Curt Doolittle

Theme: Incentives

  • I’VE ALWAYS BEEN TEASED FOR MY MANAGERIAL ‘OPTIMISM’ (Even though, operationally

    http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130620130134-128811924-note-to-managers-positivity-mattersFUNNY : I’VE ALWAYS BEEN TEASED FOR MY MANAGERIAL ‘OPTIMISM’

    (Even though, operationally, and financially, I’m pretty pessimistic really.)

    But there are good reasons for broadcasting optimism – in the sense that there are other options at any given piont, not just hollow encouragement. One of my favorite lines is “what is the worst that can happen if we do this?” Which is usually followed by “And what are our choices from there?” I also try to explain to engineers that science doesn’t progress by being right. It progresses by taking risks (and in business, this means competitive risks) Asking this one question repeatedly tends to train people to ask it of themselves, and plan accordingly.

    You can never let your people feel self doubt. Give them room. Let them know that if you’re asking them to do risky things, that failure is a possibility, but that there are always additional options. Give them the credit when they win, and be prepared with options so that you can catch them when they fail.

    THE SCARCITY OF POSITIVE THINKING

    Now on the analytical side, I know a) that thinking is a resource that is scarce. b) that decisions are not clear, or made in isolation, and are easily influenced by external stimuli. So the problem is giving people the right things to think about and eliminating things that they shouldn’t think about.

    Self doubt, fear, “is the mind killer’. Primarily because it’s easier to think about bad stuff, than it is to do the hard work of ignoring bad stuff and simply working on collecting ideas. We are as mentally effort-avoiding as we are physical labor-avoiding. So preserve your people’s prescious mental resources by keeping them focused on problem solving rather than fear of failure. (I view fear of failure as a weakness in management, that want to go hide in an office pretending to add value, or working political games rather than assisting the people.)

    BEHAVIOR IN THE FACE OF SCARCITY

    Over the weekend I read a lot of ancient and medieval law. And, not so much in the ancient world, but certainly in the medieval world, you get the feeling of this incredible WEIGHT of pervasive and oppressive scarcity affecting everything that people think, say and do.

    Our world is so absent of scarcity that we generally are trying to motivate people by the reward of fulfillment, more so than money.

    THE PROBLEM OF OPTIMISM

    The mistake I tend to make, is that I give my staff the confidence in their own thoughts, so much so, that they start to actually believe me, and they discount my ability to influence them, and so I must let them fail to get my influence over them back. I wish I could somehow figure out how to get out of this trap. But I can’t. I love that people develop into independent actors who are confident in their decisions.

    PARENTING RATHER THAN DISCIPLINING

    But I think this is just good parenting. Which is, a far better way to run a business than is military cum bureaucratic processes, that we inherited from our european, and particularly british ancestors.

    The best executive advice I have is the sort of wisdom that I got from the good-to-great data: build people from within, build a family regulated by cultural values, do what you can succeed at doing, plus my own advice: that scale and credit are an extraordinary competitive advantage, but one that calcifies your organization in mediocrity. Drive to excellence not efficiency. Profit will come from competitive survival, not from efficient production. Efficient production too often takes your focus off the customer. And the customer is the hardest asset to obtain.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-26 09:22:00 UTC

