Karl Marx Shrugged?

nesf

turgon wrote: »

I know this is off topic, but would any of the previous posters know of any good books as an introduction to the liberal economics they are describing? Its a very interesting discussion to read.

Hah, expect much disagreement on this.

P. Breathnach

silverharp wrote: »

Ideally new currencies would be backed by gold , silver or some other commodity or even an algorithm ,companies like goldmoney.com already exist where you hold you account on line in gold grams, in this case the reserves are not lent out...

And who would verify the backing? What is to prevent an institution from creating a little bit more money than its reserves underpin? Or a lot more?

We have been here before.

Permabear

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nesf

donegalfella wrote: »

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I'd second The Road to Serfdom. Was just about to post this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Serfdom

The criticism section particularly by libertarians underlies the disagreement in the economic right over different values (i.e. the extent to which the State should play a role in the economy).

Soldie

donegalfella wrote: »

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That's amazing. Thanks for that. Having studied English at university I always found that certain deconstructionist theories seemed to serve little purpose other than to stimulate mental masturbation amongst left-leaning pseudo-intellectuals, but I must say that Alan Sokal's parody trumps all when it comes to highlighting this.

silverharp

P. Breathnach wrote: »

And who would verify the backing? What is to prevent an institution from creating a little bit more money than its reserves underpin? Or a lot more?

We have been here before.

there would be a "beauty contest" from the providers perspective , whoever has the most oversight would get the best ratings. in the case of the company goldmoney.com I mentioned , the gold backing is held at an insured vault belonging to a third party which is audited. In this case fudging the numbers would be fraud. Compare that to the current system where the banks didnt actually do anything wrong , they were just reckless.
I think the incentive for fraud would be less then now as the banks would be following an agency model not being creators of credit.

nesf

Soldie wrote: »

That's amazing. Thanks for that. Having studied English at university I always found that certain deconstructionist theories seemed to serve little purpose other than to stimulate mental masturbation amongst left-leaning pseudo-intellectuals, but I must say that Alan Sokal's parody trumps all when it comes to highlighting this.

That anyone thought Sokal's piece should be published scares the hell out of me. Mainly because post-modern theory is so prevalent in many areas of academics.

Permabear

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nesf

donegalfella wrote: »

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I thought you said before that you did your Ph.D in Economics?

Permabear

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Sand

Excellent thread, rescued from its poor start. Carry on.

earwicker

That's irrelevant, really.

Only if you don't believe in peer-review. Having seen the process at work from both sides, I can say that it functions for the most part. It's not flawless by any means.

I also said in my post that the editors had problems with Sokal's essay and that I couldn't excuse the editors for their failure to submit Sokal's essay to proper peer-review.

I'm not sure it's accurate to tar all those engaged in postmodernism and deconstruction with the same brush. But that's a whole other keg of powder.

If anyone is interested in another look at the Sokal affair, you could do worse than look at http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/sokalhoax.html. The author also wrote an interesting history of quantum physics--Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001). It digs into the debate over how physicists--Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.--saw "reality" as a slippery customer.

<snip>

nesf

earwicker wrote: »

I'm not sure it's accurate to tar all those engaged in postmodernism and deconstruction with the same brush. But that's a whole other keg of powder.

It's neither fair nor accurate, though most of us who've been exposed to that area of academics should be honest enough to admit the amount of crap it has generated.

earwicker wrote: »

If anyone is interested in another look at the Sokal affair, you could do worse than look at http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~bohmmech/BohmHome/sokalhoax.html. The author also wrote an interesting history of quantum physics--Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001). It digs into the debate over how physicists--Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.--saw "reality" as a slippery customer.

Interesting, and thank you for the link. The problem is that for most physicists that I've known they just do the maths and don't think about the philosophy too much. It's just too messy and the Copenhagen Interpretation doesn't sit well with a lot of people.

