(Part 3) Best economic history books according to redditors
We found 2,347 Reddit comments discussing the best economic history books. We ranked the 606 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 41-60. You can also go back to the previous section.
I'm very distrustful of such claims. What is considered a "jobless degree" today was a perfectly reasonable degree 30 years ago. We crack jokes about philosophy majors or english majors or history majors but there is nothing inherently bad about those majors.
We compare them to hard science majors or engineering majors without examining what exactly distinguishes them. Consensus on reddit appears to be that engineering majors are hard and liberal arts majors are easy. This is probably empirically valid in most US colleges but it wasn't always the case. We used to have a serious liberal arts program in this country and you could expect to devote a considerable amount of effort into getting a history degree or a philosophy degree (or any of the humanities). The idea was "liberal arts" meant rigorous preparation for life in general--critical faculties, writing skills, etc.
A few things happened on the way to the forum. In the late 20th century college ceased to be the limited preserve of the rich and dedicated. Rather for the first time a significant percentage of Americans would attend college--partially due to the GI bill but also due to the spread of secondary education. Go have a look at the percentage of americans with high school diplomas pre WWII. It's pretty amazing. This rise in enrollment coincided with a much less fortuitous change--the ascendance of the business school. Expanded from an original mission to produce (at the undergraduate level) book-keepers and (at the graduate level) managers, the business school has fashioned itself as a generalist trade school with a more expensive tuition. In doing so it has produced a much higher percentage of wealthy alumni (arguably the true goal of a university) who have in turn spent a great deal of money on the schools. Because of this cycle, the goal of business schools has metastasized to other departments--college must be considered a training ground for future employment.
The first thing to suffer in the training ground mentality is the humanities. Who needs to know about shakespeare or Weber (or Webster!) in order to manage a factory. Here we get to the last unfortunate coincidence.
At the time when liberal arts departments should have been mounting a concerted argument in their defense, they were engaged in internecine strife over cultural politics. The 60s (and really the 70s) marked a watershed in the humanities and social sciences. Colleges which had been segregating student bodies (yes, even into the 60s and even big, important colleges) now faced a huge backlash from students and faculty and opened departments devoted to post-colonial study, feminist and black/latino issues. don't get me wrong. All of those departments needed to be opened up. anyone who says that we were learning a complete (or even moderately honest/comprehensive) history when it was all white men is ignorant of the actual goings on. But I digress. These professors and students didn't just devote themselves to teaching black/latino/NA/feminist history. They relished in their victory and focused on the meta-issues like historiography and feminist/marxist/nationalist social theory. The snake began to eat its own tail and outside observers could see it. By the time the humanities awoke from their post-watershed slumber it was too late. The funding and students had gone, along with the expectation that liberal arts meant a strong and rigorous education rather than a simple "rounding out" of a business or engineering student.
There are some other factors at work here. Rising cost and student mobility (compare the average distance traveled for a student in 1960 w/ 1990 from high school to college) have given rise to an entitlement in the student body which the faculty isn't all that quick to disabuse. One way it has been phrased is that students don't really like homework and professors don't like it either, so they both agree to an equilibrium with less of it (that's from an omnibus study on grade inflation--I can find the cite but it may take me a while). "Good" degrees may just be those in fields which due to their own cultural leanings haven't succumbed to lowered standards or lack of rigor. In some cases these are art classes (seriously talk to a BFA student at one of the big private art colleges, their workload is insane). In some cases these are math or engineering majors. But in other places they may be philosophy majors or anthropology majors or econ or poly sci.
Whew. Sorry that's probably way long.
tl;dr American education underwent some serious shit in the last 60 years and we haven't got it all figured out yet.
Edit: some sources just to let people see what I am and am not pulling out of my ass:
As far as I can see, Joe is totally correct here. World Bank Economist Branco Milanovic has it in his book, but if you don't want to read the book, you can check out ForeignPolicy.com's analysis
or the Daily Mail's take on it. If you don't like those sources, Investopedia has an analysis
of Oxfam's data.
OP made some logical mistakes. Obviously, the USA is the richest country with the highest population, and takes up a disproportionate amount of the top 1%. Other countries between #8 and #1 are places like Qatar or Luxembourg which don't have large populations.
R1:
Today I bring you this WaPo Op-Ed on how the Carrier deal will return business norms back to ones that favor labor and community because firms will fear Trump’s wrath. Here the author offers a distorted view of America’s past, a dysfunctional view of how contracts and norms interact, and a wayward portrayal of economists as unable to fathom agents and systems which do not follow strict mathematical functional forms.
>There was a time in America when there was an unwritten pact in the business world — workers were loyal to their companies and successful companies returned that loyalty by sharing some of their profits with their workers in the form of higher wages, job security and support for the local community.
The author wistfully describes a past that did not exist when businesses and workers in long term marriages because it was what was right and good for the community.
At its heart this period existed because unionization (or more accurately worker bargaining power) made it possible. Certainly on the point of loyalty, unionization decline is the largest contributor to declining tenure (see Bidwell. As unionization fell, this loyalty also disappeared.
However, unionization's decline can largely be explained by the rule of law (right-to-work laws, unionization process etc.) though governing and business norms played a role (to be discussed).
With bargaining power largely reduce, workers had additional difficulty (for better or worse) attempting to hold their jobs in the face of international pressures and especially technological change as countless economist (Autor just to name check one) have documented.
>modern day economists tend to ignore such shifts in social norms because they can’t quantify them in the same way they can quantify trade flows or technological innovation or changes in educational attainment. They assume that social norms change in response to economic fundamentals rather than the other way around.
This is the sort of things that can ruin my work day as a nominally institutionalist style economist. To begin, several Nobel prize winning economists have done significant work studying norms formation and effects such as North, Ostrom, Akerlof, Akerlof again!.
Beyond this, others have built off these works (Ostrom was focusing on the importance of norms, but not specifically addressing the problem) to try to model norm development in game theory example.
In fact, in Samuel Bowles’ Microeconomics, discusses in detail the way contracts influence the norms and institutions of exchange (Chapter 8, p. 265). The long and short of Bowles’ discussion is that norms are well understood, evolutionary, and in the absence of complete contracting have significant influence on the results of exchange.
Norms matter greatly to economists in the event that contracting is incomplete. One would hope, it seems in vain, that contracting between the federal government and American firms is more complete than most contractual situations.
>the new norm is not longer acceptable, and [Trump] intends to do whatever he can to shame and punish companies that abandon their workers.
>He may even have to make an example of a runaway company by sending in the tax auditors or the OSHA inspectors or cancelling a big government contract.
Many economists see the potential change of market norms that will result from government contracts suddenly being less than 100% enforceable as a problem. Coming back to Bowles, he notes that said norms “are sustained by the structure of the market and other social interactions in which traders routinely engage.” If having government contracts and enforcement become less predictable is to be the new norm of enforcement, surely the market response will be to ask government from some premia in contracting to account for uncertainty. New firms may avoid starting their business under the supervision of this government altogether.
Tyler Cowen points out that the new norms that would arise likely involve more complex contractual agreements to skirt restrictions, degradation of U.S. tech advancement, a ramping of favoritism to levels not seen since the Harding administration, potential de facto capital controls, or at best a politicization of the economy with no real rule of law effects.
>Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt understood that. So did Ronald Reagan when he fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers and set back the union movement for several decades.
Perhaps most crucially, the author here references a variety of Presidents who enforced their support (or lack therefore) for labor, but did so through the rule of law via various anti-trust acts, the championing and enactment of a large set of labor relations legislation, and the decision to enforce laws enshrined in code 15 years prior that had been previously ignored. As opposed to potentially undermining the rule of law as Trump does by leveraging government contracts and regulation.
A bonus on this point is that—though Reagan’s actions may have signaled willingness from government to support changing business norms by supporting them through rule of law—unionization’s decline had already begun years prior to the changes in business norms Reagan’s ruling supposedly incited.
The study of economics is not one that lacks an understanding of how norms influence market interactions. Though I am not as well versed in studies accounting for changes in norms mathematically, I’d wager someone here could produce good examples of studies that do just this through the use of good instrumental variables.
