It was only with Reaganism... that the shift towards equating rampant capitalism somehow became associated with being "right-wing"
I think you're missing some pretty big things here. For instance, there was notable (though not universal) Republican opposition to the New Deal. In 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater generally opposed the New Deal - a pretty big split from Eisenhower. Nixon (the nominee in 1960 and 1968) supported "New Federalism", which was essentially replacing federal New Deal programs with grants to states. All of this was against a backdrop of Cold War anti-communism.
Even before the New Deal, Hoover was against government welfare (remember Scott's review?). Before him, Coolidge cut taxes and spending.
So, I'm not really comfortable saying that capitalism was associated with being right-wing only with Reagan. It seems to be an association that, if it even has a single origin, came decades earlier - possibly with the New Deal, but likely before even that, with Eisenhower being an exception to the rule.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I asked this question on the old sub, and got this answer, which I quote part of here:
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals recently issued an opinion on this exact issue:
Now that we have recognized that section 64.012 requires individuals to know they are ineligible to vote to be convicted of illegal voting, what does it substantively mean to knowingly violate the Election Code? This Court has consistently affirmed that where an offense criminalizes otherwise innocuous conduct based on particular circumstances, "the culpable mental state of `knowingly' must apply to those surrounding circumstances."
...
Investors are already pricing in the future decline in property prices.
A price drop in VNQ could reflect an expectation that property prices will fall, but it could also reflect an expectation that the rent-price ratio will fall, that the risk-free interest rate will rise, or that volatility will rise. How can you tell which it is?
You claim the main effect is interest rate hike -> home prices down. This makes rational sense.
However, when interest rates literally doubled and then halved during the 1970s and 1980s, housing prices didn't budge. This contradicts both what you'd expect if home-buyers were making rational decisions and what you yourself are claiming is happening now.
The price-rent ratio varies dramatically across cities despite a single national interest rate.
Both these facts should make you suspicious of models that assume home buyer (and therefore home prices) are rational.
Moreover, the fact stocks have declined by 22% suggests that the same thing caused both the decline in the VNQ and the stock market. The most parsimonious hypothesis imo is that interest rates caused institutional investors to deleverage and made bonds look relatively more attractive.
Your thesis:
The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
As with all such narratives, this says more about you than the world. You simply focus on all the ways Blues hurt Reds and ignore the millions of boring policy changes where nothing of the sort happens.
This lets your “model” be “correct” since you simply ignore all disagreeing events. For instance, I really don’t see how Biden turning immigrants away at the border is him hurting the Reds or how him sending arms to Ukraine is hurting the Reds or how a boring HOA meeting about lawn care is hurting the Reds.
Then you interpret your own bias as an objective fact of the world, which lets you make fun of people who don’t share that bias by effectively calling them stupid (which is the framing for your entire comment)
Not exactly a paradigm of clear and charitable thinking.
Thinking that Democrats wanting to hurt Republicans explains the bulk of Democrat behavior is neither charitable nor clear. That was OP's thesis: not that it was a motive but that it was the chief driver of all their behavior.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
The "Culture War" is defined as waring between political factions. So if your post is entirely confined to the "Culture War", isn't it entirely circular? It becomes
[The attempt to beat the outgroup is] best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
Not exactly insightful...
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I don't see too much in his comment where the language is more inflammatory than the ideas, or where he's mocking people who disagree with his conflict theory take.
Him mocking people is literally making fun of people. That is my criticism...
How much qualification is required?
The reading he claims to prefer makes his entire comment entirely definitional. So, I would like qualification that make his comment both true and not entirely definitional. That is, I'd like his comment to include a meaningful thesis - not a meaningless one.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
they are light, not heat
I disagree.