That said, Bohr's philosophical work has been responsible (indirectly perhaps) for producing a whole load of psuedo-scientific crap linking quantum effects to macro ones which if you have studied the area formally is a very tenuous line of thinking indeed.

earwicker

It's neither fair nor accurate, though most of us who've been exposed to that area of academics should be honest enough to admit the amount of crap it has generated.

No argument here. That's why I think peer-review is important.

nesf

earwicker wrote: »

No argument here. That's why I think peer-review is important.

Indeed, but as a system it also has its flaws. Though they are very off-topic for this thread.

Permabear

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Offalycool

The release of the video game Bioshock on August 21, 2007, may account for some of the sales of Atlas Shrugged.

DadaKopf

Offalycool wrote: »

The release of the video game Bioshock on August 21, 2007, may account for some of the sales of Atlas Shrugged.

That and/or the number of times it was mentioned in the first series of Mad Men.

asdasd

Ideally new currencies would be backed by gold , silver or some other commodity or even an algorithm ,companies like goldmoney.com already exist where you hold you account on line in gold grams, in this case the reserves are not lent out.

I wanted to get back to this. I don't really get the fascination with gold. It is a commodity which has uses, like in Jewellery and Electronics. And it has it's uses as a currency: it's long lasting and portable. Fine. But any medium of exchange is used in lieu of barter. In fact it is an extension of barter. In a bartering system If want your cows and you don't want my pigs, but do need chickens, I can swap my pigs to the chicken farmer for chickens, and trade with you for cows.

Clearly, the chickens I hold to sell for cows are currency since I dont really want to use them as a product. I don't like Chicken soup. This is the origins of currency. Over time people started hoarding commodities which they didnt really want but which were portable - gold, being an obvious one. Eventually it may have ended back in the Jeweller - the only person with a real use for it but provided everybody was willing to trade for it, it worked.

The problem is that gold is finite. I dont see the economy growing more than the gold supply. As to why we should be shackled to the amount of one particular commodity we extricate from the ground, I dont know that either. it seems arbitrary. If we find lots the economy can grow again. Whoppee.

The libertarian critique of fractional reserve banking is funny too, as the entire edifice of modern capitalism - modern being since 16th century - depends on it. If banks give what they have on deposit we dont need banks, and every mortgage with a 30 year term needs a saver with a 30 year locked down deposit account. This deposit account will have a real high interest rate.

You may as well ask the guy with the money ( gold) for the loan. Get a patron.

That seems feudalist.

Permabear

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silverharp

asdasd wrote: »

The problem is that gold is finite. I dont see the economy growing more than the gold supply. As to why we should be shackled to the amount of one particular commodity we extricate from the ground, I dont know that either. it seems arbitrary. If we find lots the economy can grow again. Whoppee.

Gold comes up alot because it cant be created out of thin air at the whim of a central planner. The basic Austrian assumption is that production generates wealth not the supply of money, money is only there to keep account and to facilitate the transfer of savings. As it happens the supply of gold increases at about 2% per year so it probably served as a reasonable measure of growth. However in this day and age there is no reason that an "on line" algorithm couldnt mimic a gold standard

If you have a farmer and a shoe maker, say the farmer produces 10 chickens and consumes 2 , his (real) savings are 8 , he can go to the shoemaker and exchange say 4 chickens for a pair of shoes. So the farmer helps maintain the shoemaker and vice versa. Both particpants now have the choice of consuming each others produce or seeking out capital goods to help increase productivity. Introduce an "enforcer" into the picture now the shoemaker, and the farmer will be forced to part with their product in an exchange for nothing and this in turn will weaken the flow of production of final consumer goods.
The natural tendacy would be for prices to fall over time as productivity increases. If you take a computer the price drops overtime , more money printing isnt needed to increase consumption.

asdasd wrote: »

The libertarian critique of fractional reserve banking is funny too, as the entire edifice of modern capitalism - modern being since 16th century - depends on it. If banks give what they have on deposit we dont need banks, and every mortgage with a 30 year term needs a saver with a 30 year locked down deposit account. This deposit account will have a real high interest rate.