  • False: Krugman Gets It Wrong On Purpose Again. 🙂

    FALSEConservatives and Sewars – The NYT 1) It doesn’t follow that a one time expense, followed by fees for use is the same as redistribution that creates dependencies. the first requires action, the second does not. THe free-rider problem is different from the progressive-fees problem. Free riding is a negative signal that says free riding is a ‘right’, progressive fees illustrate that this is not a ‘right’, but a ‘charity’. This sends ‘truthful’ signals to both parties. And truthful signals are necessary to prohibit involuntary transfers. 2) It doesn’t follow that investment in a commons is the same as state-mandated redistribution. If that was true, there wouldn’t be factories, universities, churches and roads. 3) It doesn’t follow that investment in a universal commons is not conservative. Only that to do so out of charity at a cost, is different than to do so out of opportunity for profit. 4) it doesn’t follow that taxes must be levied other than fees. (They don’t need to be.) 5) It doesn’t follow that taxes should be put into a general pool and open to use OTHER than the purpose levied. (they shouldn’t) 6) It doesn’t follow that the monopolistic state is more efficient than competitive private administration (it’s not) 7) It doesn’t follow that funding the bureaucracy doesn’t produce externalities that are of intolerable cost. (it does – one of which is forcing us to spend time defending ourselves against other people’s political movements, as they seek to control the predatory state) [C]onservatism is a metaphorical language. Conservatives have one ‘curse word’ with multiple meanings: “Socialism” – state control of property and production and b) “Democratic redistributive socialism” – state ownership of the proceeds from limited private control of property. This ‘curse word’ is a catch-all for ‘those people that use the state to destroy aristocratic individualism and the status signals that I get from individualism regardless of my rank. And this is important. Conservatives do not feel victims because they obtain positive status signals from other conservatives regardless of their economic rank. This is obtainable in human societies only through religious conformity and it’s consequences, or economic conformity and its consequences. Conservatives do not object to investment in the commons. Conservatism places higher value on delaying gratification than immediate gratification – the formation of moral capital – which is an inarticulate expression meaning training human beings to enforce a prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds. Conservatism is the argument that we should not fund the expansionary bureaucratic state that out of deterministic necessity subverts our property rights and therefore our freedom, and therefore our ‘character’ – a euphemism for the prohibition on involuntary transfers of all kinds – because it is our universal prohibition on involuntary transfers both within our families and tribes and without, that is the source of western exceptionalism: the high trust society. Our high trust society is unique because we CAN trust others to avoid involuntary transfers, because of the pervasive prohibition on involuntary transfer that we developed under Manorailism by demonstrating fitness needed to obtain land to rent. Partly as a rebellion against the Catholic Church, partly because the church forbid cousin marriage and granted women property rights, in order to break up the tribes and large land holding families. Partly as an ancient indo-european tradition of personal sovereignty in the nobility, which became a status signal, and, thankfully remains a status signal in conservatives. Small homogenous polities are redistributive. Large heterogeneous polities are not. This is because trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities. And trust DECLINES in heterogeneous polities because of the different signals used by different groups, and the fact that signals in-group are ‘cheaper’ (discounted) that signals across groups with differing signals. A strong state in a small homogenous polity that functions as an extended family and therefore with high redistribution, is entirely possible. But by creating a powerful state in a heterogeneous polity, it becomes necessary and useful for people to compete via extra-market means using the state by seeking redistributions and limited monopoly (legal) rights in order to advance their signaling strategy. (Which is what Dr. Krugman does, daily – advance an alternative strategy. A strategy that he does not recognize is from the Ghetto. And would cause a return to the low trust society. And **IS*** right now, causing a return to the low trust society. Because the low trust society is natural to man. Thats why it exists everywhere but the aristocratic west.

  • IS BAD. “Will someone tell me this article is wrong?!” No, the article is not wr

    http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/06/03/michael-c-munger/recycling-can-it-be-wrong-when-it-feels-so-rightRECYCLING IS BAD.

    “Will someone tell me this article is wrong?!”

    No, the article is not wrong. It is correct. Even graciously so.

    HOWEVER:

    1) THE ECONOMICS OF THE RECYCLING MOVEMENT

    The reasons to enforce recycling are (a) political in that it advances the leftist ideological vacuum created by the failure of socialism in theory and practice, (b) psychological – it creates awareness of the veyr important issue of maintaining a clean environment, and (c) it places economic pressure (the possibility of boycott) on marketing and packaging companies.

    But recycling anything other than ‘oil, gas, liquid poisons and radioactives’ is not ‘good for the environment’ or logical or economic in any sense of the word. The optimum solution is to compartmentalize deposits land-fills so that they can be sold off and ‘mined’ at a future date when and if it ever becomes economically viable. In other words, the cost of sorting, transporting, breaking down and distributing goods is not sensible.

    The problem with plastics is not recycling but that they don’t break down well. Plastic bottles and packaging in particular. Recycling is simply a means of providing political cover using false economic calculations for what is probably the most troublesome pollutant that we make. The seas are full of that junk (although, mining the seas for plastic might eventually become a good business for someone. it depreciates our experience of the environment.)

