Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • WATCH: RESISTANCE TO SPENDING FROM 2010 People do not want to invest in infrastr

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/build-we-wont/KRUGMAN WATCH: RESISTANCE TO SPENDING FROM 2010

    People do not want to invest in infrastructure in the midst of a class war, even if it’s battles are conducted by policy rather than by violence. People do not have faith in the government. They cannot have faith in the government, because we have too disparate a set of interests.

    You’re approaching the problem from the wrong direction. There is no ‘We” any longer. The use of factions and class warfare to undermine the old class, race and cultural power base was successful.

    If people do not own their government, or feel that it represents them, then it is an external entity. They’re acting as if it is.

    There is no “We”.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:52:00 UTC

  • WATCH – FROM 2010 (Posted for archival purposes) Small business people? Hardly.

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/soros-obama-and-me/KRUGMAN WATCH – FROM 2010

    (Posted for archival purposes)

    Small business people? Hardly. That writing provides a limited return is not a measure of its level of consumption by a large number of customers, but a measure of how little people are willing to pay for it.

    The term Mitch is looking for is not “entrepreneur” it is “Schumpeterian Intellectuals”: people who bring about the destruction of capitalism, the market and the prosperity of national competitiveness by undermining both the sentiment of, and capital structure of entrepreneurship.

    Unfortunately, we don’t have special taxes for Shumpeterian market destroyers like we have special taxes on entrepreneurial market creators. But we can fix that. Perhaps we should level the playing field by heavily taxing political, extra-market goods and services, and lowering taxes on apolitical intra-market goods and services?

    Wouldn’t that be a switch? I mean, why should the amount of income be the axis of measurement, rather than the service provided to the market? Under that measure we could confiscate all of Soros’ money, recover our losses from the bloated financial sector, and reduce the media to non-profit status, and make political writing an unprofitable exercise.

    As for putting capital to a better purpose, that’s not yet proven. Soros was not participating in the market for goods and services by creating unemployment and reorganizing that capital. He’s just using remunerative coercion under state protections. And extra-market remunerative coercion at that. A form of coercion made possible only by the restraint of violence by others in order to create the somewhat free market – a restraint he does not himself employ. And while that asymmetry of restraint may not be apparent to your cult of those who are incapable of holding territory and trade routes, or building an durable government, or durable institutions of calculation and cooperation, it is not lost on those of us whose ancestors have done so for a millennia or more.

    It seems odd to me that so many people fail to grasp just how entertaining and enjoyable civil war is for those people who practice militial restraint – often at high personal cost of forgone opportunity. Modern war is a ‘hell’ only for people who fight in the western model. It’s not for warriors, terrorists and raiders. We forget that the reason we cannot conquer the Afghans is in no small part because raiding and killing are actually enjoyable, entertaining, status-enhancing pass times among practitioners. And creating markets and property rights, and philosophy and econometrics, is a poor substitute.

    Then, perhaps some of us should put our capital stock of violence to better use, if in our restraint, we are disabused by men who simply take advantage of our creation – the market. It would be the optimum use of our asset.

    Or those who put their financial capital stock, or political capital stock to such uses, could pay the opportunity cost of restraint, so that we do not have to. And can continue to devote our energies to the proxy of entrepreneurship and company building instead of the more enjoyable and rewarding use of our capital stock of violence.

    🙂

    Cheers

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 20:42:00 UTC

  • “Down on the street, I interpret a lot of what Krugman says, to mean “make it/ma

    “Down on the street, I interpret a lot of what Krugman says, to mean “make it/manufacture it/produce it it doesn’t matter if you can sell it for a profit or sell it at all, hell stash it in a warehouse until the aliens come, the idea of production is to transfer money to employees, not to sell things and make profit”. Shiit straight out of the old Soviet Union.”

    -George White

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-25 13:14:00 UTC

  • “The issue today is not communism or socialism versus capitalism; it’s how much

    “The issue today is not communism or socialism versus capitalism; it’s how much regulation of capitalism is optimal. ” – Posner

    I DON”T THINK SO

    I think the issue today is, regardless of regulation, what norms produce the benefits of capitalism and what norms threaten it.

    But then I see the world in decades and centuries so I’m a little more attuned to the long run.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 13:54:00 UTC

  • TO CAPITALISM “The major modern challenges to capitalism came not from that or a

    http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/09/has-capitalism-revivedsurvived-posner.htmlCHALLENGES TO CAPITALISM

    “The major modern challenges to capitalism came not from that or any other depression, but from the two world wars of the twentieth century, without which it is hard to believe that the European nations would have lost their colonies, experienced a great depression (in the 1930s), or (in central and eastern Europe) become communist. Without World War I, it is very doubtful that Russia would have become communist; and without the Soviet conquests in eastern and central Europe in World War II, neither would Poland, Rumania, etc. have become communist.”