The Carrier deal will likely change norms in business actions, but those are likely to be related to businesses’ certainty in contracting with government during the Trump presidency. Just as is seen in Trump’s cabinet, the only people left to provide work will be those certain they can take advantage of information asymmetry to get a better deal from U.S. governments. Any mass effort to enforce job retention on a scale much more massive than the Carrier deal will be enacted via law and will be just as harmful to business culture as Cowen and other economist predict, but it will be the changes to contractual enforcement that drive these results and not revolution in norms spurred on by backroom dealing.
This is 100% how South Korea became the economic powerhouse it is today. Several decades ago, they'd bring in new technology- VCRs, cassette tapes, whatever the hot new tech thing was of the time. Then they'd break the machines apart, reverse engineer everything, and started selling cheap versions of it, and then export it to the US and wherever. They deliberately and gleefully did this so they could start building up their economy based on the tech industry.
Bad Samaritans
Except that's fucking nonsense. Actual historians, not bullshit blogs, have detailed how slave capital was the key to fueling growth in both the North and the South. Why do you think New York city supported the South during the war? They were making bank off the insuring of slaves, finishing goods whose raw materials were produced by slaves, etc.
Here's an academic source.
http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15556.html
Here's a more popular style source, but one written by an actual historian.
https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664
Here's another.
https://www.amazon.com/Business-Slavery-Rise-American-Capitalism/dp/0300192002
here you go!
By the way - this book was a major inspiration for Season 2 of The Wire. Season 2 was about the disappearance of work on the Baltimore ports and the ensuing effects that had on various union workers and Baltimore as a whole.
How class in China became politically incorrect
> “It’s just not trendy to talk about class,” says Sydney University political scientist Guo Yingjie, who has met with resistance — even from mainland academics — to his research on the topic. Talking about class is neither politically safe, nor politically correct, “It’s a dirty word. It’s almost something that many academics in China think is irrelevant.”
> Such a strategy is underlined by the messages propagated through the state-run media, according to Wanning Sun, a media scholar from the University of Technology, Sydney. “If you want to get rid of class struggle discourse, one way the party has done this is to promote consumption so people get a sense of hope,” Sun says. “An ideology of hope — the neoliberal discourse — has taken root. Neoliberalism doesn’t like class discourse. As long as you find your position in the market, you’ll be fine.” In this way, class has become defined by consumption, and in some cases, conspicuous consumption.
...
> Research by the University of Sydney’s David Goodman has found that around 84% of today’s elite are direct descendants of the elite from pre-1949. This suggests that six decades of Communism may not have a dramatic impact upon the elites, who have the advantage of decades of capital accumulation — including economic, cultural and social capital — which have apparently continued to benefit them under the party-state system.
The research mentioned in the last paragraph reminds me of Gregory Clark's book.
The main sources for that post are David Graeber's The History of Debt, which is one of the best books I've ever read on credit and commerce. He talks about the econ of slavery a lot.
The rest of my info comes from research done for my historical fiction books, so firsthand accounts and history books that just go on and on. I'm just a self-publishing guy though. The newest stuff I have is a series called Cthulhu in the Deep South. It's basically using Lovecraft's mythos to talk about slavery.
Evidence suggests that there is less social mobility than you think. The richest families in Venice in the 1300s are the great great ... grandparents of the richest families in Venice today.
Read the Son Also Rises
Given the choice between higher income taxes which discourage wealth creation and higher estate taxes which discourage inter-generational transfers, I'd pick the latter.
>had a few famines, they were caused by Capitalists. Farmers who did not want to turn over the crops to the people, and instead burned and razed their own fields. On top of a few naturally caused famines, just having come out of a Civil War, and being the biggest contributor to the allies victory in World War II, I can understand why some people cut Stalin some slack.
Seeing a Libertarian Socialist posting blatant historical revisionism that only comes from apologist works is so disheartening.
It's well established by historians that massive errors in planning committed by the Soviet bureaucracy contributed massively to the Holodomor and other famines. A large part of why this happened was because collectivization was imposed upon the peasants by a bureaucracy with little knowledge of the local conditions (and who didn't prepare for the seasonal weather changes that Ukraine faces) and that tried to get it's way with the peasantry with brute force when their plans began failing. I have a short write-up about the causes of famine in this sub.
And in return for that loan, the world bank forces the country to adopt neoliberal policies. Like how S Korea was forced to not run deficits after the economy tanked, and over 100 corporations a day were going bankrupt. Meanwhile, the US was bailing out its big corporations. Isn't the world bank controlled by member countries based on their GDP? Doesn't this make the US the controlling member?
Here is a link to that book I mentioned:
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991
Why is the world bank and the IMF trying to get other countries to adopt monetarist policies, while we still practice Keynesianism? As Chang points out in that book, we are 'kicking out the ladder' for developing countries.
>>modern day economists tend to ignore such shifts in social norms because they can’t quantify them in the same way they can quantify trade flows or technological innovation or changes in educational attainment.
>They assume that social norms change in response to economic fundamentals rather than the other way around.
This is the sort of things that can ruin my work day as a nominally institutionalist style economist. To begin, several Nobel prize winning economists have done significant work studying norms formation and effects such as North, Ostrom, Akerlof, Akerlof again!.
I think your formatting failed there, it appears like one quote, whereas I think the seconds part is supposed to be your response. Pretty confusing to read.
Worth noting, I am not particularly an expert on homicide or urban criminology, but I've worked some in the area and ran a cursory google search (lazy, bad me!) followed by a shallow EBSCO search (slightly less lazy!) for relevant lit. I also skimmed a couple books on my shelf. With luck someone more versed can offer a more detailed answer.
This question is reasonably complicated as it isn't specific how you'd like to conceptualize population density. If you're considering the difference between rural and urban areas, there is certainly a link between murder rate and urbanization if using, say, UCR reported population and UCR index crimes (homicide being the most reliably reported UCR index crime). Specific reasons for this are numerous and the topic of a wide range of criminological and sociological theories; in general cities offer lower informal social control, more opportunities for deviance, proximal inequality and heterogeneity, concentrated poverty... you name it. Those are all very different approaches to looking at the problem and a text like Akers & Sellers hits most of the spots. My graduate chair did most of his work on segregation which is largely an urban crime problem and I did my own comprehensive work on changes in homicide rates in US cities from 1960 to 2010 across all US counties from the perspective of deindustrialization as per William Julius Wilson, which is a unique urban issue. There are so very many reasons for cities to have more murder.
Now if you're more interested in the link between levels of population density between different cities or nations of similar total population, results there are somewhat mixed to my knowledge. Some older work that looked at it found it to be less significant than factors like ethnic and economic heterogeneity, though still potentially a factor (Land, McCall, Cohen 1990 "Structural Covariates of Homicide Rates" and subsequent reanalyses of that important work). A large issue here is multicollinearity; population density of cities, or other units, tends to be pretty highly correlated with many other predictors of crime. My understanding is that population density isn't nearly as strong a predictor, particularly internationally, as the primary structural covariates of economic deprivation and heterogeneity, once you isolate it; in a simple model population density is simply serving as a proxy for the other criminogenic conditions common to urban areas.
Edit: Depending on your familiarity with research methods and the topic area my second paragraph may be unclear. With regard to multicollinearity, when you have a number of variables you're trying to use to predict your dependent variable, in this case homicide, which are very closely correlated, they effectively "eat up" each others' variation, diluting the statistical significance of their impact (though not biasing the direction / magnitude in most commonly used approaches like OLS regression). This can make it hard to get useful results when you're trying to separate the impact of, say, area population and density (the latter being a function of the former and area), when your sample size is fairly small (there are only so many cities with populations over 250,000). Therefore people often attempt to look at, say, density while excluding highly correlated variables, which may mean density is actually absorbing the "ignored" impact of the now omitted variables. Combine this with other vital-to-control-for predictors of homicide like economic inequality/deprivation and population heterogeneity, which are also pretty damned collinear, and life gets difficult. Researchers have to trade off between multicollinearity and omitted variable bias and it gets worse when dealing with small sample sizes.
No the book is excellent. It's required reading. It's not a 'final explanation for all poverty and all world events' but it's required reading.
I'm curious who dismisses it because very few high level economists do. If it's 'political scientists' on reddit they're probably morons with a bone to pick.
If you want the more academic version and not the popsci version read Douglass North's Institutions, Institutional Change & Economic Performance, or read Acemoglu and Robinson's papers like
https://economics.mit.edu/files/4469 or https://economics.mit.edu/files/4123
>>> "Why do you not think it is culture?"