    Contrary to popular belief, landfills are small, inexpensive, and concentrate waste, and create an opportunity for future recycling at low cost. They concentrate resources at low cost for future use. They are ‘savings accounts’ full of resources that can be mined when the economics make it sensible to mine them. Conversely, it’s extremely expensive to transport all that nonsense around to use it now, when we don’t NEED to use it. And we can only tell that we NEED to use something if FIRST, the pricing system tells us so, and SECOND if our moral codes, once understood, suggest that there are not involuntary transfers being created .

    Of course, the economic solution is to drastically reduce population and drastically increase consumption. It’s not that we consume too much. That’s not really logical. It’s that we have too many people consuming.

    Consumption is like information. The more the better. Space travel for example, is the ultimate consumption. It’s freaking expensive. The mass required to convert into energy necessary to get to another planet is terrifyingly expensive in every possible term. So is the information necessary to solve the problem. Every cost we distribute widely is a cost not dedicated to the narrow pursuit of something like space travel.

    2) MORAL RULES ARE PROHIBITIONS ON THEFT

    The author is correct in what he senses, but cannot articulate:

    (a) the pricing system does not make visible ALL costs. (This is one of the three or for conceptual failures in libertarian economic theory – because it discounts the cost of morals – norms, and morals are extremely costly to develop in any society.) Prices tell us what people WANT, what they NEED, and are WILLING TO DO to get it. The last being the most important. But that’s ALL they tell us.

    (b) He doesn’t understand that morals costs are material costs. Because our actions are costly. Our time is costly. But most importantly, our OPPORTUNITIES that we DON’T TAKE are very costly – that’s what manners and ethics are: lists of opportunities that we do NOT take, because it transfers costs in time, opportunity, effort and money, from others involuntarily. Most economists do not make this mistake. Almost all political science, and all political philosophers make this mistake – almost bar none.

    3) LIES AND DAMNED LIES

    The excuses offered by producers of pollutants, and those of the recycling movement are as ridiculous as the carbon market argument: POLLUTING IS STEALING. PERIOD. And GOVERNMENTS created the ability to pollute by giving SANCTION to polluters, and requiring that ordinary consumers have ‘standing’ in order to sue polluters. There is no reason that we cannot require x number of signatures in order to produce ‘standing’ for a crime of pollution, in which every single person has only a micro-claim against the polluter.

    The current argument is that our politicians are elected for this purpose. The stupidity of the argument never ceases to amaze me: why then do we need demonstrably influenceable and corruptible politicians elected by majority rule instead of courts to resolve what are of necessity property rights? This is yet another illustration of the argument against representational government and in favor of the common law, courts, and property rights.

    You can’t sue polluters because the government prevents you from doing it. The common law allows you to. It allowed you to. Governments took away that right on purpose in order to increase taxation available from pollution generating manufacturers. (Yes, you can look it up.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-06-04 05:36:00 UTC

  • THE MARKET PUNISHES IRRESPONSIBILITY. THE GOVERNMENT REWARDS IT

    THE MARKET PUNISHES IRRESPONSIBILITY. THE GOVERNMENT REWARDS IT.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-30 23:30:00 UTC

  • THREAD ON STARVING THE BEAST (GOVERNMENT) (Just logging it here.) NOTE: For thos

    http://angrybearblog.com/2013/05/starving-the-beast-aka-drowning-the-people-in-the-bathwater-seattle-bridge-edition.htmlA THREAD ON STARVING THE BEAST (GOVERNMENT)

    (Just logging it here.)

    NOTE: For those who aren’t aware (a) our infrastructure is in dire repair. (b) a bridge fell into the river north of seattle yesterday. (c) the cause was the driver of a truck carrying an oversize load of very heavy equipment running into the bridge and destroying it’s structural integrity.

    My comment here is over the politicization of this incident as a complaint against starving the beast, rather than the fact that it was human error and accident.

    ———–CURT DOOLITTLE

    Starving the beast is cheaper than the alternatives: secession, revolution, and civil war.

    Conservatives simply prefer one set of externalities and progressives another.

    That the difference in these preferences is eugenic vs dysgenic albeit stated in moralistic language is the only topic worth debating.

    And in that debate, i am fairly sure conservatives are correct.

