The Glade 4.0

While I can appreciate that, hopefully you appreciate how that makes it impossible to verify your claims at being an expert in Economics. As well as being able to provide a detailed review of your conclusions as you regularly harp on many of us here to do.

See Aizle, he has provided some of his works to read, he just obscures the fact by not pointing it out, and providing works by many others as well.

I'm sure that is true. However, I would much prefer to read a whole coherant publication instead of being spoon fed edited bits without the context around them.

Crazy talk.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I was referring to the fact that you seem to reject basically the entire edifice of contemporary economics, which makes discussing specific issues nigh impossible. For instance, if I were lucky enough to be discussing last year's Stimulus Bill with Tyler Cowen, Paul Krugman, Tim Harford, Alex Tabborok, Ben Bernake, etc., the conversation would revolve around things like multipliers, liquidity traps, the funds rate, etc. With you, the conversation instead turns into a dispute over whether the entire system, and every statistic used to measure its performance, is illusory. It's like trying to discuss medical treatment options with someone who rejects not only the particular diagnosis involved but also the legitimacy of the tests that led to it and, indeed, the very understanding of disease etiology in general.



I don't doubt that my level of knowledge regarding economics is far below yours. The issue I have, though, is with the way you regularly dismiss amd disdain every actual economist I cite in disagreement with you. If it were just my opinion you found so lacking in respectability, I could attribute it to our knowledge gap, but the fact that you seem to feel the same way about people who are extremely knowledgable and respected in the field makes me think it's genuinely an issue of perspective. And honestly, it makes me far less inclined to see your arguments as persuasive, because it makes me doubt whether you're considering and presenting the issues in a fair and balanced way.



On this, I don't disagree. The list of books I intended to read over the years but never got around to is depressingly long.

RangerDave:

Eh, I read Marginal Evolution every day. It is, however, politically encumbered in much the same way Paul Krugman politically encumbers himself. Your list of economists, of which you say demonstrate a consensus, actually constitutes a confirmation bias based on your ideological goals and preferences. For instance, do you read everything Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini writes? Do you read the Von Mises Institute Blogs or Heritage Institute Economic Reports?

The thing about heterodox mainstream economics I find most troubling is its reliance on political economists as legitimate sources of theory and hypothesis. While Keynes had his moments, the vast bulk of his work has to do with how government can control the outcome of a vastly complex system. This doesn't mean I reject Keynes on everything; but I certainly reject the policy thrust of his writing and theorization.

Sure, I'm probably oversimplify things a bit, but that's after years of you guys asking me to write for my audience. We could discuss regional economics as economics in a wide variety of locales and locations, particularly rural China; but that doesn't really engage the conversations you want to have. Rather, I discuss macro-economics with a rather broad and well developed understanding of what's going on. But macro-economics, in this day and age, is synonymous with political economy: you cannot extract government from what is going on. So, to a point, Krugman, Cowen, et al, are correct: things happen this way when there exists extraordinary regulatory pressure to make things conform to this way. But that's only a superficial confirmation of the reality they want to exist.

And, yes, those statistics are illusory. I'll give you a concrete example: median household income and relative unemployment rates.

The unemployment rate, if we accept the official BLS stance, should be 9.8%. That means 1 in 10 individuals capable and willing to work, collecting unemployment, or actively searching for work does not have a job. However, it's rather erroneous to compare our 9.8% unemployment to the ~20% unemployment during the Dust Bowl Years of the Great Depression. As part of total population, those numbers are actually fairly even. As part of the work force, they indicate something terribly, terribly wrong; incidentally, this is where unemployment and median household income tie into each other.

The 1970s represent a massive and nearly uncontrollable external shift in the supply of available labor. Between 1969 and 1974, the workforce in the United increased by 30%. It doubled by 1984 as percentage of the population. And wages went down because of it. Today, you need 2 earners per household to leverage the same economic power a single earner had as few as 40 years ago. Mainstream economics doesn't want to address these issues: it's not politically correct. Instead, we're talking about the political and social ramifications of ~6% of the adult population of the United States between 18 and 58 not having a job as if it's some horrendous sea change in the status quo. We're ignoring the fact that the actual workforce of the country was less than 25% of the total population less than a century ago.

That said, I've explained the situation in mainstream terms before; I've also demonstrated repeatedly that the situation is vastly worse than most of the economists you reference want to indicate. Except, maybe, for Krugman, but that's because he actually is a hack. He discredits himself reliably, despite having a Nobel Prize (which was mostly the result of someone else's work mind you).

The current situation has the Euro-Zone suffering from an inherent liquidity crisis, and the only solution mainstream economics can offer is the political solution of Federalization. Perhaps, just perhaps, that should indicate to you how invested in the political authority the theorization going on right now happens to be.

As for what happened in the last 3 years? I pointed out the liquidity crisis facing the United States on Glade 1.0. I pointed to problematic lending and monetary policy by the Federal Reserve on Glade 1.0. I demonstrated the failures of Bush's economic policy with regard to employment and homebuilding during the same period. We're talking, in the past tense (although it's not over), about an economic crisis I said wasn't over in 2003 while everyone was hurrahing the Bush's Recovery.

That said, since this is retrospective from a political standpoint, most of the economists you cite are leaning toward recovery while disregarding leading and trailing indicators of further economic instability and ignoring the inherent problem in political management of the economy now. To bring back the Gold Standard issue, Credit Mismanagement by lending and central lending institutions mirrors the voluntary contraction of money supply by the United States and France during the early 1930s. In the 1930s, despite increasing monetary commodity holdings, government policy forced a deflationary period by reducing capital mobility and staple resource availability (food vouchers, price fixing, minimum wage). Dollars were worth more than the goods they were purchasing, meaning debt escape was nearly impossible. Today, we continue to extend credit beyond the reasonable limit at all levels of existence, while increasing money supply. The net effect will be reversed but have the same human impact: the value of goods will exceed the available money with which to purchase goods. Consequently, people are forced out of economic viability by mismanagement of the money supply. And what makes it all the worse is the refusal of mainstream economists to accept that money is always a commodity and that fiat currency commoditizes the human being for that purpose. At least in the 1930s, we can point to intentional mismanagement of gold reserves and currency pools in France and the United States as problematic (Hamilton's still wrong; the correlation he wants to say exist doesn't, because the issues how to do with monetary policy as I've described, not the presence of the gold standard). Today, we're simply leveraging individuals into self-oblivion. And this doesn't even consider the social complications of government policy on individual behavior.

Of course, I realize this will perplex Hopwin on the praxeology side of things, but governments are very small populations that exert a lot of force. Predicting how government behavior affects government numbers is actually relatively simple.

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