Because [this] (http://www.amazon.com/When-Work-Disappears-World-Urban/dp/0679724176).
Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans is an awesome rebuttal of the free trade nonsense the libertarians always push.
He's a Reader at Cambridge University, but I don't know exactly what that means. Trying to find out I started feeling bad that I didn't go to Cambridge.
>the incentive system of the free market is terrible for scientific research.
This is wholly wrong.
The Myth of Science as a Public Good.
Or the book by Terence Kealey.
Funnily enough, blowing other people's money on political pet research projects doesn't make the "incentives" for scientific research better. State funding doesn't add to "scientific research," what it does is crowd out private monies (at ~1 to 1.25 meaning every $1 in public funding means losing $1.25 in private funding) which are being more efficiently allocated for the effect of making common people better off instead of being touted at the next political event.
Ha Joon Chang, a Korean economist does an excellent book about this.
All those myths about how free market capitalism is the greatest is fucking bullshit.
https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003Z9L4NA/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
IMF and the World Bank have essentially become enforcers of the current capitalist regime and basically shame countries who try to adopt self-sufficient policies that can be better for them in the long-run.
1 excellent example he gave in the books is the steel & shipbuilding industry in Korea. 50 years ago the free market wouldn't have thought of investing in them as Korea was a poor country with no resources with super risky projects. The government took the matter into their own hands and it laid the groundwork for the economic miracle that they experienced.
Countries going into debt to invest in their long-term capabilities really made sense to me, just like how you pay for your college & post-graduate fees to better your human capital. If countries always spend within their means, huge infrastructure projects will never get off the ground.
Likewise, if Indonesia's government do not invest in long-term profitable projects, we will never really become developed. The main driver of the economy will be the private market that really don't give a fuck about infrastructure and the likes if it doesn't benefit them (e.g. RGE in Riau having their own ports and electric generators for their paper mills, Lippo having their malls/hospitals/housing relatively well-connected to each other).
One can make an argument that if the government incur debts and use it inefficiently they may well make the economy worse off, but as long as the money stays within the country, it's better than not doing it at all. The book mentions the example of Suharto vs Mobutu Sese Seko who remitted most of the money to Swiss.
But I agree, Indonesia should invest more in projects like this. Debts aren't always bad. Gimana beli rumah kalo ga ada KPR? Gimana mulai bisnis kalo ga ada pinjeman bank?
You need to make $35k per year to be in the global 1%.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465019749/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=fopo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0465019749
Yes, they do, at book length:
http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Laws-Scientific-Research/dp/0312173067
Government research is often politicized, slow, and sucks up funding that would've gone for more productive private research:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-economics-of-science
Urban communities of color are over-policed, and our sentences for almost everything are too harsh. I know, I know, this sounds like liberal SJW party line talk, but the facts bear it out.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration on the planet (and by far a higher rate of incarceration than any industrialized/European country we view as our social peers). If you start parsing out demographics, black and latino Americans have incarceration rates that somewhere around 10x any comparable nation. I'm talking gulag/apartheid level incarceration rates for these subgroups. (Sorry for the lack of figures throughout this post, but it's too much work to bust out the books each time. In general, these figures are what I remember from Crime and Public Policy). To me, the most convincing piece of evidence is the disparity between arrest rates for drug use of adolescents by race. White and black teenagers use at about the same rate, but black teenagers are arrested far more frequently. Are black teenagers made safer by that higher arrest rate? Are white teenagers made worse off by their lower drug arrest rate?
I think the answer (on aggregate) is a resounding no on both counts. That's over policing right there, where fewer contacts results in better outcomes.
So what do we get from this? We lock people up for far longer than any of our peer nations do for similar crimes (the common anecdote here is a life sentence in the UK is only 15 years) and for far longer than we did historically (again, anecdotal but look at some of the sentences in an old crim law casebook. I'm talking 7 years for 2nd degree murder). Yet, we also have a middling to high rate of crime (particularly homicide). Either American's are particularly criminal, particularly insensitive to incarceration, or other nations have a better system (i.e., one that achieves better/comparable results with less incarceration). That's what I mean by draconian charging; we could have less incarceration and the same or better crime rates with the right system. And these excessive sentences create other problems as well, such as giving prosecutors disproportionate power to dictate punishment.
So where can we trace these phenomena to? The explosion of inner-city crime from the 1960's to the 1990's. This unprecedented level of violence and crime caused an overreaction of law and order, so this is where we start getting 10-25 year sentences for possession of drugs. Just think about that, we are penalizing simple possession more harshly than most of sister nations do for murder. This escalation in drug sentencing caused an escalation in everything else, because once you're getting heavy sentences for mere possession it seems weird to give out a lighter sentence for manslaughter or assault. The concentration of violence in the inner cities (the cause of which is still up for debate, see When the Work Disappears or Don't Shoot or even lead) means that we concentrate these harsh sentences on on inner-city residents who are primarily minorities.
Finally, if you have any interest in this area at all, read "When Brute Force Fails" by Kleiman. It's only like 80 pages, but it lays out the theory and the basic stats for why our current system should be considered to over-police but under-protect.
You say that like gold is good and fiat money is bad. Fiat money is much more flexible, an there's decades of evidence showing it enables central banks to engage in useful, stabilizing monetary policy.
I don't buy the "Golden Fetters" theory entirely, but there's good evidence that the recession was worst in the countries that stayed on the gold standard the longest, and least bad in those that abandoned it quickly.
This is a really great book on how slavery made America what it is today https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=the+half+has+never+been+told&qid=1562914097&s=gateway&sr=8-1
After listening to it on Audible I'm convinced that without slavery America would be nowhere near as powerful and influential today. It is a horrible stain upon our nation. And something that all of us who live here need to learn to come to terms with.
Not according to Gregory Clark, who proved that there are no descendants of the laborers and practically every person in England was descended from those who owned property back in the 15th-18th century.
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/0691168377
The Top out of Sight, a class first described by Paul Fussell.
https://lionoftheblogosphere.wordpress.com/2013/05/23/another-post-about-the-top-out-of-sight/
(Trump and his cohort will never join them)
>Collectivization leads to heavy losses, to Stalin, "Starvation was resistance and resistance was a sign that the victory of socialism was just around the corner," Bloodlands, 41., "Moscow expected far ore from Ukraine than Ukraine could possibly give." (33), moreover "Stalin ordered on 5 December that collective farms that ha not yet fulfilled their annual requirements must surrender their seed grain." (34)..."Then in early 1932 they had no seed grain with which to plant the fall crop." (34) - You may argue that the famine was not man-made, but taking away seed grain seems like a shitty way to jump start collectivization. Stalin's capricious response to low yields in 1932, ensured that the famine would result in millions of deaths.
So now the famine is no longer man-made? You backtrack quite quickly.
>As for aiding Ukraine, "Now, hundreds of thousands of starvation deaths later, Stalin sent Kaganovich to hold the whip over the Ukranian party leadership...it resolved that requisition targets were to be met. This was a death sentence for about three million people. As everyone in that room knew in those early morning hours, grain could not be collected from an already starving population without the most horrific of consequences." (44), Stalin and Kaganovich caused those deaths, no doubt about it.
Snyder takes too many licenses in his descriptions, that's one of his failures in 'Bloodlands'. Try to read more than one book per subject. Start with:
http://www.amazon.com/Years-Hunger-Agriculture-1931-1933-Industrialisation/dp/0333311078/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1312325930&sr=8-2
I'll step up and post some critiques as per your request. I'm unsure that anyone else here really will-- small movements tend to be overly sensitive to criticism.
This is a book called Wealth and Democracy, a very historical book whose premise is simply "Laissez-faire is a pretense." As much as the idea that capitalism leads the way to corporatism is solely a problem with government gets bandied around here, the author makes a very strong historical argument that the capitalists will simply create the mechanisms for their own control and rent-seeking if none exist.
The Chomsky Reader is another good choice. The idea that replacing the government with less government (or no government, as the people at Mises.org or Murray Rothbard would recommend) is preferable given that government has done bad things, is silly given the history of the interaction of lawless or near-lawless states and very rich people.
Not a book per se, but Bryan Caplan (a very conservative economist, in fact) showing the fallacies in the grape kool-aid that is Austrian economics is a compelling read. Also not a book, E. Feaser's critique of Rothbard as a philosopher really does a good job of clipping the wings off of the premise-pyramid that is Man, Economy, and State before it ever leaves the ground.