    ———–STEVE ROTH

    @Curt Doolittle: “Starving the beast is cheaper than the alternatives: secession, revolution, and civil war.”

    1. Not sure what you mean by “cheaper.” See SRW on accounting profit vs economic profit: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/4043.html

    2. An interesting tradeoff you’re suggesting You’re saying that if we increase government revenues (currently the lowest in the developed world, and far below the average) by a couple or few points, the result will be “secession, revolution, and civil war”?

    Really??

    “i am fairly sure conservatives are correct”

    Chicken Little was undoubtedly correct as well.

    ———–CURT DOOLITTLE

    @Steve Roth,

    Explanation: One of my interests is understanding ideological strategies, ideological arguments, the moral sentiments that drive those arguments, and comparing those sentiments to reproductive strategies. Net is that family structure, or rather, reproductive model, increases in diversity as we become economically independent individuals. Our ‘interests’ diverge as the tribe, family, nuclear family dissolve – the distribution of our morality therefore does not remain constant. This change is what we see in voting patterns. (It’s why single women determine the current election cycle – all other things being equal.) Men don’t change, but women increasingly express their natural reproductive strategies in daily life, and their biases in voting patterns. And they vote more often and in greater percentages than males.

    I understand conservative morality, ideology, and reproductive strategy (status signaling, mating, child rearing). And as such I try to explain to the moderate left that wants to understand the other side’s motivations, how the conservatives think, but in rational terms (libertarian terms) rather than the allegorical, historical, and morally loaded terms used by conservatives.

    RE: 1) It’s not a matter of calculating profit, but of born losses. 🙂 From the conservative point of view the cost, to them, of progressive ideas is infinite. Starving (bankrupting) the beast is the cheapest way for them to fight it. Just as incrementalism, undermining the constitution, and most recently, postmodern ideology (liberal philosophy) are inexpensive means of accomplishing political goals of the left.

    To conduct a war over the definition of the distribution of property rights between the individual (the right) and the commons (the left) and the structure and value of signals, one can use ideology, religion, civil resistance and disobedience, immigration and emigration, secession, revolution, and civil war to achieve one’s ends. And in that sequence, ideology is the least expensive strategy and it’s available within a democracy without the need for escalation. Conservatives understood in the 70′s and 80′s that the assault on the family, on morality, and on meritocracy would win, and that is why they developed the think tank network and adopted libertarian economic ideology. The tea party is the middle class equivalent resistance movement, and interestingly makes use of both conservative, classical liberal and libertarian ideas.

    RE: 2) I’m saying that (a) the conservative strategy is to bankrupt and block and therefore delegitimize the state. ‘State’ and ‘government’ being technical terms – the first corporal, the second organizational. (b) That religion is the oldest means of determining the limits of governance, and that the right, especially outside of the coastal immigrant cities, embraces religion and moral argument as a means of opposition to the attack on the family, the status signals, and the ability to use boycotting and ostracization to sustain their expected norms. On the left, the Liberal ideology of postmodernism is expressly contra-logical in an effort to use the strategy of monotheistic religions using false statements about the nature of man instead of false statements about man’s relation to nature. It is an attempt to use religious strategies in an effort to compensate for the failure of socialism in theory and practice. It is just as absurd as the right’s strategy. But both right and left are more influential than we empiricists, because they speak in moral language accessible to the many. Policy is not made by empirical analysis of a supposed common good. Anything but.

    The point is, that both left and right strategies WORK because of the distribution of talents of individuals and the distribution of their interests, and those of us who make intellectual arguments, for the benefit of a population with an assumed homogeneity of interests, fail to understand that at the reproductive level, and therefore the moral level, there is no homogeneity of interest between these groups once the nuclear family is sufficiently weakened and the mores and norms associated with that nuclear family also weakened.

    Data is data. Voting data at the national level (which is what campaign strategy makes use of) is the only empirical data we have to work with and that data is telling us some very uncomfortable things – there is no ‘we’ in the normative sense, only a ‘we’ in the legal sense.

