Theme: Productivity

  • Democracy is Irrelevant for The Creation Of Prosperity

    Democracy is Irrelevant for The Creation Of Prosperity. http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/12/democracy-is-irrelevant-for-the-creation-of-prosperity/


    Source date (UTC): 2011-12-08 14:59:47 UTC

    Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/144793298962362370

  • Labor and Education Numbers Illustrate What’s Wrong With Progressives And Keynesianism

    On Modeled Behavior Karl Smith uses these diagrams, and from it concludes:

    “The United States is becoming more educated faster than the economy would absorb educated workers.”

    Actually, that statement would attribute value to education that is not demonstrated by the numbers in the market. It would just as likely suggest that ‘education’ has lost it’s meaning, and that being ‘educated’ is becoming disconnected from being ‘productive’ where ‘Productive’ is determined by the return on one’s skills in the marketplace. Islamic countries misallocate human capital too — by educating people in “islamic studies”. Just as westerners do by educating people into the vast literature and pseudoscience of the democratic mythos. We are still educating people as if they’re farm workers moving into industrial labor as if it’s 1949, and in college in particular, educating the middle class as if they are entering a world of comparative privilege – and the market is demonstrating the folly of it. If the absolute number of ‘hard’ degrees has remained constant since 1963, while the percentage of the population with degrees has increased so dramatically, then we cannot have kept pace with technology that increasingly requires hard degrees. SOLUTION?

      The market is smarter than planners, politicians and economists. ILLUSTRATING THE PROGRESSIVE FAILURE And this is the second post on Modeled Behavior in three days that illustrates what’s wrong with solving for employment using monetary policy instead of solving for inter-temporal productivity using ALL AVAILABLE POLICY. It assumes that inter-temporal redistribution of money for the purpose of increasing consumption regardless of productive ends has NO EFFECT on future productivity. (Thats the whole problem with Keynesianism isn’t it?) It’s the great progressive failure, It demonstrates the failure of progressive policy. It demonstrates the folly of the progressive hijacking of Keynesian ideas — just as progressives – democratic socialists – have hijacked the world ‘liberal’. (Keynesianism has become synonymous with irrational progressive philosophy despite that it does not have to be.) Progressivism is the philosophy of kicking the can down the road until the entire economy collapses from long term misallocation of human capital. From that perspective the IS-MP approach is even more destructive than IS-LM. FWIW: I’m not an anarchist, but a neo-classical liberal using Austrian methodology. Austrianism is a methodology of observation using Propertarian analysis. Austrian methods have been adopted by people with libertarian sentiments. Libertarianism is a philosophy that is an outgrowth of Catholic Natural Law, which is an a restatement of greek philosophy, which in turn is the science of ‘observation’ of human behavior. From this standpoint, Keynesianism is UNSCIENTIFIC because it denies the observation of some factors in order to provide confirmation of other factors. The purpose of the entire progressive project is the accumulation of state power using methods that produce consequences that are harmful to the polity over the long term. There is no free lunch. There is no ‘natural momentum’ to innovation in an economy. Consumption also consumes differences in innovation that make consumption possible. You can borrow across time, but it’s either an investment or a loss, and both investments and losses are cumulative. BTW: There is nothing that can be expressed in mathematics that cannot be expressed in human language. There is quite a bit that can be expressed in human language that cannot be expressed in mathematics. This is because mathematics is a process of maintaining ratios, and language is a process for determining causality. Curt

    • Efficiency and equality are dirty words

      Efficiency and equality are dirty words. http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/11/efficiency-and-equality-are-dirty-words/


      Source date (UTC): 2011-11-25 14:57:08 UTC

      Original post: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/140081590268207104

    • Efficiency and equality are dirty words. Break up the eurozone. That’s what shou

      Efficiency and equality are dirty words.

      Break up the eurozone. That’s what should be done.

      Why create another even more totalitarian bureaucracy that abuses our freedoms in europe to match the one in the USA?

      THe west is special because no one was unable to consolidate power, and had to rely upon the balance of powers, specialization and trade.