I've found this website useful for addressing some of the more esoteric, but no less fundamental, aspects of Libertarian philosophy. Finally, if you can separate advocacy from critique and understand that the critique still applies even if the solution turns out not to work, I would recommend reading Das Kapital. Much of Marx's formal critique of the system of capitalism (the beginnings of public choice theory, the machinations of capitalism) remains unaddressed today.
No, not that. Nobody denies the human factor. Intent, however, was never proven. As in, nobody plotted to create Holodomor, and nobody plotted to take a natural famine and make it even worse. On the contrary, efforts to help people were documented (if only "too little too late" - local authorities were reluctant to report the real situation to Moscow). For the record, my position here is based on Western research, not Russian.
>Show me an example of a system like this working. I dare you.
https://www.amazon.com/Anarchy-Unbound-Self-Governance-Cambridge-Economics/dp/1107629705
https://www.amazon.com/Private-Governance-Creating-Economic-Social/dp/0199365164
https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Hook-Hidden-Economics-Pirates/dp/0691150095
https://www.amazon.com/Not-So-Wild-West-Economics/dp/0804748543
https://www.amazon.com/Machinery-Freedom-Guide-Radical-Capitalism/dp/1507785607
https://www.amazon.com/Art-Not-Being-Governed-Anarchist/dp/0300169175
There is also a whole ton of economic literature out there about groups who resolve disputes using game theory, or long term contracts, things like that, instead of relying on a central governing body with a strong threat of violence.
Guten tag OP!
Glad to hear you're enjoying reading about Kansas history! Have you also been reading about the history of John Brown and abolitionism? That is an interesting story as well.
You mention wanting to better understand the history of the north and south and how it led to the Civil War. You are exactly right that the North wasn't some beacon of abolitionism - in fact, the North was complicit making money off of slavery, and in the expansion of slavery in the south from the very beginnings of the country.
A great book that will help you understand this, and how it led to the Civil War - and strife in places like Kansas / Missouri / Nebraska later - is "The Half Has Never Been Told". It's an economic history of slavery and it's expansion from the founding of the US through the beginning of the Civil War.
https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664
If you are interested in this topic, here's a book that goes into exactly what economic mechanisms Britain and the US used to aid the Nazis: Conjuring Hitler. It was written by one of my college professors.
Please study some recent American history. If you really believe that "black culture" is the reason for higher incarceration rates and lower incomes/educational outcomes for black Americans, you are very ignorant. Try reading [this] (http://www.amazon.com/When-Work-Disappears-World-Urban/dp/0679724176/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344357214&sr=1-10&keywords=work+inner+city) as an overview.
> wealth concentrations allow you to do screw everyone else over by doing market-breaking things like creating artificial scarcities, fixing prices, bribing judges, and outspending your competitors to drive them out of business.
And yet, without government favors, such things generally don't happen in the real world.
I'm familiar with the monopoly lifecycle, just as you are.
Interestingly enough, step 4 doesn't happen, because step 3 is never completed. Standard Oil had a good run, but they never jacked up prices. Same for Alcoa, and probably others that I can't think of right now.
Also, without government favors, giant companies tend to lose their "monopoly" status over time. Remember Woolworth's?
My source for all this is How Capitalism Saved America, by Thomas DiLorenzo.
Sex Science and Profits is linked in the video but that is basically as popular version of the more serious: The Economic Laws of Scientific Research
http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Laws-Scientific-Research/dp/0312173067/ref=la_B000AQ3Y2A_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398616752&sr=1-2
How about checking your own facts. South Korea became an economic powerhouse through protective tariffs and economic policies.
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991
Here
There is also this book
It's true. Only 60 million make it into the top 1%, with $34,000/year. Half of that 1% (29 million) live in the US. The number comes from Branko Milanovic's work, and his book The Haves and the Have-Nots.
Here are some articles on it from well respected organizations:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/inequality-and-rise-global-1-great-new-paper-branko-milanovic
http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/garyshapiro/2012/05/30/we-are-the-worlds-one-percent/#7db36adf20f0
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/04/americans-make-up-one-half-of-the-one-percent_n_1183713.html
However, keep in mind they all cite the same source, which is Milanovic and his book, and were all written at around the same time, so I assume it was Milanovic's publisher paying a PR firm to get these written. But that's pretty much how most media works now days. So if you are still skeptical of the number, I suggest reading the book, or finding some of Milanovic's published papers and reading through the methodology used to come up with his numbers.
Another fantastic book on the subject is Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I highly recommend reading it. Picketty actually expected huge amounts of controversy when he released his book, and was surprised to find out that not many people disagreed with his methodologies and conclusions. Which is pretty scary in itself.
There is a distinction between those who believe in anarchism as the ideal system and anarchism as operational in practice (or both, of course). I stand on the former and would like to be convinced of the latter.
As an ideal, anarchists believe no state is the most moral way to structure society (technically unstructured). The key issue here, and this is the core issue of any political thinking, is of collective action, and from that, the use of coercion, force, and other physical methods. For instance, many if not all people would say force is justified in self-defense. However, is coercion or force justified when someone goes over the speed limit when driving, which is not directly harming someone but could potentially harm someone. What about if someone harms themselves (in the case of suicide, drug use, food use, and euthanasia)? Is force also justified if someone ignores some sort of building requirement when building their own home (pointing to certain zoning laws and building requirements)? There are varying degrees in which force and violence are tolerated. For anarchists, the belief is that force is only justified in self-defense--and that it should be the right of the individual to defend himself or herself but never to initiate it. There are even pacifist anarchists who go further and will not even defend themselves.
There is also the misconception that anarchists are radical individualists, that is, there should be no other groups, associations, fraternities, or other collection of people. It is precisely because people should be free to join whatever group that anarchists believe what they believe. No individual should be forced against their will to be part of another group. There are also strains of anarchist groups that do believe in self-governance on a small scale and voluntary level. That is, something akin to a kibbutz or the Amish community. These people willingly form their own associations and create a sort of self-government structure.
On the nature of conflict and crime, it is indeed true conflict can and will arise from any sort of human interaction. The question becomes is this conflict solved best through government or by the parties involved? Remember, every war ever fought was because of government and the people in power convinced the common man and woman that this was their problem as well. Private Governance by Edward Stringham, while not advocating for the anarchist position, details how complicated problems and conflicts are mitigated through private means. This book is not a defense of anarchism nor is it meant to convince you of anarchism, but that there are examples where private means are the best ways to solve problems. Richard Dawkins is known to have said: "We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further." In the same vein, most of us are anarchists about most governments and most forms of governance; some people just go one government further.
Onto the second half of your bullet points, the theory of anarchism is simply the belief that people should rule themselves bottom-up rather than from a person or a group of people top-down. The points you make are not necessarily implicated by the theory of anarchism, though you may believe there are strong reasons such events could happen. Democracy, majoritarian by definition, itself is fundamentally mob justice. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn does a great exposition and criticism on democracy on exactly this point in Liberty and Equality. H.L. Mencken is purported to have said: "An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods."
hmmmmmm, unfortunately, Germanys economic crisis in the late 1920s was not created by German fiscal irresponsibility, but by the lucridous reparations demanded by the Allies after WW I combined with an British-American engineered inflation.
If you are interested, I can recommend Conjuring Hitler - How Britain and America made the Third Reich
Great responses here. I'd also point people to Barry Eicgengreen's book Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression which does a good job of presenting the evidence.
I'd have to email you a more thorough response or contact you later through DM for research. A few resources that have influenced me:
When Work Disappears
which was published about 20 years ago really explored this topic on the economic shifts of the country and how they impacted country.
Also the New Jim Crow touches on drug issues and workforce development a little bit too.
Is your question trying to ask if we train more people for work they're less likely to use drugs or something?
Here's a book that outlines what happened 1933 during the Soviet famines
https://www.amazon.com/Years-Hunger-Agriculture-1931-1933-Industrialization/dp/0333311078
Anthony De Jasay is one the most smartest yet underappreciated libertarians I guess. Just look up on his books. Besides that Edward Stringham and Peter Leeson are important figures. I always liked Bruce Benson's works. You should also read his article enforcement of property rights in primitive societies
This article on wild west is excellent. It's based on their book Not So Wild, Wild West
I mentioned Peter Leeson, his article on pirates An-Arrgh-Chy is a different perspective on organization outside the state, his book on same subject, The Invisible Hook is a must read. Also his article on Somalia, Better off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse is perfect.