    Cheers

    ——– COBERLY

    @Curt Doolittle

    perhaps you should do less, or say less.

    i have to guess that by eugenic vs dysgenic, and moralistic, you are trying to say that helping people stay alive weakens the gene pool.

    that topic is not worth debating. if for no other reason than your complete failure to understand Darwin, and the history of “eugenic” thinking, including that which inspired the late Adolf Hitler.

    if, that is, it’s okay for me to mention Hitler in this context.

    ———CURT DOOLITTLE

    @Coberly

    You do realize that your comment translates to a postmodernist raspberry?

    Whether you like something or not is not relevant. Whether you want to engage it or not is not relevant. Displaying your disapproval and disengagement is not an argument. It is the very definition of failing to make one.

    I take great pride in never fearing or surrendering an argument. On the other hand your reputation as a troll is well earned, and my time is precious.

    I’ll agree to ignore you if you’ll do the same.

    Cheers. 🙂

    ———–COBERLY

    @Curt

    if you don’t want a raspberry you need to be a little more careful how you say things. your reply to steve roth above merits a little more nuanced answer than the one i gave you.

    i am afraid it will come to the same thing in the end, intellectual pretension notwithstanding.

    i am afraid your definition of troll doesn’t quite meet the situation either. but like you i don’t have time at the moment to “debate.”

    ———–CURT DOOLITTLE

    @Coberly,

    Thanks. Although I suspect that you confuse the rigor of analytical language in expressing causal relations with pretension, and absence of rigor in morally loaded language as something other than the lack of articulated causal relation – and therefore a lack of comprehension. 🙂

    Analytical philosophy: It’s how the discipline is done.

    As to “The same thing”…. that is, I assume, whether there is a transfer of reproductive frequency from the middle to the lower classes, and the requisite impact on normative, political, legal institutions, and consequential economic impact. I’ll leave it to Flynn et al to argue whether the Flynn effect (omnipresent scientific language and measurement) compensates for the drop in mean IQ. So far, it is beginning to look like it doesn’t. But the jury is still out.

    But then, I”m not making moral statements. Just descriptive ones. 🙂

    Cheers.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-25 10:40:00 UTC

  • WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL MONEY SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED? by Curt Doolittle, The Prop

    WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ALL MONEY SUDDENLY DISAPPEARED?

    by Curt Doolittle, The Propertarian Institute

    (Reposted from Quora)

    Believe it or not, this subject has been given quite a bit of treatment in the literature – mostly during the early part of the last century in response to the communist, socialist and fascist movements.

    REALITY:

    Almost everyone, on the planet, except for perhaps ~500M subsistence farmers would die in the first 30-90 days. Yes. Really. Seriously.

    MONEY

    Money makes planning of complex things possible.

    Humans literally cannot ‘think’ as we understand the term, without numbers, money, property, contracts, credit and interest. Just as drawings and written words help us remember things, numbers help us remember things we could not remember, think about, or compare without them. Money makes numbers possible to apply to things that are DIFFERENT. Whereas numbers without money can only be used for things that are the SAME. As such, we say that money makes it possible to compare objects that are otherwise incommensurable. Money renders the world commensurable: open to planning and the use of mathematics (measurement and forecasting).

    In practical terms, money and prices form an information system that tells us all what to do in real time in response to what others want and need. It is how we tell each other how to cooperate. It is the human social system. And the use of that social system, plus the capture of fossile fuel, has taken us out of ignorance and poverty.

    CONVERSELY

    What money and credit have also done is make it possible to breed again up to new malthusian levels. While Malthus was only half right, he was half right. Group selection accomplishes what malthus did not account for. THe general belief of ‘progressives’ is that technology will ‘save us again’ just like agrarianism, and then pastoralism saved us in the past. But the truth is we just breed up to these levels again, and reduce ourselves back to poverty.

    The problem then is that we must control our breeding. And that has been, except for a brief period in china, or the middle ages in England under Manorialism impossible to achieve. Partly because it is so profitable to sell things to people who bear children, and those children as they too mature.

    EXAMPLES

    THe US economy is primarily driven by housing, and the high rate of return on lending for housing, and the large supply of labor jobs for the production of housing. From this perspective, the exceptional nature of the american economy is not the product of ‘democracy’ or innovation, but the product of selling off a continent to waves of immigrants and their offspring, and using the profits from the sale of the (conquered) continent to invest in increasingly complex technologies.

