And yes I have worked through the consequences to institutional investors. This bypasses institutional investors by eliminating the need for them.) Why this set of solutions? Because this (1) makes employment a preference not a necessity, and therefore not subject to regulation, (2) encourages everyone to limit the scope of government and maximize personal take home giving producers and consumers the same interest in keep ing the parasitic state as small as possible (3) doesn’t interfere with the pricing structure by artificially pricing labor and distorting the international price of american products and services. The macro economic importance of this point is greater than the importance of the first two. (4) also this solution would force the population to resist all immigration other than that which increases productivity, and depress the current fictionalization. (5) eliminates the class warfare in government by giving us exactly the same interest. (6) most importantly, it eliminates the majority of the financial sector, by pushing money directly to consumers and causing the banks to compete for consumer savings, rather than construct predatory consumer credit schemes, as we distribute money from the treasury down through the banking system. The impact of this on dismantling the influence of the financial sector on political and world affairs is something that if understood is more profound than the evolution of fiat currency in the first place. I wish I had time to give this the treatment it’s worthy of, but it will have to do for now. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev Ukraine

  • PROPERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THE COMING MOBS OF PITCHFORKS – A BETTER WAY OF GETTING

    http://topinfopost.com/2014/06/30/ultra-rich-mans-letter-to-my-fellow-filthy-rich-americans-the-pitchforks-are-comingA PROPERTARIAN SOLUTION TO THE COMING MOBS OF PITCHFORKS – A BETTER WAY OF GETTING PEOPLE MINIMUM INCOME

    (READ THIS) (IMPORTANT PIECE)

    (regardless of your political persuasion, you should read this. because it’s the best existing answer to the social problem of post-agrarian capitalism).

    This might sound like a criticism, but it’s not: he “gets it” sentimentally, he doesn’t get it economically, or institutionally, because he’s not knowledgeable enough to ‘get it’ economically or institutionally. But the fact that he expresses his ideas sentimentally, is more USEFUL than expressing them economically or institutionally. Because people will not understand the importance of the economic and institutional arguments.

    The institutional problem we face with engaging in systematic dependency-creating redistribution is giving everyone the right incentives, rather than those that encourage the expansion of the government, which is a parasite on consumers and producers alike. The economic problem we face with creating institutionalized redistribution is doing it without doing more damage to the complex system of information provided by prices and wages. We forget too easily that capitalism refers to the *voluntary organization of production* in contrast to the various involuntary means of organizing production.

    The reason why capitalism produces prosperity and socialism doesn’t is because under the voluntary organization of production people have both the incentive to work and producers the ability to make rational plans under ever-changing conditions. Under socialism, people have the incentive not to work, or to work as little as possible, and it is impossible to rationally organize production to serve the desires of other producers and consumers. So capitalism isn’t a matter of preference, it’s a matter of necessity.

    But here is the rub – and the solution.

    When our governments were invented, people worked in an agrarian society where our productivity was marginally indifferent, and determined not so much by our abilities, but whether we controlled our breeding, and whether we had the discipline to work hard. Today, disconnected from the productivity of the land, no longer farmers, no longer farm workers, even if we want to work, many of us cannot, because we can do nothing productive enough to participate in production under the voluntary organization of production.

    But this is logical a mistake we’ve inherited from our agrarian past. The most important part of making the voluntarily organization of production possible, is respecting other people’s property rights, and respecting the commons, and not increasing the expenses that others must bear for your existence in the world. That is why the west is wealthier than the rest – the high trust society.

    But respecting property – forgoing pleasures, and policing other so that they also forgo pleasures that would make the voluntary organization of production difficult and expensive if not impossible – is a form of work. If you respect property, the commons, and do not increase the costs that others must bear to support you, and police the behavior of others so that they respect property rights too, then you are in fact, working in production. You are working to produce the law, order and property rights that make the voluntary organization of production possible. The high trust society is just as important to the voluntary organization of society as are the resources that go into that production.

    As such, we must pay people for that work that they do, or we are failing to pay them for their participation in the production of the necessary conditions under which we can voluntarily organize production using the information provided by the pricing system, and our individual incentives to work in order to increase our consumption.

    This is the “missing” moral argument for redistribution that is economically sound, and institutionally sound, that we have been searching for since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700’s in England (and which Marx got terribly wrong at the cost of 100M lives, and which Keynes also got terribly wrong, which has cost us again, possibly, the economic health of western civilization.)

    The economically sound, and institutionally safe method of accomplishing this wage payment for constructing the social order that is necessary for the voluntary organization of production under the pricing system is to (a) redistribute money directly from the treasury to consumers via debit cards (b) base the amount of the distribution on monthly sales taxes collected, and eliminate as much of the income tax structure as possible, if not all of it, and (c) construct that payment as a non-guaranteed commission such that the more people in the work force, the less there is to go around (d) give it to everyone. (e) remove all employment laws, discrimination laws, minimum wage laws and the like (f) make it as much as we can economically tolerate (f) eliminate all other redistributive and controlling government programs and organizations and add that to the payment. (g) and lastly, and perhaps equally as importantly, use direct-from-treasury lending on all single-home single-owner mortgages, and single owner business properties at zero interest rate over 15 years. (g) As Galbraith and I both argued before his death, refinance and write down all mortgages against the treasury and pay them off over 30 years. There is no reason that an investor has the long term right to the interest on a mortgage at public expense. (And yes I have worked through the consequences to institutional investors. This bypasses institutional investors by eliminating the need for them.)