And this is another article on law and justice by Bruce Benson.
Look you seem to have good intentions but you're completely immersed in the neoclassical economics bullshit.
So, I recommend taking at this particular book:
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community by Harvard Economics Professor Stephen A. Marglin, who is also a reformed/ former neoclassical economist.
Philip Mirowski's book Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science, his book More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics and his latest The Knowledge We Have Lost in Information: The History of Information in Modern Economics deal with a lot of the bullshit coming from economics.
You can find a more anti-capitalist critique in [The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital](http://www.lamarre-mediaken.com/Site/COMS_630_files/Beginning%20of%20History.pdf
) (I included a PDF to it).
As for books on what communism might look like:
https://www.amazon.com/Living-Edges-Capitalism-Adventures-Mutual/dp/0520287304
https://www.amazon.com/World-Gift-Jacques-T-Godbout/dp/0773517510
https://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Economy-Sharing-Thomas-Widlok/dp/1138945552
The economic mechanism that Thomas Widlok talks about in his book is very to what Peter Kropotkin calls "mutual aid" and David Graeber calls "everyday communism".
Terence Kealey: The Myth of Science as a Public Good
The Economic Laws of Scientific Research
thanks for posting this.
i am currently reading (almost finished) machine dreams which covers some of the background history associated with von neumann and, also, the connections with economics (the author argues that economic thought is closely associated with a certain interpretation of computer science that avoided dealing with the problems raised by godel/turing due to a political desire to push a right-wing "individualist" approach). it (machine dreams) is interesting - it made reading sections of the link above much more interesting, because i had a context to understand who he was arguing with - but you might want to read a few pages online before buying it - there's a lot of economics and it's written by someone a tad smitten by post-modernism.
source: http://www.amazon.com/Conjuring-Hitler-Guido-Giacomo-Preparata/dp/074532181X
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mefo_bills
source: http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_07.htm
The American board members were not placed on trial at Nuremburg and the German Central Banker who managed the scheme lived to the ripe age of 93 before dying in 1970. I think he was also a godfather to the children of the director of the British Central Bank or comparable financial leader but couldn't find the source right now, should be in the first book referenced. Point is they belonged to an established social group, or CLASS.
TL/DR:
Q) How could Germany, in a span of 80 years (1918-2000s), lose a World War, get back in shape enough to start another one (in 20 years only), lose it again and then become one of the wealthiest country?
A) A global cabal of financiers coordinated Germany's rearmament free of oversight or economic restraint in order to profit from another world war and eventual rebuilding.
As someone who recently got their DNA genetic test thingy, it's hard to say what % of your genetics you have from your grandfather. I thought I was a quarter native American -- but I have like less than 5% Just depends on how the deck gets cut. My last name geneology goes back to England and English colonists to the US, but I have the same % English as I do native American. Although it is my last name, that makes up a small sliver of my genetics. Which when you think about the genetic tree, the farther you go back, you have so many ancestors, it's crazy.
That said, people with my last name seem to uncannily have similar interests/career paths/obsessions as me. (e.g., someone with my last name has published a book on environmental collapse)
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/0691168377
That is not true. Historically it took 10-15 generations for wealth to dissipate. Source: https://www.amazon.com/The-Son-Also-Rises-Princeton/dp/0691162549
Don't know where he has written about it but Ha Joon Chang's Bad Samaritan's covers it in detail and was fantastic.
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991
“Lucid, deeply informed, and enlivened with striking illustrations, this penetrating study could be entitled "economics in the real world." Chang reveals the yawning gap between standard doctrines concerning economic development and what really has taken place from the origins of the industrial revolution until today. His incisive analysis shows how, and why, prescriptions based on reigning doctrines have caused severe harm, particularly to the most vulnerable and defenseless, and are likely to continue to do so. He goes on to provide sensible and constructive proposals, solidly based on economic theory and historical evidence, as to how the global economy could be redesigned to proceed on a far more humane and civilized course. And his warnings of what might happen if corrective action is not taken are grim and apt.” ―Noam Chomsky
Sounds like both you and /u/watrenu would get a kick out of Philip Mirowski's modern classic More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics
> It's a beautiful tangled interwoven tapestry of science, mathematics, philosophy, and social theory.
Economics is a comprehensive study. Many Economists, Douglas North, Daron Acemoglu, and Nathan Nunn to name a few, have used Institutional Economics to analyze some of the non-quantifiable factors that explain some of the differences in performance between developed and developing countries.
I think Tom DiLorenzo's book How Capitalism Saved America would be a good primer. It addresses a number of instances where private property, the foundation of capitalism, were far more useful than other methods of resource distribution. There are also some bits about how moving away from it was, while good sounding in theory, ultimately destructive.
The key ideas here are that private property avoid the tragedy of the commons, provide incentives for good behavior in trading and being self-serving both in consumption and profit, and they also provide a rational way to decide between choices of goods and choices of services all via the price system and subjective value.
Older article, but that figure for top 1% has been pretty much around that number for quite a while now. https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/27/were-all-the-1-percent/
​
" So by global standards, America’s middle class is also really, really rich. To make it into the richest 1 percent globally, all you need is an income of around $34,000, according to World Bank economist Branko Milanovic. The average family in the United States has more than three times the income of those living in poverty in America, and nearly 50 times that of the world’s poorest. Many of America’s 99 percenters, and the West’s, are really 1 percenters on a global level. "
Do you actually think that? The progress of technology has been driven by the desire to lessen the time spent on attaining the daily requirements to live since we stopped hunting and gathering. The Rational Optimist is a great read that lays all of this out. You currently leverage the equivalent of thousands of man hours through the use of technology just living a simple modern life today.
How we spend that extra time is up to the individual. Most people choose to fill that time with other activities instead of "leisure". Make no mistake that technology is working for you right now.
I enjoyed the book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It's not entirely apropos your interests, but I think you will find it agreeably skeptical about the prevailing economic mumbo-jumbo. Steven Landsburg's The Armchair Economist is another easy, thought-provoking read. I have not read it, but I am curious about More Heat than Light ("Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics ").
My brother has around 15 books on business and economics. I plan on reading them but also ordering
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/0691162549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464470016&sr=8-1&keywords=surnames+economics
A book about how surnames are derived from wealth. I find it intriguing but also because I want to do it for an EPQ :p
There are other books: Freakonomics, The Intelligent Investor, etc
Seems like you are arguing along the lines of what Douglass North articulated in this book. For what it's worth, I found it to be a pretty persuasive argument, but seeing as how it was a pivotal publication in terms of his winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, and still studied two decades later in the social sciences, I submit that he may have been onto something.
It's true that all money is debt. I highly recommend reading "Debt: The First 5,000 Years"
However, whether or not a government forces you to accept a specific type of money as settlement for a debt is irrelevant to its status as money.
>>Did the crisis in Europe cause the Europeans to pull their gold from the US banks -- the mechanism of the gold standard transmitting economic calamity across the ocean just as in 1929 and so many other times?
>How is that "The mechanism of the gold standard"? Capital flight occurs whether the capital in question is gold, rice, potatoes, or greenbacks.
Because, when X causes a financial crisis on one side of the ocean, so defensive gold hoarding by business and individuals drives real interest rates way up, fueling deflation, bank and business failiures, thus more defensive gold hoarding, repeat, gold is pulled in as on a chain from the other side of the ocean.
The economy on that other side of the ocean may be purring along fine and be completely sound. But the sudden unexpected yank of great masses of gold from it is an X that causes a new crisis there. The sudden yank creates a financial market panic -- thus, the gold standard era Panic of 1873, Panic of 1907, and so many others -- which drives up defensive gold hoarding by business and individuals that drives up real interest rates and fuels deflation, bank failures, business failures etc.
This is what happend in 1873 going from Europe to America, and in 1929 going from America to Europe, then reverberating in waves around the world for years after.
Without the gold standard none of this happens. With flexible exchange rates for currencies -- the free market practice! -- the effect of the original crisis is absorbed by a change of the first nation's exchange rate. That changes the relative price of what that nation has to pay to buy rice and potatoes and gold (to use in tooth fillings) compared to people on the other side of the ocean -- but it doesn't bust any financial centers on the far side of the world by causing sudden Panics, money hoarding, deflation driving more money hoarding, bank failures, and all the rest.
