Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • I DIDN’T REALIZE I’D PAY FOR IT! “Of course, I want people to have health care,”

    I DIDN’T REALIZE I’D PAY FOR IT!

    “Of course, I want people to have health care,” [Cindy] Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.” – San Jose Mercury-News. Via Michael Lee “Ask A Rational Conservative”

    Well you know, first you run out of other people’s money. Then you run out of other people’s credit.

    I guess I’m ok with the Keynesian Progressive fantasy of infinite consumption. I mean. I have guns.

    I hope you like Soylent Green.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 09:59:00 UTC

  • CHINESE MONETARY THOUGHTS I HEARD FROM A MOUSE We all know that the Chinese have

    CHINESE MONETARY THOUGHTS I HEARD FROM A MOUSE

    We all know that the Chinese have been running around the world buying up all possible resources.

    But interestingly enough it turns out that they’re buying them in dollars and dollar denominated accounts, and securing them against their holding of US bonds.

    Now you can look at this a couple of ways.

    First, It could be that that buyers have greater faith in the dollar than the Renminbi. And so the price for assets is lower if paid in dollars.

    Second, it could be that the Chinese expect our dollar to explode and that if it does, they will leave the rest of the world holding the bag.

    Third, it could be that by spreading US debt around the world, it becomes possible to use the entire debt structure as an economic alliance against what the USA must do at some point, which is destroy the value of the dollar.

    Or. Of course. All of the above. Now, ‘nice folk’ don’t think in these kind of terms. But you know, I do, and I know that there are other people in the world who think like me. And it’s not ‘nice folk’ I’m worried about.

    It’s people like me.

    (Thank you Roman and Michael. )

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 09:28:00 UTC

  • HUMAN BEHAVIOR QUESTION: LOTTOCRATIC BUSINESS PROCESSES? If you have worked with

    HUMAN BEHAVIOR QUESTION: LOTTOCRATIC BUSINESS PROCESSES?

    If you have worked with me before, you know that I have a sort of personal commitment to eliminating overhead bureaucracy and empowering the people who actually do the work. I’ve found that it’s better to distribute management functions to a large number of people, each of whom does just a little bit of it.

    The side effects are fascinating. First, you educate a lot of people about how to run a business. If you rotate these duties you basically train most of your staff in how to operate the boring but necessary parts. Second, it makes it impossible for people to use their management duties to obscure information. Third, it prevents stagnation and encourages innovation. People want to eliminate these little process functions rather than expand them. So they tend to invent ways of making them go away.

    TIME CARDS AND EXPENSES AS LOTTOCRACY

    I have been toying with the idea of lottocratically assigning timesheet approvals around a services company. That is, anyone with one year of experience or more gets X randomly assigned timesheets and expense reports to review and approve. Most of what is accomplished by approvals is error checking. If accounting, upon entering and posting, approves it too, your score goes up, and if they reject it your score goes down.

    Now you might think this is crazy. But I’m pretty sure, that if I made it an option. Most people in any company would want to do it. Particularly the less experienced people. And the senior people would avoid it at all costs.

    People would want to do it because it increases Sovereignty. They are more in control, and participating more in their environment. And from my perspective, an informed and participatory employee is happier one, who brags about his or her job to others. Which helps recruiting. And customers ‘SENSE’ it. And that ‘sense’ sells.

    I’M WONDERING WHAT YOU THINK?

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 01:19:00 UTC

  • OF *COURSE* THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT IS TAKING PLACE OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA. Academia

    OF *COURSE* THE DARK ENLIGHTENMENT IS TAKING PLACE OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA.

    Academia is part of the state. It’s the church of the state. And Academia’s bureaucratic and commercial incentives are to foster the fantasy of upper middle class universalism so that they can sell their over-priced,defective, non-performing wares, without warranty or right of suit, to a highly motivated, ignorant and idealistically motivated consumer, who will do nothing more than blame himself, society or the government, for his or her failure to obtain upper middle class status, despite being sold ‘the promise’ by universities.

    Not that academics aren’t involved in our movement. They are. It’s just interesting that the taboo of empirical work on ‘differences’ and ‘incompatibilities’ is as dominant in state-sponsored-academia as it was under the pre-reformation church.

    TOTALITARIAN HUMANISM, CULTURAL MARXISM, POSTMODERNISM AND SOCIALISM ARE THE RELIGION OF THE STATE

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 06:10:00 UTC

  • MICROECONOMIC FALLACY #1 No. Our interests do NOT equilibrate. All your assumpti

    MICROECONOMIC FALLACY #1

    No. Our interests do NOT equilibrate.

    All your assumptions blind you to the false notion that human society is a process if equality rather than an ongoing struggle to civilize each person in each generation.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 05:04:00 UTC

  • INCENTIVES DEFEAT ECONOMIC INCENTIVES “….economists fail to realize what a Kaf

    http://cafehayek.com/2013/10/politics-trumps-economics.htmlPOLITICAL INCENTIVES DEFEAT ECONOMIC INCENTIVES

    “….economists fail to realize what a Kafka-esque world we live in trying to engineer the perfect regulatory system while the banks involvement in the process will always dwarf ours. We should be thinking about the political process and not just the economic process. The person in the street might have a better idea of what’s important.” – Russ Roberts

    But economists do not know why. (Although I do) It is because humans are necessiarly MORAL and will punish IMMORALITY at high cost. If a community is homogenous then this condition is politically and economically productive. But if a polity is diverse then this condition is politically and economically deconstructive. Because the incentive to prevent immorality is greater than the incentive to produce shared prosperity.

