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-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
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101679720Um. Of course?
I’m sorry. But guys who are that smart and can work that hard just can out compete the rest of us. I might be pretty smart, and I can drill on something absurdly complicated forever; but I can’t grok stuff from that many different sources and contexts in one day without having a nervous breakdown. Some of these guys just amaze me. Their sheer ability to switch context on demand. All. Day. Long. Day after day. Year after year. With one person after another. And they don’t get tired. I am so jealous. lol. Sure some guys are lucky. But a lot of them are just smart.
The market is not friendly to stupid. It’s only friendly to lucky once. Guys who do great stuff repeatedly – that’s not luck. That’s brains. And it’s freaking hard.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-16 16:28:00 UTC
http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/05/is-there-too-little-creative-destruction-in-the-us-economy/A SCARCITY OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION – WHY?
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-13 04:29:00 UTC
THE END OF THE MYTH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUE OF DENSE CITIES
Now this is something that I wasn’t sure was going to play out. But it appears that the data is starting to work in favor of suburbia (the ring around a city) more so than the downtown itself. The places that are experiencing growth are those that are not benefitting so much from the immigration of numbers (poor) but the immigration of talent.
So I suspect that the next progressive myth that science is going to undermine, is the virtue of well managed big cities, rather than a number of closely related suburbs.
I’ve sort of been watching the data that’s been slung around for the past decade and I assumed that it was just a matter of cities making it easier for bureaucrats to seek rents. And that’s actually the ‘first cause’. But it didn’t really occur to me that the “seattle/bellevue/redmond” model was actually the one that worked best.
Now, I’ve looked at various Georgist theories, and there is definitely something to e said there since density increases productivity (of smart people) so much. And I’ve also worked at my preferred solution: pay people to do the work of policing laws, commons and norms. And you know that they accomplish slightly different things. My solution would actually distribute the poor into the surrounding territory where their lower value in production is not hampering the productivity of more productive people by forcing them out. Unfortunately the less well off want the value of the city even if they’re a net drag on the generation of tax revenue because really all they serve to do is allow vote buying that allows political and bureaucratic rent seekers to capture more of the revenue for themselves. Also, normative pressure is higher in rural areas, so the more ‘troublesome’ populations are more subject to normative pressures to ‘behave’ than in urban environments. ALso we are stuck with the fact that raising children in a city in no way is as awesome as raising them in a suburban home. (Spoken as someone raised in a small rural farm town, but who has lived in cities or suburbia for most of his adult life.)
Anyway, I want to keep working on this a little more before taking a better position on it.
Net is, that the progressive fantasy is the walking dead at this point. The conservative fantasy is impossible. The Rothbardian fantasy is immoral and impossible. So, what is our solution to the problem of formal institutions that is both moral and possible, even if it’s not ‘efficient’.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-08 15:11:00 UTC
THE VALUE OF DIFFERENT COLLEGE DEGREES
THE BEST 1% DEGREES
(most likely to assist in becoming wealthy)
1. Engineering / Computer Science
2. Economics / Commerce / MBA / (Bachelor’s) Business Administration (BBA)
3. Law / Politics
4. Finance / Accounting
THE BEST-RIGHT OUT OF COLLEGE DEGREES
(you can’t go wrong if you want to always have earning potential)
1. Engineering: $80-90,000 (of any kind at all, and there are LOTS of kinds)
2. Computer Science/ Mathematics: $100,000 (engineering where you don’t get your hands dirty)
3. Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: $105,000
THE BEST GUARANTEED INCOMES (INSULATED OVER THE LONG TERM)
1. Universal Demand: Doctor / Medical Specialist / Nurse
2. Protected Class: Teachers and Professors and other Bureaucrats.
USELESS DEGREES
1. Liberal Arts. (You know who you are.)
THE WORST DEGREES – DEGREES THE HARM YOUR LIFE’S TRAJECTORY
(you will be poor unless you are a statistical anomaly. These degrees mean you will earn 30K or less per year. When the median income is 48K. This means you are barely better off than working minimum wage.)
(Institutionalized Motherhood – Stay home and have kids instead.)
Human Services and Community Organization
Social Work
Counseling Psychology
Early Childhood Education
(institutionalized childhood – save your money and don’t go to college – just volunteer or go to training schools)
Drama and Theater Arts
Studio Arts
Visual and Performing Arts
(Institutionalized introspection – you don’t need education.)
Theology and Religious Vocations
(fields flooded with applications and which do not require skills)
Communication Disorders Sciences and Service
Health and Medical Preparatory Programs
CLOSING COMMENT
IMHO, you are better off taking the lightest possible load, at one of the least expensive and least difficult colleges, in one of the top four fields than you are taking any load in any other degree. You MUST learn to use abstractions at some point. Your intuitions and perceptions are limited to what any other animal can make use of. Only through using abstractions – the mental equivalent of tools – will other humans pay you for your time. Everything else is a useless commodity by comparison.