It is no coincidence that the USA and every other nation left the collapse part of the Depression exactly when it left the gold standard, with recovery starting prompty. And it is not surprising that no nation has ever been tempted to go back to it.
I mean, read a book. One by a professional who has no axe to grind on the subject. Here's a good one.. (Though get it used or at a library, boy they've really upped the price!) If you fancy yourself an Austrian read Hayek. (For god's sake not Rothbard.)
>I never made an argument for the gold standard, just against the Fed
OK, so you are not for the gold standard and not for a fiat currency managed by a central bank. The third option is ... ???
BTW, just for the record, here is real GDP growth per capita in the USA from the end of the Civil War until the Fed started operating in 1914, and then since the creation of the Fed until today.
per capita annual real GDP growth:
1868 to 1914: 1.51%
1914 to 2010: 2.14% <<-- 42% more.
Make of that what you will. Just some information for you from Mr "Full Retard". :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Conjuring-Hitler-Britain-America-Third/dp/074532181X
You might find this book interesting. Maybe not.
Economists are like the calvary in old western movies, they only show up at the very end. Much as I like C21 and it's rigor this trend was adequately laid out a decade prior.
Just finished these 2:
"The Son Also Rises" by Gregory Clark. No it's not a cheap imitation of Hemingway's. It's a book written by Economic Historian Gregory Clark. His main argument is that socioeconomic mobility is much slower than expected. He uses a new method to analyze this. Specifically he uses surname analysis. Which has the advantage being able to reach back further in time. Current method only able to reach back 3-4 generations. With surnames you could trace 10-15 generations or more.
Clark found out that socioeconomic mobility is indeed very slow and largely immune to government social policy. Surnames which were elite 10-15 generations ago are still elite today although less elite than in the past. So there is indeed social mobility downward but it is slow.
Clark uses the surname analysis method for England, Sweden, India, Japan, and China. For China he has to use rare surnames only. So this means his findings is correct across all cultures, not just Western cultures.
How do we increase the rate of socioeconomic mobility? Clark said only 1 thing seem to work: exogamous marriage (marriage between SES class). Unfortunately some society discourage this practice and prefer endogamous marriage instead. He gave example India as a society which practice endogamous marriage. As a consequence he said "India is a uniquely immobile society". He doesn't see India changing anytime soon. Based on data he collected from Indian matrimonial website Brahmin still prefers to date other Brahmin. In short SES mobility is low everywhere but India's is extremely low/non-existent.
That brings me to my own observation. The Chinese-Indonesians form an economic elite. Most of the time they only marry their own (ie. endogamous marriage). This is primarily because of religion. Based on Clark's theory I predict they will remain economic elite. This one is my own prediction not Clark's
However Clark did mention similar situation as the Chinese-Indonesian which happens in Egypt among their Coptic Christian minority. The Coptic Christian is better educated and have higher income than the rest of Egypt. Clark suspect this happens because of jizya tax (ie extra tax that non-muslim must pay). Jizya tax means most of the convert to Islam were lower class families. Upper class families remain Christian. Egypt was strongly Christian before the Arab invasion. After they converted lower class Muslim families no longer intermarry with upper class Christian families. Hence the muslim stopped rising in SES. Nowadays Egypt no longer have Jizya tax BUT their religion still forbids intermarriage so the SES status of the Coptic is fossilized at the upper level.
One last thing and maybe most controversial. Clark said the mechanism with which social status is passed down from parents to offspring is suspicicously similar to genetic mechanism. Hence that's why he recommends the only sure fire way to make sure your descendants are successful is to marry successful person from successful families. So not only your spouse must be successful his/her family must also be successful. If your spouse is successful BUT her family is not then most likely she is a one-off success. But if her family is also successful then that's how you know that she comes from a long line of successful people and most likely to produce successful offspring.
All in all Clark's book remind me of Javanese saying "Bibit, Bebet, Bobot". "Bibit" means your spouse must be bibit unggul (ie comes from successful family). "Bobot" means your spouse must be successful on her own. I don't know what Bebet means. This shows once again that we still have a lot to learn from tradtiional wisdom.
The word (I think) you want is "Nonhierarchical."
In political science we call this sort of focus on organizational hierarchy "structuralism" however "neo-institutionalism" (which is not mutually exclusive) also discusses a lot of relevant concepts.
And organization (including governments) requires hierarchy of some sort essentially by definition.
That said, some hierarchies, especially those within government, diffuse decision making at the top. For example, a commission has 3 or more commissioners who vote on the final executive decisions of their agency. The Michigan Public Service Commission, for example, has three commissioners, who together make decisions about the regulation of the states regional monopolies (electricity/gas, auto carrier, cell phones, etc...). Another example of shared power, some city governments have a "weak mayoral" system where the mayor is simply chosen by the city-council from the city-council and who only has weak agenda setting powers and little to no independent executive capacity. That said, in many weak mayoral systems the city-council hires a city-manager who reports to them. Is that a pyramid, in your estimation?
Not all hierarchies are designed like a pyramid. Is a public traded companies hierarchically shaped like a pyramid? Not really. It has a CEO but, s/he answers to a board of shareholders where the residual interest and decision making power is highly diffuse. Coase argues that these sorts of imperfect pyramid shaped structures are far less efficient than pure single-manager hierarchies where only the "CEO" has a right to the residual interest of the organization (the profits/rewards/or ills). Coase, and others from the Chicago school tradition (like North), that same article the non-profits and (democratic) government must be extremely inefficient because of the extreme diffusion of power/residual interest.
Not even all hierarchies have a clear and narrowing path to the top. The hierarchies of some high-risk agencies (like-NASA), for example, employ a matrix hierarchy which creates more "veto points" (making it easier to avert disaster) but at increased personnel costs and greater ambiguity regarding the chain of command.
Elinor Ostrom however argues that extreme diffusion of power within the decision making environment can work really effectively to manage common pool resources. However, Ostrom only found that the common pool resource was only successfully managed in this way by really small groups where essentially everyone in the group owned a residual interest and everyone had near perfect information about the behavior of the other group members AND could effectively punish members who shirked their responsibility. These are really impossibly hard criteria to achieve in most situations. That said Ostrom also doesn't dismiss the possibility of some sort of leader existing in that scenario.
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I think Miller's Managerial Dilemmas is a good first read which describes the importance of hierarchy on outcomes.
Hammond has a bunch of research on the impact of structures (hierarchy) in government too.
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Your question was really short and could be interpreted in lots of ways so I kind of took the shotgun approach here. Hope it was useful anyway.
Also, Hitler and the Holocaust came as pretty much a surprise; I mean, people heard rumblings of anti-Semitism and such after the Treaty of Versailles made the Germans butthurt and they went off the deep-end with the Depression. It's not like Anglo-American banks and leading industrialists actively created and funded the Nazi war machine or anything—the same elite who established public education based on the Prussian Model and still dominate the two major political parties in the United States on Wall Street.
Bacondated said you were looking for more of a book that shows history, I have this book on my coffee stand but haven't had the time to read it. Thomas DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America. I've seen it referenced in r/libertarian a dozen times or so, that's why I bought it.
Don't equate "free" trade with climate change. They're not even close in terms of definitions, context, and in terms of "agreement" or consensus by scientists. Portraying criticisms of "free" trade as it is practiced in the world within political systems as being similar to climate deniers is simply wrong.
One quick search shows a prominent economist, Paul Krugman, critiquing Mankiw and his support for the TPP which Mankiw uses the spectre of "economists' belief that free trade is a good thing" to bolster: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/this-is-not-a-trade-agreement/
Here's Dean Baker, a macroeconomist, on the same article:
https://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/correction-to-mankiw-economists-actually-agree-just-because-you-call-something-free-trade-doesn-t-make-it-free-trade
Joseph Stiglitz, another prominent economist, on the TPP and free trade: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/15/on-the-wrong-side-of-globalization/
The Economic Policy Institute on the TPP: http://www.epi.org/publication/white-house-wrong-fast-track-massive-trade/
Ha Joon Chang on free trade: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003Z9L4NA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&amp;btkr=1
Economists on rethinking free trade: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2008-01-30/economists-rethink-free-trade
Factory farming actually enables us to feed more people with less land/resources and at a lower cost. (I believe I read in The Rational Optimist that) it would be impossible to sustain our global population using traditional farming techniques and technologies - it truly is technological advances that make us more productive and more efficient, especially in farming and food production.
