laxam
1yr ago
The fact that human capital can't be easily taxed is pretty close to a grand unified theory of 21st century American politics, really.
laxam
15d ago
Continental Philosophy is, to a great extent, un-rigorous sociology and social psychology. Talking about social science in the same breath is just accepting that fact.
laxam
19d ago
'Christianity' declined in America when elite institutions started getting filled up with Catholics and jews. This happened in the 1940's and by the 1960's the new 'elite' was throwing their weight around. The old WASP ideals were pushed aside. That's all there is to the story of modern America. 1,2
The Modernism versus Traditionalism split in the Presbyterian Church pre-dates the 1940's. The split between what were essentially modern professional class atheists and fundamentalist Christians who still insisted on the Westminster confession dates from then, at the latest, not from the 1960's.
The growth of socialism, progressivism, modernism, and secularism in the 19th and early 20th century elite is something you can't ignore when telling a story about American social history. The guys in the scenes at Harvard from the 1930's in The Good Shepherd were quintessential WASPs but they certainly weren't Puritans.
And, of course, the most resounding condemnation of this from the 20th century, God and Man at Yale, was written by a Catholic conservative...
laxam
19d ago
Elite Christian culture adopted the Classical heritage before the Roman Empire even fell in the West, so the thing where British imperial administrators learned Latin and Greek and the Classics is just the same Christian tradition that sent them to listen to the softly spoken magic spell every Sunday.
laxam
1mo ago
Austrian economics correctly states that this leads to over-investment: investment is unbacked by corresponding saving, causing a bubble and mis-allocation of economic resources.
I was waiting for this. The rest of the post prior has all of those usual """dog-whistles""" that it was like a twist in a movie you can see coming from miles away.
Is it 2008 again? I remember the internet being full of this kind of thing (and being one of the contributors!).
Anyway, it's important to point out that 'full reserve' theorizing is not 'Austrian' economics, it's Rothbardian Austrian economics. The original ABCT doesn't require it to avoid business cycles and Hayek's formulation can be re-cast in essentially monetarist terms as about the interplay of the supply and demand for money without much modification. The supply of loanable funds (a nominal quantity) does not necessarily represent the full production possibilities of the underlying economy (a real one). That is, there are 'real' savings that are not represented by nominal savings at a given price level/quantity of money. The demand for money will be driven, in part, by the investment possibilities created by real savings, so a full reserve banking system will under invest in production, while the fractional reserve system the Rothbardians are against would be able to invest enough for the economy to reach its production possibilities frontier without going beyond it and generating a business cycle.
As to the rest of your post: a lot of what you're talking about with population discount rates would probably be covered in post-war Keynesian literature on the propensity to save/consume. The empirical validity of a lot of it varies, I'm sure, but I can't imagine it's any more questionable than your last two paragraphs.
laxam
3mo ago
Maybe. There's probably still more going on than just those particular problems. The theoretically correct answer is that the virtue of the people themselves has declined, so we elect men to Congress who will not govern well regardless of the structure you place them in. This is an appetizing enough answer, although certainly not itself complete.
laxam
4mo ago
If we could exchange these people for the homeless and the activists, that would certainly be a net win.
laxam
5mo ago
Last I knew it was something in the low 20's percent range, although I'll cop to not having checked in a while. I think it has drifted downward into the high-middle teens over the last five or so years.
But, importantly, median incomes for blacks are still very low. In 2020, median household income for black Americans was $45,000~. It's a shifted curve so, while there are plenty of upper middle class blacks like show up in commercials, there are fewer as a proportion than, for example, Asians.
laxam
5mo ago
Well, other than some trade with India I don't think we know much about and the tin trade, most trade in the Bronze Age was overland, riverine, or coastwise.
Piracy certainly existed (plenty of coastwise trade happened in areas distant from central authorities), but it wouldn't have been part of most trade that happened.
laxam
6mo ago
Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.
Which averages matter a lot.
Of course, there is no real policy discussion going on with these discussions of macro statistics. It's just Lefty professionals sneering at the rest of the country and saying, "Why won't you just do what I tell you and vote for the Democrats?"
laxam
6mo ago
Well, what I'm really doing is underrating the diversity of opinion among the Recalcitrants. Chip Roy, although not one of the defenestrators, has consistently been among the recalcitrants on advancing budget bills, but I trust him to be doing what he does for the reasons he says and he would probably have been fine with a shutdown if the budget didn't come out the way he wanted. Gaetz was doing it for attention and fundraising, he thinks he's going to become the next Governor of Florida off of this. Some of the others wanted a shutdown because they seem to think hardball negotiating will get them what they want ( I think Andy Biggs is in this category).