    THe Chinese for example have figured this out and are doing the same thing but moving people from the ‘poor’ village farm to cities where they *hope* the population will be more productive than they were at subsistence farming. China can do this bcause it adopted consumer capitalism (money, prices and interest) and abandoned communism (no money, no prices, and no interest).

    The problem other countries face (India and say, Ukraine) is india is so pervasively corrupt that it’s not possible to create infrastructure without privatization of the investment through corruption, and the population is still expanding unsustainably in a dirty and hot environment. THe problem Ukraine faces, is that it cannot play ‘china’ because the lower levels of government are so corrupt and the country sees no demand for its currency, so the government cannot issue credit, and therefore the people remain poor.

    IN CLOSING

    When you say ‘money went away’ what you must also understand is that with money and prices will go the ability to communicate, and think. Literally. Humans would not be able to cooperate, communicate, plan and think without money. Worse, they would have no incentive to do so, because to have an incentive one must be able to think of something to do. And you couldn’t think of anything to do that you couldn’t do with your own two hands.

    THere is about 4 days worth of energy, and 14 days worth of food in the pipeline. If you made money vanish, you would need to make 6B people vanish along with it.

    You may find a more thorough, or a more simplistic answer elsewhere. But this is the answer, and there isnt any alternative.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-05-01 06:37:00 UTC

  • What Would Happen If There Were No Money On Earth?

    Believe it or not, this subject has been given quite a bit of treatment in the literature – mostly during the early part of the last century in response to the communist, socialist and fascist movements.

    REALITY:
    Almost everyone, on the planet,  except for perhaps ~500M subsistence farmers would die in the first 30-90 days.  Yes.  Really.  Seriously.

    MONEY
    Money makes planning of complex things possible.
    Humans literally cannot ‘think’ as we understand the term, without numbers, money, property, contracts, credit and interest. Just as drawings and written words help us remember things, numbers help us remember things we could not remember, think about, or compare without them.  Money makes numbers possible to apply to things that are DIFFERENT.  Whereas numbers without  money can only be used for things that are the SAME. As such, we say that money makes it possible to compare objects that are otherwise incommensurable.  Money renders the world commensurable: open to planning and the use of mathematics (measurement and forecasting).

    In practical terms, money and prices form an information system that tells us all what to do in real time in response to what others want and need. It is how we tell each other how to cooperate.  It is the human social system. And the use of that social system, plus the capture of fossile fuel, has taken us out of ignorance and poverty.

    CONVERSELY
    What money and credit have also done is make it possible to breed again up to new malthusian levels. While Malthus was only half right, he was half right. Group selection accomplishes what malthus did not account for.  THe general belief of ‘progressives’ is that technology will ‘save us again’ just like agrarianism, and then pastoralism saved us in the past.  But the truth is we just breed up to these levels again, and reduce ourselves back to poverty.

    The problem then is that we must control our breeding.  And that has been, except for a brief period in china, or the middle ages in England under Manorialism impossible to achieve. Partly because it is so profitable to sell things to people who bear children, and those children as they too mature.

    EXAMPLES
    THe US economy is primarily driven by housing, and the high rate of return on lending for housing, and the large supply of labor jobs for the production of housing. From this perspective, the exceptional nature of the american economy is not the product of ‘democracy’ or innovation, but the product of selling off a continent to waves of immigrants and their offspring, and using the profits from the sale of the (conquered) continent to invest in increasingly complex technologies.

    THe Chinese for example have figured this out and are doing the same thing but moving people from the ‘poor’ village farm to cities where they *hope* the population will be more productive than they were at subsistence farming. China can do this bcause it adopted consumer capitalism (money, prices and interest) and abandoned communism (no money, no prices, and no interest). 

    The problem other countries face (India and say, Ukraine) is india is so pervasively corrupt that it’s not possible to create infrastructure without privatization of the investment through corruption, and the population is still expanding unsustainably in a dirty and hot environment.  THe problem Ukraine faces, is that it cannot play ‘china’ because the lower levels of government are so corrupt and the country sees no demand for its currency, so the government cannot issue credit, and therefore the people remain poor.