That being said, even though factory farming can be bad, pulling the plug would be devastating; it would cause a shortage of food and prices to skyrocket, especially on cheap foods that poorer families rely on.
Instead, I think we as consumers need to demand these changes (as Gov. Johnson stated). The market will naturally respond to this demand, but we'll also need new technologies to replace factory farming in order to maintain a similar level of efficiency, production and prices.
I found this book very enlightening on calling bullshit on "Scandinavia has higher social mobility than the US", because it really does not.
The Son Also Rises
His whole Bad Samaritans book based around his thesis on the application of protectionism for developing economies. We used the book as a supplemental text in an International Political Economy class that I took.
I found the theory interesting. He lays out a number of examples of how protectionism allowed countries we now consider economic superpowers to grow industry until they could compete on the world stage, and then develops examples of how this theory could be applied to currently struggling economies.
I wouldn't underestimate the power of a decentralized, fully armed militia and/or private defense and dispute resolution organizations; they have won many times before. Also, citizens of most powerful countries would lose the will to fight modern day wars much like the American public did a la Iraq and Afghanistan (and that was even after a major provocation).
You seem to only see the negatives. Here's a great book on some of this.
Well you're speaking about stereotypes and other nebulous crap. How about showing some data? There is lots of literature surrounding the correlation of IQ and socioeconomic status/income/etc. I suggest you look into it.
And by the way, regarding the stereotype in China that "people don't stay rich for more than 3 generations:" well, I think you're wrong. Again, there's been a lot of research into historical levels of social mobility and generally what we find is that these levels tend to stay very low, both throughout history and between cultures. Here's some relevant reading
Here is a link to one of many books that will explain it.
Here's an interesting book for you.
If you're a real computer scientist then you'll enjoy reading the following:
>Korea moved from a system where they had oppressive government. They moved in the direction of less government and got more prosperity.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. I suggest you read Bad Samaritans. You will learn that the 'oppressive' government is what took their economy from one of the poorest in the world to one of the richest in a couple of generations.
The rest of your post is just a hodgepodge of nonsense and talking points.
>If you take away power for the government to pick winners and losers in the private sector, if you end the bailouts and the subsidies and the money printing, then there is no incentive for corporations to bribe government.
Oh OK. So if government isn't corrupt, you won't have government corruption. Sounds great.
Here is a piece of future advice. If you are in college, drop out immediately. Find a job doing something simple and repetitive.
Actually the market DID take care of child labor and worker safety largely by itself. If you're interested in understanding this in detail, check out http://www.amazon.com/How-Capitalism-Saved-America-Pilgrims/dp/0761525262
In short, children used to HAVE to work to survive, but because of the productivity brought about by capitalism we were able to give them education instead of making them work in the cannery. For worker safety, as productivity per worker increased, it became economically viable and good business to look after worker's health and well-being.
For segregation and women's rights, I'd argue that free society (the market) was far ahead of the government in ending the institutionalized discrimination present in more backward parts of the USA.
The rigidity of the Gold Standard is widely believed to have caused the great depression.
As for property rights as an alternative to the EPA, you still haven't stated how individuals will succeed in court against big corporations. Even though property rights aren't as strong today, many people have tried to sue fracking companies like Range, but have lost in court because they could not prove 100% that their flammable water was coming from fracking chemicals. Utlimately, scientific things like pollution and global warming need to be handled by scientists, not judges.
No idea on Friedman's take, but here's a book about the topic you may find interesting, in case you haven't read it or heard of it
http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Laws-Scientific-Research/dp/0312173067
Gold as a basis for a currency
>... what the imf did to the third world ...
Develop its industry? Build its infrastructure? Seed its capital markets? Bring its population from malaria-ridden jungles and into cities? Those heartless globalizing bastards!
But seriously though, get educated:
Niall Ferguson:
http://www.amazon.com/Ascent-Money-Financial-History-World/dp/1594201927
Milton Friedman:
http://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Freedom-Anniversary-Milton-Friedman/dp/0226264211
Matt Ridley:
http://www.amazon.com/Rational-Optimist-How-Prosperity-Evolves/dp/006145205X
Hernando De Soto:
http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Capital-Capitalism-Triumphs-Everywhere/dp/0465016146
To answer these questions would require me to write the equivalent of several books. All I can say is that I've read enough on the subject to believe it to be feasible and more importantly non-tyrannical. I will give you my best one sentence answers, link you to the relevant book(s) and then let you interpret them however you wish. Any uses of the term "we" is completely rhetorical and may not reflect views of some subsects of libertarianism.
> So who manages inherently monopolistic infrastructure is a reasonable question. No one?
We don't acknowledge roads as inherently monopolistic, or in fact anything as such. Our entire purpose is to remove the monopoly of security that government represents because it can be done better with competition.
Links:
http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf
http://mises.org/books/production_of_security.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOFdvPyp1rI
> Asking how a person or corporation who accumulates vast sums of money / land / employees is any less tyrannical or exerts any less control over our lives and welfare than a government is also a reasonable question.
Because that person has gained that money through satisfying human wants and needs voluntarily. Any corruption and control over our lives by corporations is inevitably done through the government's monopoly on force. Regulations aren't designed to limit corporations they are designed to create them.
Links:
http://www.cblpi.org/ftp/Econ/RoadtoSerfdom_ReadersDigest_and_Cartoon_Versions.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/How-Capitalism-Saved-America-Pilgrims/dp/0761525262
> So paint me a picture. What does the ideal society looks like?
Too large of a question, all property is private, anything now done by government done by competing private entities.
Links:
http://mises.org/rothbard/foranewlb.pdf
> Has one ever existed in modern history? What's city, state, or nation has the laws (or lackthereof) that you think are good decisions and the closest things to your ideal world?
This is a red herring argument. Before feudalism there was never a feudal monarchy, before Ur there was never a religious autocracy, before Athens there was never a direct democracy, before the U.S. there was never a republican government...this isn't an argument at all actually. However the closest thing would probably be certain times of the 19th century in America.
Links:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8DwAM9OAbw&amp;feature=channel_video_title
Maybe something that you could read later on.
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist
https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664
It's primarily about slavery, but it gives a LOT of context to the westward expansion and the role that slavery played in it, and that both combined played to initiate the Civil War. So basically it covers the social, political and economic history from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War.
There is the Son Also Rises which covers the subject.
The top review gave me a TLDR of the book
In a nutshell, I believe advancements in technology will make agriculture, transportation and other resource-intensive industries much more efficient than they currently are, allowing higher population growth and higher living standards.
To quote The Rational Optimist: "The amount of oil left, the food-growing capacity of the world’s farmland, even the regenerative capacity of the biosphere – these are not fixed numbers; they are dynamic variables produced by a constant negotiation between human ingenuity and natural constraints."
Consider that in 1865, a British author expressed concern that England's reliance on coal would eventually reduce living standards as population growth outstripped coal production.
However, increases in efficiency and the increased use of oil and gasoline (i.e., a different energy source) meant this did not happen.
My main point is this: the biggest problem with predictions about the future is they are made only with knowledge of today's technologies. Humanity has a long history of overcoming problems and I see no reason to think that will change.
EDIT: Also worth noting that whether the world has yet reached the point of "peak oil" is quite debatable.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the notion of "personal responsibility." A notion that, for many conservatives, seems to break through the clouds and let the heaven shine in. I want you to question, for a moment, this way of thinking.
This value is certainly grounded in something very real and true. We recognize that if people are not generally responsible this whole world will fall apart. Everyone needs to be a responsible person. They need to wake up and go to work and they need to take care of their children and possessions. They need to hold to a budget and have the will to deny themselves pleasure when it's in their own long term best interest. Someone who hasn't accomplished these habits is someone we would consider "immature" or childlike. In other words, they never learned, they never had to face punishment and "learn better."
We've also experienced personally moments in our lives where a lazy friend or relative has dropped the ball, made poor or reckless decisions, and as a result, caused us to suffer through no fault of our own.
I think that conservatives tend to take this character of immaturity, that anecdotally is certainly true of some immature people, and project it onto the poor populace at large, as well as anyone who has a grievance that they don't recognize as valid. (what grievances they do recognize, it turns out, has a lot to do with their own ingroup vs an outgroup, involving race and gender and nationality, etc, but that's another issue).