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-24 13:51:00 UTC

  • 2007 WHEN I SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN, EVERYONE TREATED ME LIKE AN IDIOT Told ‘ya.

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/charleskadlec/2012/02/06/the-federal-reserves-explicit-goal-devalue-the-dollar-33/IN 2007 WHEN I SAID THIS WOULD HAPPEN, EVERYONE TREATED ME LIKE AN IDIOT

    Told ‘ya. No Other Way Out.

    Period.

    (Of course, I haven’t had any US dollars since 2009, or US assets since 2010.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-20 10:29:00 UTC

  • DEATH PANELS. Told you. You cant control costs any other way. So care will be de

    DEATH PANELS.

    Told you. You cant control costs any other way. So care will be delayed. People will die from delay. People will die because of death panels. High cost experimentation will stop. The R and D will decline. We will export our only remaining technical advantage offshore.

    So top medical care will require medical tourism. Great for me. Sucks for everyone else.

    Should have just given people medical visa cards and subsidized hospitals and clinics to accept them. Create a signaling-only medical economy like we have for all other goods, so that the wealthy continue to pay for R&D and ordinary people benefit from the expenditures of the wealthy.

    Like every other process in human history.

    Sigh.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-16 14:28:00 UTC

  • ON FERTILITY Money = kids Which is how it must be

    http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/09/11/more-money-more-children/MORE ON FERTILITY

    Money = kids

    Which is how it must be.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-16 12:17:00 UTC

  • article. But the title reflects one on my suggestions. Split off the insurance c

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/09/america-the-nuclear-armed-insurance-company-in-one-chart/Weak article. But the title reflects one on my suggestions.

    Split off the insurance company from the states.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-13 14:50:00 UTC

  • ON STRATEGY In my experience, strategy is not something you should be looking fo

    ON STRATEGY

    In my experience, strategy is not something you should be looking for outside of your business. If you are, then its hopeless.

    Strategy is a largely logical and empirical problem. And aesthetics are as well.

    The reason that, in my experience, large companies need strategic advice is because the incentives in the business are either incorrectly organized, or the information used to create aggregates by which decisions are made is incorrectly organized. Or there is no rational leader in the organization who either understands the business, or has the power ( or believes he does ) to alter the business.

    You might criticize me for brevity here, but i promise that any criticism is only my choice of brevity, not my failure to understand.

    I cannot recall , ever, in my career, a time when the answer to the strategic problem was not readily available in the company, and often well known. And that management, board or investor influence was not the causal problem. Ever.

    The people next to the customers almost always know the answer.

    My job, almost without exception, was to socialize with empirical and logical argument, what was commonly held knowledge somewhere in the organization. And thus arm everyone with the concepts and vocabulary to advocate the best idea and make it impossible for political land grabbing, and a lack of transparency to prevent the strategy that was obvious from emerging by self organizing means.

    This was a more effective strategy than delivering a powerpoint that could easily be ignored.

    When selling my service I used the reluctant close all the time, to the horror of my sales staff.

    “I will do the work if you want me to. But you must be sure that you want the right answer to your question. Because I will find it, and you might not like it. And I have better things to do than spend my time with organizations that do not really want to change. “

    Always worked.

    I stopped doing strategy in 2005 when I spent six months with a certain tech giant having to talk to them like kindergardeners and realized that they did not want to change. Because their incentives were contrary to the market. And I decided that money isnt that important to me. The market will (and has) taught them what I could not.

    And it was nowhere near as considerate as I am.

    We teach political economics. Macro economics. Which is little more than democratic ideology wrapped in a thin veneer of fragile correlative mathematics.

    And while I am not one of those people that advocates austrian economics – micro economics – in the political sphere ( its largely been incorporated already). I think that we should teach accounting, finance and austrian economics much more so than the silliness of the liberal arts education.

    Because Austrian economics is first and foremost a theory of incentives, and the organizational model of the self organizing organization, as a response to the self organizing market.

    Command and control went out with the age if sail. Central control went out with the collapse of world communism.

    We argue that the world has gone socialistic. But in fact, it has gone Corporatist: just as all governments in history have been.

    Companies are increasingly perishable alliances of people and capital that must constantly reorganize in response to the market.

    And that is the only strategic law that we must currently understand.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-09-12 07:29:00 UTC