    IN CLOSING
    When you say ‘money went away’ what you must also understand is that with money and prices will go the ability to communicate, and think. Literally.  Humans would not be able to cooperate, communicate, plan and think without money. Worse, they would have no incentive to do so, because to have an incentive one must be able to think of something to do.  And you couldn’t think of anything to do that you couldn’t do with your own two hands.

    THere is about 4 days worth of energy, and 14 days worth of food in the pipeline. If you made money vanish, you would need to make 6B people vanish along with it.

    You may find a more thorough, or a more simplistic answer elsewhere. But this is the answer, and there isnt any alternative.

    https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-there-were-no-money-on-earth

  • What Is The Libertarian Position On The Phoebus Cartel?

    The libertarian position is often misinterpreted.  We do not suggest that cartels will not form. Rather, that cartels are not sustainable.   Our position is that they aren’t sustainable, nor are monopolies, without government support.  If they are sustainable, then they’re probably market-efficient, and therefore not a cartel in practice -although its pretty difficult to imagine such a thing.

    The counter argument is that government interference can end cartels more quickly than the market.  Although this is both questionable and comes at a very high price: Phone service was a lot better Before the breakup of ATT, and the attack on MIcrosoft was an attack on the desire of a company to give us for free what others wanted money for.

    (One concern: I am not confident that the land problem has been solved however – or that it matters. But I think it is arguable that the problem of land cannot be solved without war  on one end of the spectrum and restricted reproduction on the other.)

    As others have noted, the Phoebus cartel did disappear quickly. So I assume that you were simply confused by the difference between whether cartels are possible or whether they’re sustainable.

    https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-libertarian-position-on-the-Phoebus-cartel

  • OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the so

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e/ECONOMICS OF RACE AND REPRODUCTION

    QUESTION: “Why is single motherhood so common in the south?”

    Well, of course I don’t like to say the impolitic truth and then have to fend off the ignorant. Quora is peopled by the demographic that does not rely on data. We know this because almost all questions there can be answered easily with available data. But since all data of meaning requires knowledge of economics and statistics, and ignorance of economics and statistics is pervasive, this prohibits access to comprehension of that data, and prohibits resolution of questions of popular opinion and political doctrine.

    As such, it’s tedious to answer impolitic questions here. That is why few people do it.

    That said, I will do my best:

    FAMILY STRUCTURE

    1) Family structure and family economic structures determine poverty. The nuclear family is highly efficient economic structure. The two income nuclear family is the most efficient economic structure. For a male it is the smallest tribe he can be alpha in, and maintain access to a female as he declines in desirability For a woman she is the alpha female in her tribe of one, and has a monopoly claim on his production for the duration of her childrearing, despite her declining ‘desirability’ during this time. The nuclear family also places asset demands on the male, and therefore delays marriage and mating, both of which increase the skill level, work experience of the members.

    2) Redistribution undermines the family and increases poverty, partly because men in the lower classes are less desirable (and able) than women in the lower classes, because men are more widely distributed in feature and ability than are women, with more men at the very top (nobel prize winners) and more men at the bottom (persistently impulsive criminality). Our Y chromosome is where nature experiements, and our wider male distribution affects mating under monogamy, and less so under polygyny, because under polygyny, a smaller number of more desirable males can be shared amongst a larger number of marginally more desirable females.

    3) Racial groups are more or less ‘desirable’ as mates worldwide, not just in the states. This has largely to do, as best as any of us can tell, with a mating preference for females with thinner skin in contrast to mates with thicker skin as a signal that is different from the thicker skin of males. Since the only uniform scale of beauty across all cultures, other than symmetry, is quality of female skin clarity, this is the only selection preference necessary to explain racial preferences, other than the rate at which we appear to have exited Africa and begun the process of near-speciation (racial diversification), and the problem of access to vitamin D in the northern climes. This research is impolitic and the people who pursue it are ostracized from academia so it has moved to being conducted under a different guise, or now to china where such things are considered only logical. But the research is available. And it shows that fairer, thinner skin on females with finer features, is more desirable regardless of racial group.

    4) People mate almost entirely within race (<15%) and prefer to associate, work, and live within racial groups. With the consumer marketplace for goods the only shared environment. Extremes can run counter to this fact with crossing occurring at the lower and higher ends of desirability where each individual has better options in mates and often better access to social class by crossing racial boundaries.