Here are some actual arguments against a LVT:
-
A LVT will force people to sell their homes, because people are cash-constrained
-
A LVT will force people to sell who have lived somewhere for decades, and the anxiety this creates among everyone (whether or not they are forced to sell) is a huge cost that outweighs the benefits
Arguments like "LVT is equivalent to the state seizing all land, and renting it back at market rates; it's expropriation on a massive scale" are just examples of the worst argument in the world. They're not careful analysis of values or cause-and-effect. They are simply trying to get you to associate the connotations of one idea (the government seizing property) with another (the government taxing property) with no critical analysis of the connection.
For instance, it is plainly obvious that a sales tax on cigarettes is dramatically different than a state seizing all cigarettes. Like, do I even need to state the differences? It is equally obvious that a LVT on a house is different than the government seizing the house - we already impose LVT on houses, we just bundle them with an additional tax on improvements and call it a "property tax".
Argument by analogy is, imo, usually a bad and lazy way to think and write. At best its value is as a brain-storming idea generator; definitely not as a finished thought. Alas, it is also one of the most common ways to "argue" on this very forum.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I think you're missing a distinction.
The mods are generally balanced. I could even be convinced they're slightly biased in favor of people on the left.
The commenters here definitely skew anti-mainstream and anti-woke, which is very close to being synonymous with skewing rightwards in the post-2016 era. This has gotten more and more blatant over the last several years, imo.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Essentially, there's no difference between Georgism and the government owning all the land outright.
This is so obviously wrong, it's hard for me to think you're serious.
That's like saying
Essentially, there's no difference between income taxes and you being the government's slave.
or
Essentially, there's no difference between capital gains taxes and communism
Like, yes there are. There are enormous, dramatic, obvious differences in all three cases.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Are you indifferent between paying property taxes (as happens today) and the government literally seizing control of all lane?
If not, they are not equivalent, so stop saying they are equivalent.
You’re zooming out to a ridiculous extent. You may as well say “the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, so they own everything, and we live under communism”
That level of abstraction is so useless as to not even be false.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Really, this is just another way the quoted post is terrible.
A LVT is not equivalent to the 100% tax advocated for by George. Equivocating between the two is yet another shortcoming of the critique.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot
What makes any of that "left-wing"?
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Some of these are 'hard' cartels, like doctors who meticulously prevent competition by limiting med school and residency places
Do you have any evidence that doctors actually lobby for the limitation of med school and residency places? I've heard this claim several times here, but never any evidence to back it up. Some quick googling led me to contrary evidence.
That paragraph completes a collection of 3 paragraphs all follow the form "Republicans do <scummy thing>, but Democrats aren't any better". That is to say, I'm pretty close to certain OP is saying "Roe v Wade, anyone" as a dig at Democrats
KnotGodel
1yr ago
If something goes wrong, they run. If a citizen ever lays hands on these individuals, we send in the real police to do a summary execution.
I looked this up in case I misunderstood:
Summary Execution
A summary execution is an execution in which a person is accused of a crime and immediately killed without the benefit of a full and fair trial.
I don't much like ideas that lead a cop killing someone kneeling and hand-cuffed without any kind of trial. I really don't like the idea that a non-cop can just claim someone slapped them and this results in summary execution.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
Inflation and the labour market which underpins it have not reacted at all to the current interest rate policy. Rates are going to need to rise much more than people think. Both here and the US.
...
When rates rise beyond some point there is going to be a panic cut in government spending at all levels. Either that or we give up and let inflation rip. Buckle up. We’re in economic accelerationism now.
I think this reasoning is wrong for the US for a couple reasons.
First, over the last 3 months, inflation has averaged 2% (annualized).
Second, the financial markets expect inflation to be brought back under control: the 5-year breakeven inflation rate has fallen from 3.6% in March to 2.6% today. Meanwhile the break-even inflation rate for the subsequent five years (2027-2032) fell from 2.67% to 2.35% over the same period of time. The most parsimonious explanation is that inflation will fall from 3-4% to 2.4% over the next couple years.
So, for the US at least, I don't think an inflation apocalypse is all that likely.
