Topic: Capitalism. - page 3. (Read 6902 times)

   explain.

Huh?

And that's why i phrased my reply as a question.  Why should an economic system dependent on exponential growth be expected to last forever, when you are perfectly fine with mankind itself becoming extinct?  Why mourn the economy but not mankind?


Now you're just playin' sophist.  The examples you bring up are doubly flawed.  First, in all the examples you offered, the oscillation *is intentional,* the *desired* function of the LC circuit in a radio, the *desired* function in a n engine.  Without shielding and careful design, *parasitic* oscillations would saturate every circuit of a radio, turning it into a oversized paperweight, and an engine designed with no attention to vibration will rattle itself to pieces in minutes, throwing a few rods through the sides of its block for good measure.  Nuf said.


Yes they are. Take out your shocks, and give your car a push.  It will bounce like a jack in the box. Please don't insult my intelligence -- no, bumps in the road do not have a predictable pattern, though the mass of the car combined with its springs makes a wonderful oscillator.  Learn to physics.


Feel free to drop the patronizing tone.  You've been shown to be laughably wrong.

Auctions

You're trying to convince me that nothing intelligent could be said about economy since we never have all the data & (paraphrasing here) we ain't as smart as we think?  Is that it? Then, for starters, you should practice what you preach & stop dabbling in economics -- your ideas, according to yourself, can't be more than half-reasoned.  Unless you're exempt from your own pronouncement.

I'm not saying they're smarter than you -- simply that you don't get to the Council of Economic Advisers for by being ignorant, inept & slow.  These are not dabblers -- they do that stuff for a living. And even the staff has staff.  

There's scant evidence that two heads are better than one, and absolutely none that a billion heads are better still.  A mob's intelligence does not grow with its numbers, quality is not a function of quantity, though a shrewd Georgian once pointed out that "quantity is a quality all of its own."  Everyone gets to be a wit.

Again, you fail.  I said nothing about exponetial population growth.  While that might happen if we manage to get off this rock, it certainly doesn't have to happen.  The natural world all has limits, and humanity isn't really an exception.  If that is "doom" in your eyes, then doom it may be.  But I'm not going to cry over what cannot be avoided, and if we can avoid it (by getting of this rock) nor will I be disappointed to be wrong.


And ham radio operators could never do what they do without a 'stable' oscillation, and a car engine would never go anywhere without it's 'stable' cycles.  An economy is much better compared to a machine in operation than a static construction such as a bridge.

And shock absorbers are not oscillation dampers.  Bumps in the road aren;t oscillations, they don't have a predictable pattern.  Talk about your bad model.


I was giving them the enefit of the doubt, because most certainly some of them are basicly 'simple minded' after a fashion, and are often taken advantage of by others.  It's actually an established rule of politics, often called the rule of the Baptists & Bootleggers.  Feel free to look that one up.

You give him and his like too much credit.  While there is a certain kind of 'smarts' required to obtain and maintain these positions of power, there are many different kinds of 'smarts'.  The kind of 'smart' required to succeed in a social position of power (i.e. politics) is decidedly distinct to the kind of smarts required to analyse a complex economy.  The latter kind of smarts is both rare and humbling, as the end result is usually that, no matter how well you did in school nor how many times your mother told you were so smart, you're not smart enough and you can't be.  And that is the fundamental lesson not taught in economics courses.  Those classes teach the students methods of simplyfying the overal picture, in such a manner as to be able to approximate the massive issue.  But just like chaos theory implies that the choice of direction a butteryfly may take can impact the course of a typhoon halfway around the world and 6 months later, the long tail of data in the economy cannot be rounded off and accurately approximate such a huge and dynamic system for any real timescale.  Oftentimes, the long tail of data isn't even available for analysis.  How do you know what deals that the recycler in Africa makes, if he is not willing to tell you the truth?  What if you never ask?

I'm happy to assume they are smarter than I am, but that doesn't necessarily make them smart enough to outwit the aggregate folks outside their influence.
For a more resilient economy, distributed power seems superior.  More choices in currencies, more flexibility to create and innovate.  The problems seem to arise when we get too much in one place.
At its core, money is just that stuff folks use to convince others to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do, (for free).

Since exponential population growth necessitates matching or better economic growth, which, you point out, "can not be sustained indefinitely," either all economic approaches are doomed, or your assumption of continued population growth is bad.  Are you prophesying doom or


What, exactly, are you basing this on?  Other than the colorful allusion to "compounding" oscillations?  As most of us who've driven a car know, bad shock absorbers (oscillation dampers) make for a lousy ride.  Undamped oscillations are typically disastrous.  Armies, when walking on bridges, are made to break march to prevent bridge collapses.  Unchecked parasitic oscillations in electronics cause ringing, or worse, turn entire circuits into oscillators.  Bad model to pick.


See above.

Edit:  "Well-intentioned politicos"?  Really?  I always assumed that politicians were, at least, given ulterior motives, but you feel that they're just ... simpleminded?  Not quite up to the mile-high bar set by the esteemed politicos of this forum?

I'm not sold on the Keynesian idea yet.  The problem seems to be the "you".  If it were just you and me, we would save for rainy days, and then spend on the rainy days.  When we put the burden/raison d'etre on the too-big-to-fail central banking geniuses we get moral hazard and more failures.  Eventually the too-big-to-fail does fail and then all the stuff lumped into it goes with it.  The US is tossing Health Care onto the heap this year.  Who knows which straw will break the back, but eventually it seems to happen.  The USSR becomes the many former states, the big empires fall to the failures of their banks when those confidence gamed, lose confidence.