    5) Even where racial admixture occurs, it places downward pressure on extra-group status and opportunity (desirability). In other words, racially mixed children maintain the lower of their racial preferences. Altough in black and hispanic communities and families children are still ranked in preference by skin color because it grants access to status both mating and social.

    ECONOMICS

    6) Impulsivity (the ability to resist impulses) varies between the races, with the east asians the least impulsive distribution, and the subsaharan african population the most impulsive. Impulsivity is a positive reproductive strategy unless external (climate) pressures punish survival. Impulsivity places a high penalty on learning ability which favors long periods of ‘frustration’ and concentration.

    7) Impulsivity affects both trustworthiness and creditworthiness. Nuclear families have higher more stable incomes, and are more creditworthy, as well as more economically efficient. As such high densities of nuclear families will produce higher wealth. Higher wealth will generate greater opportunity. Greater opportunity within a geography will increase demand for housing in that geography. Housing in that geography will increase in price. People who live in more impulsive, less efficient groups will of course, be unable to gain access to that geography and its opportunities.

    8) For these reasons (Which I assume I should use graphs to illustrate) the reason that poverty and single motherhood are so prevalent in the south is that 74% of black mothers, and a high percentage of hispanic mothers are unmarried. And they live in close communities reliant on support from extended family members, with populations too high to integrate into more successful communities. White single motherhood is on the increase in the lower classes, and teh USA, Ireland and New Zealand, where the postmodernist and feminist movements have been most successful, have the highest rates of single motherhood among whites, and the countries of southern europe who remain familially integral the lowest: Italy, Greece, Spain and Luxembourg.

    TRUST AND OPPORTUNITY

    All humans are faced with opportunities for both cooperation and conflict at all times. We must choose how to apply our limited time effort and resources to a limited number of opportunities.

    All opportunities other than exchanges of commodities purely on price, consist of a network of cost and benefit tradeoffs. All cost and benefit tradeoff’s are simple.

    We trade (cooperate) on all sorts of terms, but economic status, social status, values, language, culture(mythology, habits) are significant terms. Every variation in every property that is not identical in interest is a negative.

    Status signals (status and reputation) have higher value in-group than across groups. Therefore status pressure to encourage each of us to adhere to agreements is of higher value in-group.

    Therefore we trust and cooperate in-group at lower cost and risk than across group.

    This is why people break into racial, cultural, socioeconomic, educational, generational, occupational groups. Because it’s the lowest risk pool of people with the lowest cost of cooperation, even if it’s less productive it may also be the only pool available to you where you can find someone willing to pay the higher cost of cooperating with you across groups.

    Political discourse assumes we want to help each other and we do. The problem is the logic of that statement -it’s meaningless when we CAN help everyone, we must still choose the best return on our help. And we do. And that is how it is. Anything else is irrational.

    SOUTHERN RELIGIOSITY

    Race is the reason for ‘everything’ in the south, including religiosity. Although southern religiosity we must understand is a rebellion against the state, after the north conquered the south. Race is the reason for everything in america. People are born, live, reproduce, associate, work with, and speak to, people within their racial groups except where they participate in the marketplace together.

    RATES OF POVERTY BY RACE

    http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.e…

    RATES OF SINGLE MOTHERHOOD BY RACE

    LINK: http://datacenter.kidscount.org/…

    There is no end of data on this subject.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-04-12 03:28:00 UTC

  • Values And Principles: Should The Us Government Have The Power To Tax One Group In Order To Help Another?

    all commons are redistribution. The question is whether the comons that we contribute to create either hazards, perverse incentives, and free-riding. 

    There has been an organized effort for the beter part of a century, to support rather than avoid free riding, and penalize the middle class to fund reproduction by the lower classes.

    Redistribution is probably EARNED if you adhere to manners, ethics, morals and laws – albiet the argument is too complex for this post.    If you do not adhere of manners, ethics morals and laws, it is very hard to argue that you have earned any form of redistribution.

    https://www.quora.com/Values-and-Principles-Should-the-US-government-have-the-power-to-tax-one-group-in-order-to-help-another