I don't know about Canadian financial markets, but inflation in Canada was basically zero over the last 3 months, despite pretty rapid inflation before that.
The question is not "is this prediction correct", the question is "can you do better".
And I'm not trying to be dismissive. It doesn't have to be your own analysis - do you have a pundit who can do better? An organization? A MIT professor?
Just as Nate Silver can predict elections "wrongly", the market can get predictions "wrong" - but that doesn't mean I have a better source of future predictions or that a better source even exists.
To predict housing prices, I look at the single futures market that averages ~1 trade per day and where 75% of trades involve a single man. Do I trust it? Does that question even make sense? It is, in a sense, just a single expert's predictions - but at least he puts money on the line and is even a market maker - a degree of exploitability you'd expect to create a degree of honesty. It's certainly less efficient than the trading of Walmart stock, but can I (or an institution I can identify) do better? I don't think so...
And so we come to this. Someone on this forum makes a claim with pretty minimal actual justification - probably mostly just intuition, but possibly a bunch of unshown work. Do I trust their predictions more than the bond market's? No - not even close.
So, under the naive assumption that we seek "truth" on this forum rather than "feeling smart" - the market is the best forecast until someone actually puts in the work to identify a better one.
Just because I can't do better doesn't mean that I somehow logically have to accept shit predictions.
Assuming you have to make actual decisions that will be affected by inflation, you want to use the best predictions you can get.
Of course, but you know what's the lesson here? Just ignore Nate Silver. I cannot predict who will win the Super Bowl any better than my crazy uncle, but that doesn't mean that I have to listen to my crazy uncle, if he has terrible track record.
Your insistence on using black-or-white "either this pundit is perfect or useless" is not useful in the real world.
If Silver has better calibration and discrimination than your crazy uncle, his predictions are better. If I have to make an investment decision that depends on who wins the election, I'm, therefore, going to trust Silver much more. Is he perfect? No. But if you can't do any better, then his are the predictions you should use when computing expected returns.
This is not a "terrible" attitude - it is the attitude any adult who needs to make real decisions has to take.
You also seem to have a myoptic view of what counts as evidence for a predictor being useful. I don't trust markets merely due to their empirical record. I trust them because they aggregate the beliefs of informed and intelligent people with significant skin in the game. Your approach seems to be "who got the last 2 predictions closest", which... well, it should be obvious why that heuristic is shit.
Meta: Not loving your habit of criticizing arguments in "nephew" comments rather than "children" comments.
Again, you have provided zero evidence for your claim that official numbers don't reflect actual prices. The one time you tried, I demonstrated that, in fact, the price changes you experienced matched the official numbers.
To quote the relevant parts:
My receipts say that gas has gone from $3.50 / gal to $4.15, "cheap meat" IE Costco frozen pork and chicken has gone up from ~$5.00 per lb to $6.75 and the price of a hardwood 2"x4" has nearly doubled from $18.25 for 12 ft to $34.00.
and I responded
Thank you for providing raw numbers. According to official data
- Gas prices have risen 24% since the beginning of the year. You claim they've risen 19%.
- Meat prices have risen 9.5%. You claimed it rose 35%.
- Lumber rose 71% through July before falling back in the past couple months. You claim 86%.
What I'm seeing is you cherrypicked a few things that have changed in price a lot and deduced that because they've changed in price by more than 5%, overall inflation must be more than 5%. This is terrible and exactly why it does take rigorous analysis to do these comparisons.
[Apologies for quote/list formatting - they aren't playing nicely for me]
You then shifted your argument
Or maybe I picked three things (food, gas, and lumber) that people tend to buy on a weekly - monthly basis with cash on hand because they're essential consumables and I believe that such items tend to be a better indicator of what's actually happening at ground level than the prices of big ticket items that are typically bought once on credit (EG vehicles, houses and other expensive manufactured goods)...
Never mind that the CPI methodology bases its weights on the purchases of the average consumer, and therefore has an actual justification beyond HlynkaCG's gut (what percent of people buy lumber on a weekly basis??).