      China solidified, the muslims and ottomans solidified, the hindus solidified at least somewhat, and look what happened. The west, despite being poor and backward invented the industrial revolution TWICE. No one else invented it even once.

      The balance of power and freedom are more important to us and to humanity than efficiency and equality.

      “Efficiency and equality are dirty words.”


      Source date (UTC): 2011-11-24 16:41:00 UTC

    • RUMINATION: Macro always seems to have a sort of 19th century concept of an econ

      RUMINATION: Macro always seems to have a sort of 19th century concept of an economy — one of trying to distribute the basics, rather than a 21st concept of an economy that consists almost ENTIRELY OF STATUS SIGNALS.


      Source date (UTC): 2011-11-05 06:57:00 UTC

    • Positive news from Karl: “Non-residential fixed investment is on fire. Equipment

      Positive news from Karl:

      “Non-residential fixed investment is on fire. Equipment and Software is burning it up at a 17% growth rate. Indeed, non-residential fixed investment contributed almost as much to growth as did consumption. Not grew at the same rate as consumption, but the absolute increase in business investment was almost as great as the absolute increase in consumption.”

      “An open question is how long this blistering level of Business Investment can keep going. It’s a little crazy at this point. We are still below normal on capacity utilization. Real retail sales have yet to make new highs.”


      Source date (UTC): 2011-10-30 14:35:00 UTC

    • is much easier for poor countries to grow faster than it is for rich countries b

      http://blog-imfdirect.imf.org/2011/10/21/growing-pains-europes-dilemma/”It is much easier for poor countries to grow faster than it is for rich countries because they can import technology they do not already have. It is much more difficult to grow fast if you are already rich and at the technology frontier—now you can only get richer by innovation.” -Bas Bakker

      This is a basic law of economics. It’s immutable. But that doesn’t stop people from ignoring it….


      Source date (UTC): 2011-10-21 15:18:00 UTC

    • “The Department of Transportation found that, in 2009, commutes by private car t

      “The Department of Transportation found that, in 2009, commutes by private car took, on average, 23 minutes. Public transportation, by contrast, took an average of 53 minutes. “

      Public transportation is slow. It’s loud. It’s ugly, and it’s dirty. It’s only suitable for people with very regular schedules. It dampens consumption. It’s absurdly expensive per person – particularly rail. It feeds the public sector bureaucracy. It allows large corporations to get subsidized labor rather than pay increased wages. And frankly, it’s unsanitary. So, it’s all well and good that downtown cores make use of public transportation. But otherwise, we’d be better off giving people zero interest used car loans. I realize some people love it. And as a resident of downtown Boston I appreciated it – when I wasn’t freezing to death in the wind chill. But I don’t have the regular schedule, the extra hour a day to waste, plus the extra time on either side of the work day, nor the time to make separate trips for groceries and what-not. Even in Germany almost eighty percent of the population commutes by car. I’m glad that some people think it’s sensible. But the math doesn’t make sense to me at all.


      Source date (UTC): 2011-10-18 06:30:00 UTC

    • interesting paper on the weakness of the VC community, and general entrepreneurs

      http://www.eif.org/news_centre/publications/eif_wp_2011_009_EU_Venture.pdfAn interesting paper on the weakness of the VC community, and general entrepreneurship in Europe vs the USA. Personally, my experience is that too much money is captured in government hands where it does not seek speculative (high) returns. (And therefore does not create jobs.) The authors also note that VC’s in europe are predominantly from finance, not entrepreneurs, engineers or scientists and therefore lack the knowledge to invest in risk ventures. Personally, I think the cultural issues ( Americans are very tolerant of risk and willing to work very, very hard in startups) are not insignificant. Nor is the anti-capitalist sentiment very helpful.


      Source date (UTC): 2011-10-13 21:25:00 UTC

    • is the spice of life. And the source of innovation

      http://www.capitalismv3.com/index.php/2011/09/free-speech-is-a-good-only-in-public-not-private-venues/Variation is the spice of life. And the source of innovation.


      Source date (UTC): 2011-09-29 12:44:00 UTC