Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • PROPERTY RIGHTS QUESTION? Can anyone explain to me why we assume that we have a

    PROPERTY RIGHTS QUESTION?

    Can anyone explain to me why we assume that we have a right to anticipated natural rates of interest? In other words, why is non-diluted money-proper (commodity money, private money or fiat money), and the expansion of purchasing power of such money, due to increases in demand, a property right?

    (Smart people only please. ie: no empty moralisms.)

    I might be loopy on asthma meds right now but I am trying to resolve this question once and for all. And I can’t find a reason, stated as property rights, why we have the right to privatize increases in value of money, or to profit from the shortage of money.

    Thanks

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-09 06:27:00 UTC

  • Next is negative interest rates. After that we’ll hear mainstream modern monetar

    Next is negative interest rates.

    After that we’ll hear mainstream modern monetary.

    I’m all for MMT if we bypass the banks.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-07 12:01:00 UTC

  • SPLIT CURRENCIES —“A poster writes: Split the currency. 1. International Trade

    SPLIT CURRENCIES

    —“A poster writes: Split the currency.

    1. International Trade Dollars

    2. National Dollars

    3. State Dollars.

    That way the success of a State is for the Benefit of the State. International Money Giveaway schemes do not crash the National Dollar. Those who want to inflate their Dollar, will not take others down with them.”—

    You know, the amount of economic knowledge that the average libertarian has is utterly amazing. I don’t mean the “moral NAPpers” but the rest.

    I get so buried that I take it for granted. And I forget that for most people simple economics is indistinguishable from chemistry, formal logic, or some other symbolic language.

    But it’s the one they most depend upon. And they’re ignorant of it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-07 11:49:00 UTC

  • SENT THEM TO A VILLA IN CYPRUS (personal) (product development) (writing) I sent

    SENT THEM TO A VILLA IN CYPRUS

    (personal) (product development) (writing)

    I sent the development team, and their wives, to a Villa in Cyprus again, for the summer, as incentive to get to feature complete. Lots of strategy in play. They really can’t do much except eat, work, and play there. No distractions from the chaos here. And team bonding is awesome when you live together. They seem pretty happy about it (mostly). One wife isn’t all that thrilled I guess. 🙂 The rest appear to be.

    Until they get to feature complete, my work is to basically leave them alone. Once we get to feature complete, then I get to dump all the minor changes on them. And once that’s done, I’ll have a beta product ready to raise a capital round, just in time for the fall.

    While I”m doing the raise, we work on performance, since it’s a pretty heavy app. The backend is fine. The UI is heavy. And we need to speed it up a bit.

    I suspect the US economy will continue to weaken, but I don’t see a loss of appetite for this kind of product.

    Cyprus is an advantageous banking economy. Ukraine is an advantageous tax economy. We are still trying to figure out how to do all this without being in the predatory US of A, or EU.

    The flip side is that I am pretty free to write now. But book-writing and post-writing are two different things. And the book work is slow going. We’ll see. I’ll keep at it. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-06 08:02:00 UTC

  • RUSSIAN AND CHINESE INCENTIVES TO COOPERATE – LESS THAN THE REST Russia and its

    RUSSIAN AND CHINESE INCENTIVES TO COOPERATE – LESS THAN THE REST

    Russia and its satellites, backward, landlocked, without rivers, could not compete internationally. China, backward, insular, an enormous island, surrounded by sea, desert and mountains, with economically different regions, can be torn apart by international competition.

    Isolated from the rest of the world, China and Russia and its satellites can internally cooperate, if they cannot externally compete.

    The rest of the world has greater incentive to cooperate.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-03 01:54:00 UTC

  • You know, we can put morality back into economics, and radically change politics

    You know, we can put morality back into economics, and radically change politics.

    The human instinct against free riding isn’t escapable in economics. we must account for it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-28 06:52:00 UTC

  • A GOOD CEO MAKES YOU FEEL SAFE TAKING RISKS A good CEO makes you feel safe takin

    A GOOD CEO MAKES YOU FEEL SAFE TAKING RISKS

    A good CEO makes you feel safe taking risks in the interests of the company, and unsafe taking risks that do not. I tell people “I will not let you fail”. If they fail, I congratulate them on what they learned. The absence of failure: efficiency, is a chimera. If you aim for efficiency you will calcify your people, and your organization and it will not respond to the market.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-26 02:23:00 UTC

  • Economic velocity achieved with high trust in a stable population, is very diffe

    Economic velocity achieved with high trust in a stable population, is very different from economic velocity achieved with expansionary credit, in an expanding population. The first requires invention. The second only application.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-21 01:45:00 UTC

  • THE RICH DON’T CONSUME RETURNS ON SAVINGS (worth repeating) –“Piketty’s rich-ge

    THE RICH DON’T CONSUME RETURNS ON SAVINGS

    (worth repeating)

    –“Piketty’s rich-get-ever-richer projection can happen only if the rich don’t live like rich people, that is, that they don’t spend their wealth or the income generated by their wealth. All those savings just sit there making the economy more productive and, in the process, raising wages for the proletariat while the top 1% don’t actually consume any of the returns on those savings. Piketty’s scenario is close to Charles Murray’s desire that the rich live a little less ostentatiously.”—Andrew Biggs.

    (Except for food -restaurants- I bet I ‘live poorer’ than the middle class today. Almost every cent I’ve made goes into investment in my next business. Furthermore, to build ascentium, I lived on zero to 50K a year for two years, and at half my income for most of the rest, and even at my highest salary, less than 60% of my market value. Everything else was reinvested in the business. This is pretty common. Being rich isn’t a matter of consumption. It’s a matter of using your money to make money, rather than using your time, arms and legs. But then there is the entire state-corporatist-financial-sector that vampires off all of us. But entrepreneurs and private investors are not in that category.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 06:31:00 UTC

  • PICKETTY I don’t share Don very often. But here are two (OBVIOUS) criticisms of

    http://cafehayek.com/2014/05/two-piketty-links.htmlCONTRA PICKETTY

    I don’t share Don very often. But here are two (OBVIOUS) criticisms of Picketty’s work that reflect austrian understanding of economics and behavior.

    TWO QUOTES

    —“In other words, there are two ways to explain why the mean wealth of the x% has grown faster than the mean wealth of the whole population. According to Piketty, it means that the richer you are in the first place, the faster your capital grows over time (hence, the dynastic wealth world he foresees). But it might also be the opposite: this phenomenon is exactly what we should expect to see in a world of high wealth turnover, a world where fortune rewards skills, hard work and risk taking. Quite symptomatically, Piketty and its numerous followers have completely dismissed that possibility.”—Guillaume Nicoulaud.

    —“But what if people don’t spend down their savings? That seems to be Piketty’s assumption, at least for the very rich: they build more and more wealth which they don’t spend, and that wealth generates capital income, which they also don’t spend, and so on. If that happens, then the capital-output ratio does keep rising. But this also means that Piketty’s rich-get-ever-richer projection can happen only if the rich don’t live like rich people, that is, that they don’t spend their wealth or the income generated by their wealth. All those savings just sit there making the economy more productive and, in the process, raising wages for the proletariat while the top 1% don’t actually consume any of the returns on those savings. Piketty’s scenario is close to Charles Murray’s desire that the rich live a little less ostentatiously.”—Andrew Biggs.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 04:44:00 UTC