But you continue to ignore any of this nuance and just continue to complain about the experts being "wrong", and me being stupid. Rather than the obvious being true:
-
You had no clue the sub-indices agreed with your lived experience, but don't want to admit that maybe the experts were right
-
You disagree, now, not with the basic methodology, but with the weight given to specific prices, preferring your idiosyncratic weighing to a basket representative of the purchases of the average consumer
KnotGodel
1yr ago
I replied with some personal observations supporting IprayIam's claims, and you accused me of making shit up
I didn't accuse you of making shit up. I provided concrete verifiable evidence that your "personal observations" literally matched the expert metrics you were criticizing. If you're referring to my use of the term "cherrypicked", I literally apologized for that in the next comment:
Sorry, "cherrypicked" is the wrong word. I meant to say that I feel its likely the reason those goods took your attention is because they increased - not that you were intentionally cherrypicking.
.
to which I replied with a !remindme link. 6 months later when the link pops, we're looking at a 40 year high for inflation and you're pulling the "WeLl AkShUaLly ExPeRtS aGreE" bullshit yet again.
As I said at the time you made that remindme link:
No, we'll have an n=1 piece of data. We already have 18 years of 5-year TIPs data that should hold at least as much weight as this one example... You seem to be fundamentally misunderstanding me. I make no claims about what price a particular good will be at a particular time
So, no, I never agreed beforehand that your prediction would fail to occur. I never agreed to eat crow if it did occur. You merely asserted I should. Given that, it is bullshit for you to think I should be changing my mind and kowtowing to your superior wisdom.
somehow despite having made the call correctly I'm the one who needs to update my priors rather than you.
I am not asking you to "update your priors". I am asking you to simply acknowledge that
-
the literal price changes you chose did in fact match the price sub-indices reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics
-
therefore, your actual disagreement with the "ExPeRtS" computation of the CPI is almost entirely simply how much they weigh the subindices.
You haven't done either of these things. Instead, you continue to insult me. C’est la vie.
KnotGodel
1yr ago
To add some data: Israel isn't an outlier in terms of patents per capita or citations per capita either, ranking #16 in patents and #37 in citations.
Israel faces some pretty bad headwinds:
-
it's far from other developed countries
-
it exists with a perpetual risk of conflict, which makes it unattractive for investment
-
they spends 6% of their GDP on the military; mandatory military service taking ~6% of each person's career away
-
it has virtually no natural resources
A point I haven't seen at all in this forum is the impact of gerrymandering.
Let X = (Republican votes) / (Republican votes + Democrat votes)
Let Y = % of House seats for Republicans
After an essentially tied election in 2000, Y averaged* 0.6pp higher than X during the 2000s.
After a historic Republican victory in 2010, Y averaged 3.8pp higher than X during the 2010s.
After a medium Democratic victory in 2020, Y is (based on this election so far) 1.5pp lower than X.
During the 2000s and 2010s, X was only lower than Y once: during the historic 2008 Democratic victory, which, iirc, overwhelmed gerrymandering defenses such that it made them counterproductive. As a result, Democrats were advantaged a whopping 3.5pp during that election.
tl;dr - it looks like Republicans successfully gerrymandered the 2010s and gained about 17 seats each election in the House as a result. Based on this election, it looks like gerrymandering has shifted this advantage to Democrats and will give them about 8 seats each election during the 2020s.
[ /u/zeke5123 you may be interested in this regarding republican under/over-performance relative to the popular vote ]
*I'm using the median here
It seems to me the difference in your definitions are
The academics include women in the "minority" group.
The electorate includes non-oppressed minorities in the "minority" group.
Fine, but then you claim that the electorate is in favor of helping minorities "because it is the right thing to do". But, by your own definition, the only differences are the above.
So, your complaint is... activists want to help women and don't care about helping non-oppressed minorities. This does not strike me as a significant disagreement with the electorate.
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