I'll let DF take you on a trip through history if he's about but given that the past 400 years has had a long list of currency hyperinflations with John Law in France or the "its not worth a continental" so there are probably lessons to be learnt from the past
I dont see that borrowers would have any particular problem getting access to credit , various market models could be set up that dont require fractional reserve lending. You might not see too many ninja loans being created though

asdasd

I'll let DF take you on a trip through history if he's about but given that the past 400 years has had a long list of currency hyperinflations with John Law in France or the "its not worth a continental" so there are probably lessons to be learnt from the past

I m pretty sure that fractional reservce banking has a flaw, a bug which manifests every so often with a run on the bank causing misery. The question is whether, even taking this into account, the trend is better than any other model. All other models must be speculative.

silverharp

asdasd wrote: »

I m pretty sure that fractional reservce banking has a flaw, a bug which manifests every so often with a run on the bank causing misery. The question is whether, even taking this into account, the trend is better than any other model. All other models must be speculative.

ultimately it is all speculation , the world will go where it wants to go, I'm not a politician so my interest in it is purely acadmmic but it has informed my personal financial decisions so from that point of view its useful to think through these things. At the very least the Austrian model as been a good predictor that the weels were going to come off the cart. Anyone listening to Greenspan or Bernanke the last couple of years would have lost their shirts if they had listened to them

Permabear

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asdasd

Since electronic money cant be gold the real "broad" money supply would always be more than the total amount of gold in the world. So back to square one. I suppose that there is, for instance, less paper money supply available relative to GDP than before. So a gold backed currency does not solve much.

How would it work anyway, each pound of sterling backed by a pound of sterling? ( Or the equivalent in Gold?)

silverharp

asdasd wrote: »

Since electronic money cant be gold the real "broad" money supply would always be more than the total amount of gold in the world.

As gold isnt a consumption item as such it could be monitized at any value. In the 1930's in the US they revalued the official rate of gold from 20 to $35 per oz. In theory if the central banks all agreed that the official rate is $10K per oz , the market would probably accept this.

Exile 1798

Ayn Rand's views, ie her so-called philosophy of "objectivism" are out there.

We know that many socialists over the last two centuries set up communes, communities, Soviets to actually put their beliefs into action.

If "objectivism" is anything other then the wankfest that is seems to be, then why haven’t any of its adherents ever attempted to put it to the test? Why isn’t there an objectivist "camp" somewhere, where people are selfish, where altruism is scorned and all manner of evolutionary traits are reversed?

Could it be that it is just an extreme position adopted by hapless geeks to draw attention to themselves?

asdasd

Could it be that it is just an extreme position adopted by hapless geeks to draw attention to themselves?

The radicals at both sides of the political spectrum are never that sane. Or nice.

To answer for them, a socialist who does not want to wait for the revolution would have to enter a commune to replicate it's structures ( by the way communes have exisited for centuries, millennia even, if you include monastries and nunneries).

An objectivist doesnt need a camp. He can nasty outside the camp.

MoominPapa

Exile 1798 wrote: »

Why isn’t there an objectivist "camp" somewhere

Maybe there is:

where people are selfish, where altruism is scorned and all manner of evolutionary traits are reversed?

Sounds like the midlands:pac:

Exile 1798

asdasd wrote: »

The radicals at both sides of the political spectrum are never that sane. Or nice.

To answer for them, a socialist who does not want to wait for the revolution would have to enter a commune to replicate it's structures ( by the way communes have exisited for centuries, millennia even, if you include monastries and nunneries).

An objectivist doesnt need a camp. He can nasty outside the camp.

That's true, one can be selfish and self centered in normal society.

Objectivism isn't just a self help idea though, it claims to be a philosophy that would bring a better world. Rand was against public education, health, disabled toilets many more such terrible things.

I wouldn't mind her believers going somewhere and actually trying it on.