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Good post! It led me to question, how can we as writers and intellectuals be more transparent in the array of sources we integrate into our own perspectives? For instance, is there an easy way to measure how diverse the building blocks of someone's wordview are? Maybe you could measure the degree to which papers cited cite each other, and rate those as either friendly or antagonistic citations, and that would give you a pretty good idea of how one sided or multi-faceted someone's analysis is. Hard to do without a single citation system though. Maybe this presents an opportunity to add value?
Hi Tiger, Good to see you diversifying like you describe. I recommend Steve Sailer's blog, which specializes in important political and social issues arising out of often suppressed realities of human biodiversity. His is 20 year old full-time blog financed entirely by voluntary contributions from his many readers. If there is another blogger who makes his living that way I haven't heard about him or her (not counting the new substack phenomenon)
My stab at Absolute Truth: Pleasure and Pain in all their multitudinous manifestations are not separate and independent phenomena. Instead they are correlative, like the two sides of a coin, and there is a kind of symmetry between them such that they just balance in the end. That is divine justice and it applies not just to human beings but to all sentient creatures, even insects, being a law of nature that is somehow embedded in the very fabric of sentience itself. Furthermore, we have no idea of the true state of the world at any moment in time, for the simple reason that it (each person's subjective state) is completely invisible: what on the outside may appear to us to be suffering and unspeakable injustice may be experienced quite differently by the subjects involved, and vice versa.
Nor should one underestimate the possibilities of what might happen in the moment of death, when the brain disintegrates and all the eletro-chemical potentials accumulated over a lifetime of living discharge in a single instant. Dostoevsky was right when he observed that it is possible to have an feeling so intense that though it only lasts a few seconds it can counterbalance an entire lifetime of ordinary experience.
I once had a near death experience caused by breaking my neck when I fell off a cliff. The pain I felt was like an electric current running through my spine, except that it had the volume of the Mississippi River and was moving ten thousand miles an hour! I was like a thread in wind tunnel, literally awed by the sheer power of what I was experiencing, many orders of magnitude more intense than anything I could possibly imagine.
l didn't die obviously and God knows what might have happened next if I had.
I would merely note that the Phillips Curve and the whole notion of cost-push inflation with which it is associated are artifacts of the period in which strong labor unions existed with the power to negotiate automatic cost of living adjustments (so-called COLA's) in their contracts with major corporations. With the advent of the new neoliberal economic order however (allowing free mobility of labor, goods, and capital across international borders), organized labor, particularly in the private sector, has shrunk to a small fraction of what it was fifty years ago and no longer has that power. In other words, we are not likely to see cost-push inflation again anytime soon.
Nevertheless, wage stickiness—the empirical fact that ordinary wage workers don't take kindly to their employer's actively reducing their nominal hourly wage rates—is still a reality, and that is what explains why a low but steady rate of inflation is still wanted as a way to get around this problem. Employers in industries or sectors wishing to reduce real wages can simply fail to increase the level of nominal wages to keep up with that targeted wage rate, thereby recreating a flexible prices system in the market for labor. This was the original rationale for inflation spelled out in the very first chapter of Keynes's General Theory (which any careful reading will verify) and it remains to this day the preferred (only?) solution to the problem of involuntary unemployment.
As for interruptions in supply chains and other factors causing temporary or not so temporary shortages in certain areas of the economy, including food and fuel, while these may cause a family's cost of living to rise they are a result of changes in relative prices, not in the general level of prices across the board. The latter is what we mean by inflation in the current context.
Rather we are back to the old idea of too many dollars chasing too few goods, which is precisely the situation that our current fiscal and monetary policies are in danger of creating according to Summers if I understand him correctly.
I would be interested in Bernanke's assessment of the current situation because he is another economist I respect. Would like a good link.
Luke Lea here. My own perhaps too cynical view of the current state of discourse in this country is that it is largely a consequence of the neoliberal worldview that suddenly established itself as the reigning orthodoxy in elite circles in the wake of the end of the Cold War. The defining characteristic of this new “cosmopolitan ideology,” if I may describe it in those terms, is its uncompromising commitment to the free movement of capital, goods, and labor across international boundaries, with little thought given to the likely impact this would have on the living standards of ordinary working people, even as it fueled the emergence of a new global oligarchy of wealth on a scale never seen before in history.
And because this new oligarchy comprised of a few thousand families not only bankrolls both political parties but also controls all the major media in this country, it is in a position to not only tolerate but to actually encourage identity politics in all its many forms, which it sees as a way to distract and divide the electorate and thereby keep itself in power.
To put it another way, the national agenda of our new ruling class, at least in so far as it finds expression in our electoral politics, is simplicity itself: any issue is permissible no matter how divisive or culturally outrageous it might happen to be, provided only that trade and immigration are kept off the table as major pocketbook issues.
The thing about Trump is that, like FDR before him, he is in effect a traitor to his class: a self-funded billionaire who from the very moment he announced his candidacy at the bottom the escalator in Trump Tower put trade and immigration reform squarely on the agenda.
It wasn’t that Trump was a racist that bothered the establishment so much, since God knows they had plenty else to work with. Rather, it was the fact that he wasn’t a racist that made him so dangerous in their eyes. Which explains why, among other things, they gave a green light to the mainstream media to abandon all standards of truth and objectivity in an all-out attempt to paint this rogue candidate for president as a racist nonetheless, with the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” hoax being exhibit number one, a libelous accusation that Biden himself featured as talking point number one in the major address he delivered to the country on the eve of the election.
I could go on at great length but that is the gist of my hypothesis. Propaganda really works, but at a terrible cost to the nation.
