We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Here is a great video featuring “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg, talking to John Tierney, . Lomborg discusses his views about how any debate on improving lives of the poor around the world requires us to understand that resources are scarce, and that being obsessed by “sexy”, attention-grabbing issues means we ignore the less glamorous, but often far more severe issues. Of course, the media and political world tends to push attention towards the “eye-catching initiatives” (to use Tony Blair’s formulation). But that doesn’t mean we have to settle for this. Lomborg is terrific. No wonder he drives deep Greens nuts.
I recommend pretty much all his works, especially his book, Cool It.
Here is a brief comment I left over at Tim Worstall’s blog, regarding fractional reserve banking and supposed journalistic illiteracy about said:
“I can see why smart people are dubious about fractional reserve banking. The whole “maturity transformation” line that defenders of FRB come up with only works if you are prepared to take the risk that, in the event of a crisis, you won’t be able to get your money out of a bank when you want it. That is why, in a real free market, not the rigged charade we have now, FRBs would have to be clearly advertised as such, and without the moral hazard-machines of state deposit insurance and a central bank acting as lender of last resort, printer of funny money, etc. In such a laissez faire world, FRB might persist, but it would be a lot more restricted than now, and its capacity for causing booms and busts reduced. Like I say, it should not be illegal so long as everyone knows what it is.”
Sometimes useful insights about the state of the world comes from sources very far removed from the dismal mainstream media. This was taken from Knight Frank estate agency promotional bumf stuck through my door yesterday under the title “What nationalities are buying in your area?”
Given what has happened with the presidential elections in France we will be seeing many more French buyers shortly. We have also seen a huge spike from people in France searching on our website for properties in London.
Yup. We may be fucked but we are less fucked than you.
I received this via e-mail and thought it was too good not to share…
Bliss.
I’ve just been listening to an interview, conducted by recently acquired Samizdatista Patrick Crozier. His inteviewee is John Butler, and they talk about the contents of Butler’s new book, The Golden Revolution. Access this interview at the Cobden Centre blog. It lasts just over forty five minutes, but to me it felt less.
I have not read Butler’s book, but judging by this interview, my immediate impression is that Butler’s strength as an economic commentator is his combination of an unswervingly market based understanding of economic reality with a far more detailed grasp of the recent history of the twentieth century’s big economic events and big economic policy decisions, more detailed than is usual among your typical unswerving market based understander of economic reality. Butler understands why the great policy mistakes of the twentieth century were indeed mistakes. But he also knows the detail of the circumstances that made these mistakes so attractive to the people who made them.
I won’t try to retell the story Butler tells. Suffice it to say that, like many of us here, he attaches great importance to the decision, by President Nixon, to abandon the gold convertibility of the dollar.
As for the resulting mess and what to do about it, Butler considers that a return by the world to gold as the basis of its currency arrangements is not only desirable, but possible and even likely, and he reflects on the various ways in which this change back to monetary sanity might soon be accomplished and by whom.
A strongly recommended listen, to anyone who has three quarters of an hour to spare and a desire to understand the state of the world somewhat better.
Pleasure is a brain wave right now. Happiness is a good story of your life. The Greek word for happiness is “eudaimonia,” which means literally “having a good guiding angel,” like Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. The schoolbook summary of the Greek idea in Aristotle says that such happiness is “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope. But nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: “not too happy,” “pretty happy,” “very happy.” They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be “happy,” if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how.
– Deirdre N McCloskey, writing about the whole, rather dubious realm of “happiness studies”. The fact that the UK’s paternalistic prime minister, David Cameron, is a fan of this sort of thing does not fill me with confidence.
[Greek government policy is] known as ‘drinking your way back to sobriety’.
The deficit spending the Greek government wants to do is almost-entirely suppressive or neutral to GDP – it is spending by government, for government, on government. The population is shrinking, their internal revenue picture is already dreadful and only getting worse (because they have the worst ratio of producers to consumers of tax funding in the civilized world, and getting worser) and the only way any government of Greece can survive and keep the mayhem in the streets down to acceptable levels is to restore the drunken-sailor approach to public spending that got them into trouble in the first place. This means 14 monthly pension checks a year, retirement at 50 for workers in hazardous trades like hairdressing, and all the other 1,001 ways they managed to bankrupt themselves already.
– Serial commenter llamas
Who do you hope wins the election in Greece today?
As a starting point for discussion, I thought the headline of this Guardian article “A Syriza victory will mark the beginning of the end of Greece’s tragedy” might well turn out to be true if Syriza do win, albeit not in the way the left wing authors expect.
“Historically, remember, Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant; John Roebling, a German one; Nikola Tesla, a Serb who emigrated from Croatia; Albert Einstein was a German immigrant who became a U.S. citizen in 1940; the great economist, Ludwig von Mises, was an Austrian immigrant; and Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, a Russian one. The list could be indefinitely extended. In our day, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, emigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, emigrated to America from Taiwan. Vinod Khosla, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, is an Indian immigrant; Andreas Bechtolsheim, another of Sun’s founders, a German one. This list, too, could be greatly extended.”
– Andrew Bernstein.
I like this comment:
The economic platform most voters seem to want is lower taxes (or lower taxes on everyone except the “rich”), more jobs, more government benefits, and no deficits. Which, come to think of it, was Obama’s platform in 2008. The only problem is that it can’t be done, which makes it hard to run on that platform two times in a row.