    Why this set of solutions? Because this (1) makes employment a preference not a necessity, and therefore not subject to regulation, (2) encourages everyone to limit the scope of government and maximize personal take home giving producers and consumers the same interest in keep ing the parasitic state as small as possible (3) doesn’t interfere with the pricing structure by artificially pricing labor and distorting the international price of american products and services. The macro economic importance of this point is greater than the importance of the first two. (4) also this solution would force the population to resist all immigration other than that which increases productivity, and depress the current fictionalization. (5) eliminates the class warfare in government by giving us exactly the same interest. (6) most importantly, it eliminates the majority of the financial sector, by pushing money directly to consumers and causing the banks to compete for consumer savings, rather than construct predatory consumer credit schemes, as we distribute money from the treasury down through the banking system. The impact of this on dismantling the influence of the financial sector on political and world affairs is something that if understood is more profound than the evolution of fiat currency in the first place.

    I wish I had time to give this the treatment it’s worthy of, but it will have to do for now.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev Ukraine

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-05 13:45:00 UTC

  • “From the behavior of many rich people we can infer they live constantly terrori

    —“From the behavior of many rich people we can infer they live

    constantly terrorized that other rich people think that they are

    poorer than they actually are.”— Taleb

    Well, as a former member of that set, the thrill of the competition in one’s field, despite that much of it is a lottery effect, is exceeded only by the excitement of meeting and working with increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane people, on projects and ideas that are increasingly interesting rather than tedious and mundane.

    Nassim dealt with the (exasperating and epistemically challenged) financial sector, but engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes and artists tend to be fairly interesting – and they fill you with awe and humility. And that experience is as awe inspiring on a daily basis as is the feeling of revelation one experienced from one’s most profound professors.

    So we tend to forget that what separates the west from the rest is heroism. Egalitarian heroism. And the absurd excesses of the upper economic classes are a minor side effect of the cultural processes that create them. And that cultural process is what produces, when not suppresses by authority or mysticism, the rapid evolution of western civilization, despite its status as a small, poor, backward people on the margins of the bronze age.

    Be glad we produce such extremes, because of the benefits we obtain from the cultural process that creates them.

    Revel in it. If there is anything in man that approaches the divine, that is it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-07-03 09:42:00 UTC

  • MARK ANDREESSEN ON PIKETTY’S NONSENSE Timothy B. Lee: This relates to another to

    MARK ANDREESSEN ON PIKETTY’S NONSENSE

    Timothy B. Lee: This relates to another topic I wanted to ask about. You’ve had some harsh words for Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose new book is trendy in liberal circles right now. Do you think he’s right that we’re going to see a growing gap between the rich and the poor in the coming years?

    Marc Andreessen:The funny thing about Piketty is that he has a lot more faith in returns on invested capital than any professional investor I’ve ever met. It’s actually very interesting about his book. This is exactly what you’d expect form a French socialist economist. He assumes it’s really easy to put money in the market for 40 years or 80 years or 100 years and have it compound at these amazing rates. He never explains how that’s supposed to happen.

    Every investment manager I know is sweating the opposite problem, which is: what do I do? Where do I get the growth? I can’t get into the public market, so I have to go into the private market. The problem in the private market is there isn’t much growth. Maybe a dozen hedge funds. After that they’re not that good. The returns degrade down to S&P 500 levels.

    Timothy B. Lee: That’s not so bad is it? The S&P 500 has returned 6 or 7 percent real growth for the last few decades.

    Marc Andreessen:Yeah, 6 or 7 percent. But if you look at the last 15 years they’re much less than that. Jeremy Siegel put out his book about how there’s never been a 10-year period where you lose money in the stock market — right at the beginning of a very long period where you lose money for 10-plus years.

    Piketty thinks it’s really easy to compound capital at scale. There’s just a lot of evidence that that’s not true. The shining example of that is: where are all the big companies and the big families?

    If you look at what’s actually happening in the Forbes 400 and the Fortune 500, churn is accelerating. One year it’s some real estate family, and then the next year it’s like, “There’s Larry Page, where did he come from?” Somehow Piketty looks through that to a world where all this change is going to just stop. [He has] this idea that normal is 18th-century feudal France, and we’re going to go back to it.

    He does this other dodge where the 20th century doesn’t conform to his theory, but that’s because of the wars and economic dislocations. And so it’s like the 21st century is predicted to be much more peaceful and calm. I don’t know about you but that’s not what I see happening. I look around the world right now and I see exciting things happening that’s causing a lot of changes.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-29 01:29:00 UTC

  • HOW TO RAPIDLY BECOME A BILLIONAIRE? (seriously) (worth reading) Its been done.

    HOW TO RAPIDLY BECOME A BILLIONAIRE?

    (seriously) (worth reading)

    Its been done. Secret? Threaten a big company’s revenue stream or customer base, by providing a service better than they do.

    Why is that possible? Internal incompetence of bureaucracies. Why? Because brands always seek to facilitate the brand with tangential value rather than deliver a product or service in the most excellent way possible for consumers regardless of brand. Almost all companies make this mistake, Apple and Microsoft included.

    Dropbox should never have had a chance. But every other large organization failed by trying to “leverage”. That is a fallacy.

    Beats threatened Apple. Multiple companies threatened Facebook.

    Unfortunately management falsely understands the leverage as risk mitigation rather than risk amplification.

    Make it excellent. Threaten them over their mistakes.

    That is how you become a billionaire in short fashion.

    Thankfully I don’t care to be more than a millionaire. I do my threatening of paradigmatic fallacies with political philosophy and for me that is a greater reward. 🙂

    (Please Share so we see what people say. ;). )

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-25 05:59:00 UTC