Good post! It led me to question, how can we as writers and intellectuals be more transparent in the array of sources we integrate into our own perspectives? For instance, is there an easy way to measure how diverse the building blocks of someone's wordview are? Maybe you could measure the degree to which papers cited cite each other, and rate those as either friendly or antagonistic citations, and that would give you a pretty good idea of how one sided or multi-faceted someone's analysis is. Hard to do without a single citation system though. Maybe this presents an opportunity to add value?
Hi Tiger, Good to see you diversifying like you describe. I recommend Steve Sailer's blog, which specializes in important political and social issues arising out of often suppressed realities of human biodiversity. His is 20 year old full-time blog financed entirely by voluntary contributions from his many readers. If there is another blogger who makes his living that way I haven't heard about him or her (not counting the new substack phenomenon)
My stab at Absolute Truth: Pleasure and Pain in all their multitudinous manifestations are not separate and independent phenomena. Instead they are correlative, like the two sides of a coin, and there is a kind of symmetry between them such that they just balance in the end. That is divine justice and it applies not just to human beings but to all sentient creatures, even insects, being a law of nature that is somehow embedded in the very fabric of sentience itself. Furthermore, we have no idea of the true state of the world at any moment in time, for the simple reason that it (each person's subjective state) is completely invisible: what on the outside may appear to us to be suffering and unspeakable injustice may be experienced quite differently by the subjects involved, and vice versa.
Nor should one underestimate the possibilities of what might happen in the moment of death, when the brain disintegrates and all the eletro-chemical potentials accumulated over a lifetime of living discharge in a single instant. Dostoevsky was right when he observed that it is possible to have an feeling so intense that though it only lasts a few seconds it can counterbalance an entire lifetime of ordinary experience.
I once had a near death experience caused by breaking my neck when I fell off a cliff. The pain I felt was like an electric current running through my spine, except that it had the volume of the Mississippi River and was moving ten thousand miles an hour! I was like a thread in wind tunnel, literally awed by the sheer power of what I was experiencing, many orders of magnitude more intense than anything I could possibly imagine.
l didn't die obviously and God knows what might have happened next if I had.
re: bitcoin Tulip mania.
I would merely note that the Phillips Curve and the whole notion of cost-push inflation with which it is associated are artifacts of the period in which strong labor unions existed with the power to negotiate automatic cost of living adjustments (so-called COLA's) in their contracts with major corporations. With the advent of the new neoliberal economic order however (allowing free mobility of labor, goods, and capital across international borders), organized labor, particularly in the private sector, has shrunk to a small fraction of what it was fifty years ago and no longer has that power. In other words, we are not likely to see cost-push inflation again anytime soon.
Nevertheless, wage stickiness—the empirical fact that ordinary wage workers don't take kindly to their employer's actively reducing their nominal hourly wage rates—is still a reality, and that is what explains why a low but steady rate of inflation is still wanted as a way to get around this problem. Employers in industries or sectors wishing to reduce real wages can simply fail to increase the level of nominal wages to keep up with that targeted wage rate, thereby recreating a flexible prices system in the market for labor. This was the original rationale for inflation spelled out in the very first chapter of Keynes's General Theory (which any careful reading will verify) and it remains to this day the preferred (only?) solution to the problem of involuntary unemployment.
As for interruptions in supply chains and other factors causing temporary or not so temporary shortages in certain areas of the economy, including food and fuel, while these may cause a family's cost of living to rise they are a result of changes in relative prices, not in the general level of prices across the board. The latter is what we mean by inflation in the current context.
Rather we are back to the old idea of too many dollars chasing too few goods, which is precisely the situation that our current fiscal and monetary policies are in danger of creating according to Summers if I understand him correctly.
I would be interested in Bernanke's assessment of the current situation because he is another economist I respect. Would like a good link.
Luke Lea here. My own perhaps too cynical view of the current state of discourse in this country is that it is largely a consequence of the neoliberal worldview that suddenly established itself as the reigning orthodoxy in elite circles in the wake of the end of the Cold War. The defining characteristic of this new “cosmopolitan ideology,” if I may describe it in those terms, is its uncompromising commitment to the free movement of capital, goods, and labor across international boundaries, with little thought given to the likely impact this would have on the living standards of ordinary working people, even as it fueled the emergence of a new global oligarchy of wealth on a scale never seen before in history.
And because this new oligarchy comprised of a few thousand families not only bankrolls both political parties but also controls all the major media in this country, it is in a position to not only tolerate but to actually encourage identity politics in all its many forms, which it sees as a way to distract and divide the electorate and thereby keep itself in power.
To put it another way, the national agenda of our new ruling class, at least in so far as it finds expression in our electoral politics, is simplicity itself: any issue is permissible no matter how divisive or culturally outrageous it might happen to be, provided only that trade and immigration are kept off the table as major pocketbook issues.
The thing about Trump is that, like FDR before him, he is in effect a traitor to his class: a self-funded billionaire who from the very moment he announced his candidacy at the bottom the escalator in Trump Tower put trade and immigration reform squarely on the agenda.
It wasn’t that Trump was a racist that bothered the establishment so much, since God knows they had plenty else to work with. Rather, it was the fact that he wasn’t a racist that made him so dangerous in their eyes. Which explains why, among other things, they gave a green light to the mainstream media to abandon all standards of truth and objectivity in an all-out attempt to paint this rogue candidate for president as a racist nonetheless, with the Charlottesville “good people on both sides” hoax being exhibit number one, a libelous accusation that Biden himself featured as talking point number one in the major address he delivered to the country on the eve of the election.
I could go on at great length but that is the gist of my hypothesis. Propaganda really works, but at a terrible cost to the nation.