    If this natural and uncircumventable human behavior is understood, it becomes obvious that only small homogenous polities can be marginally free and democratic.

    The disorderly introduction of women into the voting pool, without a requirement for property, provided sufficient incentives to destroy the civil society, the high trust society, the nuclear family.

    A friend reminds me that women, which are, empirically, more interpersonally sensitive than empirically sensitive, less politically intuitive, less politically knowledgeable, and lacking the norms and traditions of males toward politics, were largely taken advantage of by Puritans, Marxists, Postmodernists, and Totalitarian Humanists. But empirically speaking, women’s left leaning votes provided the marginal difference to dismantle western civilization.

    Economists are part of the utopian fantasy of equality. This is partly because they work with gross aggregate numbers that launder our differences.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 04:17:00 UTC

  • FALLACY: MATERNITY AND PATERNITY LEAVE Contribute to glass ceiling. Have high ca

    http://www.economics21.org/commentary/longer-maternity-leave-not-so-great-women-after-all#.Uk50Mqb9F5Q.facebookANOTHER FALLACY: MATERNITY AND PATERNITY LEAVE

    Contribute to glass ceiling. Have high career costs. Contribute to income inequality.

    There is no free lunch.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-10-04 03:55:00 UTC

  • (Funny) HOW TO ZAP YOUR DEV TEAM “I just told you the business requirements. I’v

    (Funny) HOW TO ZAP YOUR DEV TEAM

    “I just told you the business requirements. I’ve told you that each of the solutions you’ve come up with satisfies the business requirements and is equally beneficial to the user. But you have to pick a solution. My only requirement is that it’s consistent. As long as its consistent, I won’t have a sales or training problem. So the only question then is the amount of work it is for you to get it done. And that’s your decision, not mine.”

    Short circuit. 🙂 Sparks.

    Never ceases to entertain me. 🙂 Ever. It’s like using a pen laser to tease a cat. 😉

    Humans are the best toys EVER. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-30 05:59:00 UTC

  • AUSTERITY – WHY THE CONSERVATIVES WON. In a series of posts in 2009-2011 on Paul

    AUSTERITY – WHY THE CONSERVATIVES WON.

    In a series of posts in 2009-2011 on Paul Krugman’s blog on the NYT (who will not engage us), and Karl Smith’s (who at the time had the freedom and inclination to engage us), I argued that the only possible solution to the conflict between the short time preference of the left, and the long time preference of the right, was to propose a range of spending and saving options that gave something to everyone. I did this because back-channel conservatives were arguing that they would give into spending and redistribution if they could dismantle some part of monopoly on indoctrination held by the left.

    And I know I sounded ridiculous at the time. But my argument was sound. And it’s been proven over time to have been correct: Haidt’s thesis that the conservatives have a lock on morality that can only be overcome by demographics is correct. The conservatives will happily bring the government to a craw, and possibly even bankrupt it, if it means fighting for what they morally believe.

    We know that human beings will pay very high costs to punish cheating. This is why the middle doesn’t move. Free riding is cheating. Sure the bankers are bad. But that’s government’s fault. But free riding is also government’s fault. THere is no greater chance that americans will tolerate free riding than germans will.

    MORALITY TRUMPS ECONOMICS.

    Morality is a product of genetic distribution and family structure. If you don’t grasp and internalize that. Then you will never grasp and internalize politics. And you policy initiatives will always fail.

    LIBERTARIANS AND PROGRESSIVES ALIKE

    It may not be obvious that I’m criticizing both progressives and libertarians. I am. We are not equal. We do not possess the same moral codes. Our reproductive interests are not the same. And at some point there is a limit to the compromise we will pay to sacrifice our reproductive interests for others.

    That we intuit these sensations as moral rather than biological is simply our own egocentrism playing games with us. We are intuitive creatures bound by a thin veil of reason, and enmeshed in a network of habits we call a socially constructed reality. But our justifications are little more than that. In the end, over time, we obey our selfish genes, or we will not exist.

    He who breeds wins.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-28 08:27:00 UTC

  • INDUCTION AND HUMAN SOCIETY The world is a lot easier to understand if you think

    INDUCTION AND HUMAN SOCIETY

    The world is a lot easier to understand if you think in terms of incentives that exist in the present, rather than ‘what has happened before’.

    Induction is a problem everywhere. The past repeats itself where the incentives are repeated. It’s not that we necessarily will do what we did before, if the incentives are different. Economic history helps us understand that beliefs justify incentives, but that history is a product of incentives. Beliefs and reasons are part of justification. And justification is misleading.

    We can’t learn from our justifications what we can learn from reconstructing our incentives.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-28 05:18:00 UTC