Others may have their own reasons.
laxam
7mo ago
Was that before or after they were told how to think about it by the authorities and who the object of their ire should be, at times on completely false pretenses?
I don't know if you're old enough to remember that day, but...before. Absolutely 100% before.
Just because you have a nice, coherent model of how society works that fits neatly in your head, that doesn't mean your model is correct.
laxam
8mo ago
This is what Trump wants to do with the schedule F stuff and, technically, he now has experience in politics.
I'm doubtful about his competence to actually accomplish it, though.
laxam
9mo ago
This is a more reasonable criticism. It's less over-intellectualization and more over-professionalization.
laxam
9mo ago
religion
Religion is literally the original university subject. You seem to be objecting to the academy in general, for all time, rather than over-intellectualization (something for which religion has a history stretching back 1500 beyond the origin of universities).
laxam
10mo ago
Mental health in general is almost entirely about whether something substantially prevents someone from functioning normally.
laxam
11mo ago
their preferred outcome is to continue to lose forever
They were doing a lot of winning down ballot prior to 2016 for a bunch of people who like losing.
In fact, most of the losing they've been doing has been from 2018, onward.
laxam
1yr ago
I think it's use by that subreddit has led to a lot of people on Reddit thinking that that is actually what neoliberal means.
For a big part of my life, the only person I had ever seen purposely identify as a neoliberal was Scott Sumner.
propinquity
It's relatively rare I learn a wholly new, non-technical word these days. Thanks.
laxam
1yr ago
So you think McCormick would have done better with which part of the electorate?
McCormick would have cleaned up in the suburbs and with independents, both groups Oz somehow managed to lose against a socialist loser with heart problems. McCormick codes as a business conservative in places that used to only elect business conservatives like the Philly collar counties. He would especially have had an easy time riding to victory over the brain dead if Lou Barletta were at the top of the ticket instead of Mastriano, who acted like an anchor, dragging the entire state party down with him.
McCormick may well still end up a Pennsylvania Senator. There's a lot of interest in having him run for Bob Casey's seat, although Casey is a tougher nut to crack than Fetterman was.
laxam
1yr ago
I don't think anyone expected this to be different.
The point is that he did. They have like, models that let them distinguish between situations.
I don't think the stimulus is main the cause though, because the inflation has persisted long after the stimulus was spent, and a good chunk of the money was saved/invested anyway.
So, this is getting a bit into the weeds on the question, but the way to think of the relationship between fiscal stimulus and inflation is by thinking of the stimulus as just the same as anyone with a sufficiently large credit card. The path of monetary policy that achieved low, steady inflation prior to the over-sized stimulus at the beginning of the Biden administration probably looked something like slow rate hikes over the course of late 2021 and 2022 that eventually brought rates up to some point lower than they are going to end up being in our current timeline. The monetary stimulus of 2020 had been enough to prevent the lockdowns from causing serious, deep, long-lasting depression and opening up would have brought total spending back into line with the non-pandemic growth path of 2019 without the Fed having to slam on the breaks.
Then a huge amount of additional spending happened. The Fed suddenly had to change stances to a tighter policy sooner in order to stave off inflation but, importantly, they didn't. Inflation started to spike long before the Fed even started talking about tightening. Then they took most of a year before they started actually tightening.
So, it's still monetary policy causing the inflation (as only monetary policy can cause sustained inflation), but it's the stance of monetary policy being suddenly far too loose as a result of a change in the environment, rather than a change in the policy instrument. If the Fed had followed a policy path similar to its path in real life in a hypothetical world where the 2021 stimulus didn't happen or was much smaller, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder. If the Fed had appropriately offset the 2021 stimulus by moving forward and scaling tightening plans from the second half of the year or the next year to the first half of 2021, there probably wouldn't have been any inflation or it would have been much milder.
laxam
1yr ago
Yeah, and even the ultra-wealthy Southern plantation owners were the analogical poor cousins of European nobility, who were forced by markets and circumstances to take an unseemly level of interest in the day to day management of their farms, ie. they were rural capitalists subject to market pressures.
Their favorite pastime was even bitching about their Scottish factors.
Yes, assessment has always been an issue with taxation, going back into the dark mists of history. The idea is indeed to tax the value of land which, no matter how difficult the assessment, is still more efficient than other kinds of taxes as long as you're not trying to hit exactly 100% like the Georgists.
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