It’s from “Larry3435”, and is attached to a piece by Jennifer Rubin entitled Obama’s economic approach a dud with voters.
It is important for libertarians like me not to confuse a bunch of people who think we probably shouldn’t have very much more government than we can pay for with people who think we definitely should have a lot less government than we can pay for, which is what we libertarians reckon, among other things.
Still, it’s a start.
A thing I keep banging on about is that a crucial stage in an argument occurs when the burden of proof gets reversed.
Crackpot Theorists devise a Crackpot Theory. It unites them. It excites them. It excuses their shared belief that The Free Market Is Not Good Enough. They demand action from each other. They capture small parts of government departments that most people don’t give a damn about. They write small laws and get them passed.
A few Critics notice, and start explaining that the Crackpot Theory is, maybe, a crackpot theory. The Crackpot Theorists say: No it isn’t! The Critics say: But you are making bad decisions! The Crackpot Theorists say: No we aren’t! As this phase of the argument gets seriously going, the Critics become ever more convinced that the Crackpot Theorists are indeed Crackpot Theorists, and because the Crackpot Theorists are behaving like the maniacal Crackpot Theorists that they are, the Critics grow in number, and in their certainty that the Crackpot Theorists are totally crackpot.
The small bits of the government departments grow into big bits, and infect other bits. The laws they introduce get bigger and more intrusive.
But sadly, nobody else cares, or not enough to stop all this. The money and inconvenience involved is still trivial, by the usual standards of government-imposed expense and inconvenience. Let the Crackpot Theorists have their fun! And besides: Maybe, just maybe, the Crackpot Theorists are onto something. Better safe than sorry! Anyway, what can you do?
As the Crackpot Theory grows in power, powerless people start to notice and to cry out: Your Crackpot Theory is just an excuse for us to be taxed more! Alas, for many people this is a feature, not a bug.
Throughout this phase of the history of the Crackpot Theory, the Critics of the Crackpot Theory are in the impossible position of having only one way of stopping the rise to prominence of the Crackpot Theory, which is to convince the Crackpot Theorists that they are wrong.
Some Crackpot Theorists are convinced. Quite a few of them creep away in ashamed silence. A tiny few even say in public that they were wrong. But others of them are now so wholly dependent for their livelihoods upon the Crackpot Theory being true that they stick with it anyway, despite now suspecting or even knowing what total crackpottery it is. What can they do?
Until, one day, the Crackpot Theorists pick a fight with a group of people powerful enough for their anger to actually matter, to the entire world.
At which point, the burden of proof, hitherto weighing down only upon the shoulders of the Critics, now descends upon the shoulders of the Crackpot Theorists themselves. Suddenly, they have to convince the world that they are right and that their Critics are wrong. They have to convince their Critics that their Critics are wrong, just to shut their Critics up from saying what the world now wants to be told, namely that the fight with those powerful and angry people is a fight that is not worth having.
But our Crackpot Theory says that we must have this fight! No matter what! The world must be saved, even if it is ruined in the process!
I’m just thinking aloud, you understand. Having seen this (linked to just now by the ever-alert Instapundit):
China will take swift counter-measures that could include impounding European aircraft if the EU punishes Chinese airlines for not complying with its scheme to curb carbon emissions, the China Air Transport Association said on Tuesday.
Wei Zhenzhong, secretary general of the China Air Transport Association, said:
“We would try to avoid any trade war.”
If that’s not a powerful and angry person threatening a trade war, I don’t know what is. If the trade war duly happens, next up: trade war. (What was that about the EU putting an end to conflict between Great Powers?)
So, Crackpot Theorists, is your Crackpot Theory true enough to be worth stuff like this? Go ahead. Convince us.
There are a some ideas that are useful when thinking about markets. People act rationally; they act in their own best interests; they follow incentives; their preferences are revealed by their actions; and so on. This leads to such things as arbitrage, which the rationalist Harry Potter has figured out.
So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.
Today I ordered a new HTC One S for my wife. For £15.50 per month over two years we get the handset for “free”, and various voice, SMS and data services. That means that we pay £372. But by buying via a cashback site site such as Quidco we get £30 back — this is commission that would otherwise have gone to some middleman. So we are paying £342 for the handset and the service.
The cheapest I can find the handset online on its own is £350; more typically it costs £400. For equivalent voice, SMS and data services I would pay at least £8.50 per month.
Arbitrage does seem to be happening. On eBay there are people selling phones that have been removed from their original packaging to be unlocked. Someone has taken out a contract with free handset and is then selling the handset without the service for more than they paid for the handset plus the service.
There are other oddities. My wife is an Orange customer. The deal we wanted is available on both T-Mobile and Orange, in both cases only to new customers. One can not simply arrange a new deal with one’s existing supplier because then it is impossible to keep the same phone number. One can “upgrade”, but by doing this the best deals are not available. The only rational thing for a customer to do is switch network operators every two years. My wife switched to T-Mobile. If she had been a T-Mobile customer she would have switched to Orange; nothing else would be any different.
The only way that this makes sense is if most customers do not understand it. The strategy must be to lure new customers with cheap deals and then charge them ever more by confusing them into staying loyal. And it must work, because otherwise this state of affairs would not be stable. People act rationally all right, but they are often acting on limited information.
The rather obvious lesson is that it pays to have more knowledge than the next man.
Incidentally, while it is not strictly relevant because my story could be true of any network operators in the UK, both Orange and T-Mobile are owned by the same parent company, EverythingEverywhere.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