(I studied fine art. But god gave me gifts. I could tolerate self-enlightenment.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-07 00:59:00 UTC
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/psychology_of_management/2014/05/open_plan_offices_the_new_trend_in_workplace_design.single.html#ixzz30vYjgxzHTHE BUSINESS VALUE OF “ENGINEERED MINGLING”
–“The purpose of all this engineered mingling? It encourages something that a Bloomberg spokesperson terms “institutional eavesdropping.” Employees get a sense of what’s going on in every part of the company—almost through osmosis. As Michael Bloomberg puts it in his book, workers “absorb information peripherally while focusing elsewhere.” And this fuller understanding of corporate doings seems to quell office paranoia. “Openness also constantly puts [employees] in front of their peers,” Bloomberg writes, “preventing childish fantasies that coworkers are out to get them.”–
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-06 05:50:00 UTC
http://news.distractify.com/people/mike-rowe-crushes-a-mans-hopes-for-finding-a-dream-job-and-i-agree-with-him-100/?v=1WARM FUZZIES: LIFE ADVICE
I’ve always wanted to run companies. I couldn’t care less what company it is. As long as I can do it profitably, it’s vaguely interesting, and it’s not immoral (I don’t care if its legal or not, just moral or not), then I feel that I have built my little kingdom and have contributed to society.
When I told my first future father in law this (he was from Westchester County) he was indignant that my plans weren’t more precise. I didn’t want to really argue with him. But it really bothered him.
Do good at what you can do. Don’t look for perfection. It isn’t there.
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-06 04:58:00 UTC
Juan Sebastian Ortiz
—“Yet thanks to the division of labor and capital accumulation even those who leech on producers, the welfare, food stamp, state pension and state income dependent can live an extremely wealthy life in the most Smithian of senses despite not producing any value. “—
This brings up an interesting point. The assumption in libertarian thought, is that adherence to moral codes (NAP) gain one access to the market – access to opportunity created by participating in the market. This assumes, as was true in ancient and medieval (pre-industrial) eras, that we all had labor to contribute. Further, that we gained right to hold property by fighting for the property rights of all members of the polity. These were entry costs, if not also entry-cost-rituals.
Adherence to norms is costly. Respect for rituals is costly. Observance of private property rights is costly. Production is costly in effort. These are very high costs that the individual must bear whether or not he obtains rewards from the market, by paying those costs he makes possible the reduction of transaction costs, that makes the voluntary organization of production (capitalism) possible.
Thought experiment: What happens if only 10% of the population is capable of engaging in production, but their production was sufficient to both keep say 80% of that production, and leave 20% of it for the remaining 80% of the population? The 80% have no means of engaging in production. And adherence to norms, including the norm of property rights, is of no value to them. Yet we could either exterminate them, or pay them to police the social order and make possible the low transaction costs, so that for the minority 10%, the voluntary organization of production remains possible.
So, if ordinary people, engaged in production or not, respect AND enforce property rights necessary for the voluntary organization of production, they are in fact doing labor. If we do not pay them for their efforts, I think that this is free riding. And they are right not to respect property. Or other norms for that matter. And they have no money to function as consumers unless we do so anyway.
So, rather than treat moral rules and private property as natural laws – spurious as that magical term is – I prefer to hold myself to the constant rule of voluntary exchange. If we want people to adhere to and enforce rules so that we can engage in the voluntary organization of production, then we can pay them to. I don’t think they have a ‘right’ to compensation. But then, I don’t think we can hold them to adhering to property rights, which is a very high cost, if we don’t pay them for it.
By applying property rights CONSISTENTLY I end up with this logic. And with that logic, and that consistency, all the fallacies of moral argument disappear. Every human action at all times in favor of cooperation is an exchange.
How does one price payment for adherence to norms? I’m still working on that but it actually looks pretty simple.
Maybe too many jumps there. Think it should be easy for you. Happy to clarify otherwise.
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-05 02:10:00 UTC
ILLNESS AND PRODUCTIVITY
I’ve been sick since, what, the 27th? Maybe 26th? But damn. It’s been a productive period. I think it’s because the UK trip was so important for me.
Want to thank a few people for seriously improving my thinking while in the UK:
Don Finnegan and Andy Curzon. They have strategic intuitions I know how to give voice to. I would not have done this work as I have without something Don said to me a few years ago in Bodrum. I’m sure he didn’t know what impact it had on me. Andy confirmed it and gave me a brilliant strategic direction to work in last year.
Want to again than Sean Gabb for helping me understand the current state of libertarian thought from his perspective.
And of course Ayelam Valentine Agaliba for giving me homework assignments on how to improve my arguments. 🙂
A apologize to Jan Lester who was kind enough to fit me in, but I somehow fouled communications and missed him. London is big and it takes longer to do everything, and I could not get my phone working reliably.
Forever in your debt.
Curt
Source date (UTC): 2014-05-04 09:28:00 UTC