We saw a spike in US interest rates this week at the mention of the possibility of some future slowing of the dollar faucet.  That was from one guy's speech, not due to any specific change in the economic situation, or government failing, just Uncle Ben.  This is where meritocratic operations fail, when they are overextended.  No matter how smart Ben may be, which no doubt is smarter than any of us, he doesn't merit that level of authority.

We lose one of the great benefits of capitalism, which is the spreading out of the decision making to all the tiny capitalists who each with their own decision powers add to the whole picture.  Power concentrated loses that access to the many brains of the population and relies on just the guys in the center.  Over time, that is never going to be as good as the distributed decisions of the community of capitalists in the cloud.

(Let's use examples of -2% growth during bust, 4% growth during boom, and 2% long-term goal, figures out of my ass)
I actually still believe that this aspect of the Keynesian economic theory is sound. Specifically, when the cycle goes into bust (e.g. -2% growth), you spend to support it, when it goes into the boom (say 4% growth) you take in more to suppress it, and thus, on the grand scale, even it out to a somewhat of a 'steady' growth of, say, 2% over the long term.Over all, value gets sucked into a "rainy day" fund, and expanded when the rainy day comes.
In my opinion, the main huge problem with the theory is that the suppression stage just can't be implemented. When the economy goes into a bust, governments spend to hold it up, when the economy recovers, everyone got used to the extra services they are getting, and prefer governments keep adding the extra growth (e.g. 2%) on top of the 4% growth they are experiencing, for a super-boom sustained by borrowing. The reason suppressing the economy can't work is because these stages are implemented by politicians who have to answer to constituents who will vote them out for taking away their stuff, or for even uttering a suggestion of suppressing the economy. And so, we end up with minor busts, huge booms, more minor busts, more huge booms, and eventually colossal busts, when we realize most of the booms have been supported by borrowed money.

Brazil might disagree with the flawless workings today.  Some seem to be standing up to their government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/world/americas/public-rage-catching-up-with-brazils-congress.html?pagewanted=all

I'm pretty sure you're well aware you're misrepresenting my educational background.

The problem with "stable" is that it is a subjective valuation.  All economies oscillate, it's called the business cycle.  Unfortuantely, there are many people who will make well intended, but ill advised, attempts to suppress that oscillation.  The result of which is that 'forces' become pent up, and create greater havoc when they are finally released 'out of phase'.  Still other people stand to make huge profits from the timing of changes in teh business cycle, and have a perverse incentive to encourage the realses of such 'forces' on their own timescales, thus making things even worse for everyone else.  George Soros famously made an even bigger fortune doing exactly this to England.  To most poeople, 'stable' would mean that an economy grows at or slightly better than the population rate.  By better, most people would say somthing around 2% APR.  The problem is that even 2% annually is an exponential growth rate, and cannot continue forever.  By definition, that which is not sustainable cannot continue indefinately, no matter the best wishes of  anyone.  To myself, and in this context, 'stable' would mean that the natural 'forces' that result in the business cycle be left alone, so that the magnitude of those oscillations don't have the chance to compound.

And that is what I mean by the 'right' economy.  The one that develops naturally from the people and conditions that are present and develop in the future, without influence of well intended politicos and self-interested powers.  It would be possible for some of those oscillations to be particularly harmful, even to the point of severe social strife, but over the truely long term, such oscillations (by definition) balance out.

Well... yeah? You all want a group of people to be given the power to control other people, whether those other people want to be controlled or not, so at the root you are all the same.

Also, sorry if my mistaking or comparing you to crumbs was insulting to you.

Sure, but i don't need to go ask them for help -- they don't depend on that to be empowered.  I don't ask for protection from terrorists, i just get felt up at airports & don't bother protesting since i need to get to cali without taking a detour to lockup.  I also enjoy the benefits like paved roads, which i've never asked for but must use not to break a bunch of other laws.  About the only non-contributors are the folks locked up in jail.

TL;DR is you don't need to ask for anything -- governments had millennia to perfect the scam, and today it works flawlessly.  The marks know they're scammed, they know the workings of the scam, the scam works anyway.  As one of the marks, I'm proud to contribute

...

You've already failed the test.

This doesn't appear to be an accurate characterization of Moonshadow, or at least not how I read it.

There can be profit for all parties in a transaction.  I have more than I need of A, you have more than you need of B, we swap.  When that happens the "economy" grows.  This is irrespective of any change, growth or depletion of population or anything else. 
By "right economy" it seemed to mean "undistorted" rather than "unchanging".
But then, I may not have understood Moonshadow's intent.

If by that, you mean real ecological damage, than yes.  In such a case, such 'externalities' do, indeed, negatively effect an economy of any nature or size.  The cavet here is that not all claims of environmental harm are, in fact, harmful.  Burning firewood, for example, isn't actually net harmful, even if human beings in the near environmental space may find it uncomfortable, or even personally harmful.  Inasmuch as fossil fuels are burned for energy, they are not necesarily harmful either.  Burned 'clean' such actions only produce CO2, which itself shouldn't rationally be considered a pollutant.  It's a greenhouse gas, yes, but it's also so difuse in the atmostsphere that it's actuall net contribution to global climate changes is highly debatable on scientific grounds.  But that is a huge tangent.


He can be taught!

"War is the health of the state."

OK, substitute raison d'etre for burden.
Those to whom you go to for help, you also empower. 
The less we need it, the less power it has.