The result is that something true on a small intimate scale is mapped onto things that are much much larger and more complicated, like "black culture" and "black history." This leads to a very wrong narrative.
The idea that there might be something such as structures of power, or social and economic ideologies that perpetuate racism, can be dismissed as imaginary based on this simple narrative. Black poverty can instead be explained through a lack of "personal responsibility."
As evidence to back things up, you and other conservatives provide singular examples of people who have "beaten the odds," and pulled themselves up. Not all blacks were slaves, and not all do live or have lived in poverty. Isn't it the case that some black people are more well off than some white people? (Without asking, why are the odds so bad to begin with?)
Even though statistically, blacks have suffered and continue to suffer form poverty levels far beyond whites, the fact that some have beaten the odds prove that it's not impossible. How bad can discrimination really be?
Also, Asians! The reason we know why this whole business of racial decriminalization is imaginary is because Asians actually have higher per capital earning than even whites. Why? They work hard and they take advantage of the opportunities available to everyone in this country. And other ethnic groups were discriminated against as well? What about the Irish, Catholics, Slavs, or Jews?
This leads to the final claim, that life in general is hard. It should be, it has to be, otherwise we'll all become soft. And what happens when you have soft people? They become like children. They need to be taken care of. To only way to turn children into adult is to deny them. To force them to work harder, to appreciate what they have, to take personal responsibility. All of this is true when it comes to raising children, or dealing with a family black sheep, but when this is easily mapped onto large swaths of the population as an explanation for poverty and crime, well, we've short circuited.
(in fact, conservative policy tends to have the opposite effect, it actually gives people less ability to make better choices. Choices are not made abstractly, they are made by an embodied individual, and people already living in poverty live under stress, making choices you'll never have to make. And black people especially have lived under low level but constant psychological disparagement. This is changing, but to get a sense of it historically, Read Native Son, or anything James Baldwin, or The Souls of Black Folks).
Conservatives tend to think, aren't all these claims explaining black poverty really just an excuse? An excuse for a lack of personal responsibility? Typically what then gets blamed is "black culture."
I can see how this is a compelling narrative, especially if you are allergic to guilt or shame, but the reason why most of this is to me bullshit, or entirely irrelevant to policy, is because it ignores the specificity of black history. Every group that has faced discrimination in the US has a distinct history and that history matters. You can't just say well one race did fine while another one has floundered, so we can cross off race as a variable.
You have to look at each ethnic group's history to see what happened. Each story is complicated, and the real story of African Americans is incredibly complex. It's also probably the most interesting aspect of American history, to me at least.
In the case of both the Irish and the Jews, they eventually were able to disappear into whiteness. This book is especially telling: https://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415963095
as well as this one: https://www.amazon.com/Blackface-White-Noise-Immigrants-Hollywood/dp/0520213807
For both, their assimilation was aided by engaging in the national past time of discriminating against, you guessed it, black people. Setting themselves in opposition to them.
Whiteness as a category has been incredibly essential to American identity. This is argued famously in The Wages of Whiteness: https://www.amazon.com/Wages-Whiteness-Making-American-Working/dp/1844671453/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+wages+of+whiteness&amp;qid=1567617090&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1
Basically, the book argues that American's came to be able to accept their position as wage laborers by identifying with whiteness, being able to contrast their position with that of slaves. At least they weren't slaves! At least they were white, at least they were better than someone.
This psychological drama has played out in politics and history ever since. I could go on and on and on. You might dismiss these books, and these claims, but you shouldn't. You should read and evaluate them for yourself. They are well sourced.
Basically, if there's one thing to take away here, it's that you should bracket the narrative that you have come to believe in, and you should open yourself to reading actual quality history about the black experience and race relations in this country.
A good place to start might be this book: https://www.amazon.com/Half-Has-Never-Been-Told/dp/0465049664
And if you want to find some free pdfs of these books. This is the go to site: https://libgen.is/
Just search, the books are in there.
> I learned in 7th grade some basic economic stuff. Printing money causess inflation.
Except when it doesn’t. In the 2007 crisis the money supply expanded by over a trillion dollars with no inflation. The simple answer is: it’s complicated. You never get the same initial conditions so prediction is more like vague weather forecasting rather than precision engineering. Not defending what the Vulgarian in Chief said, just thought people interested in this topic would enjoy this book on the history of the first 5000 years of debt.
>Come on now. You dont think Pahlavi had anything to do with it? You dont think he was colluding? He just somehow landed into power again by chance?
Of course he might have also wanted to be in power. But the US and UK had much more interest in having the Shah back in place to keep business as usual. Operation AJAX was a foreign operation, not an inside job. They had a big interest in keeping oil prices down. But since prices of other commodities increased by more than 400% it was not possible for Iran and other OPEC members to keep it that way.
>Also, you fail to mention that all members of OPEC started upping the price in the 70s....not just the Shah. In fact, it was Saudi Arabia leading the way, and Iran following.
Sorry, but stop pretending that you know anything about the 70s economics. It's so wrong in so many places. Just read the article that was mentioned a while ago. Saudi Arabia did the opposite, they did not increase the oil price vote and started to pump more and caused a crash in oil prices.
>As I said, Saudi Arabia upped the price, but the US didnt overthrow them, did they?
I think the discussion is over for me. You have no clue about economics in the 70s. I did my master thesis regarding the oil crisis in the 70s. It is a fascinating time in so many levels. But what you are saying is utterly wrong. Saudi Arabia did not vote for a price hike and unilaterally flooded the market. They betrayed the OPEC cartel.
>In fact, the raising of oil prices benefited the US most of all. All the money was in dollars which boosted their economy and currency to make it the worldwide standard. Not only that, all the extra money the OPEC members were making was sent right back to American banks so American companies could use it to invest in their businesses and give predatory loans abroad. Its called Petrodollar Recycling.
Dude, stop with that BS. Iran did not invest in US bonds. Iran invested those oil revenues domestically or in US military equipment. But US bonds? Wrong. It was even wrong from Iran to invest oil revenues directly in the country, which caused a massive inflation. Read about the Dutch Disease.
Saudi Arabia started as of the late 70s with US bonds. You did not even understand the link about Petrodollar Recycling. Please read the book: The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony. US bonds were a topic as of the late 70s to get the money back from oil-producing countries. This is what Saudi Arabia is doing for the last 40 years and accumulated around $170 billion dollars in US bonds, and around $750 billion in US assets.
>So not only did it help boost the US economy, it also helped US dominate weaker economies in the Global South (who actually struggled with higher oil prices) and force them into roles of dependency on US loans (money which came from OPEC members excess oil money).
WTF, you have no clue about economics. Now it is clear. The US was 70% dependent on OPEC oil during the 70s. It caused the oil crisis during '73 and later in '79. If the oil price increases it has a negative effect on the economic growth. This is economics 1+1. Whenever the price of oil jumped, importing nations needed to adjust/lower their economic growth forecast. For example when the oil price increased by more than 380%. The US and western economies were suffering.
And why the hell are you talking about Global South?! The Global South is able to produce oil! They were not struggling due high oil prices. Stop with your Bullshit. You are telling so many lies or sciolism that is even worse than fake news.
Educate yourself, please!
If you are trying to reply, back your statements with sources.
No. They tortured slaves to increase productivity, and guess what? it worked.
My top post in here is some hilarious anarchists
https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/1nhqoy/a_mighty_faggot_queers_against_fascism_2012/?ref=search_posts
I didn't know all that before I made this post, I just read up on it. I don't really have political views anymore, I'm just an antinatalist. Well I extend that perspective to all life, so, efilist.
Hitler himself was probably backed by global banking power
I guess it's because, to the layman, the stockmarket seems like a complex new invention - as this thread demonstrated, it spawns feelings of "debt was just invented to keep us beholden to the rich capitalists".
I'd have said the same things myself when I was younger.
I guess I'd be particularly interested in the middle ages and also the rise of the stock exchange. I find the Dutch East India Company was "the first company in history to issue bonds and shares of stock to the general public" and it that it arose in the decline of the Hanseatic League. Stringham's Private Governance is cited in the notes on that wikipedia page ("Companies with transferable shares date back to classical Rome, but these were usually not enduring endeavors and no considerable secondary market existed") so perhaps I should pick up a copy.
Very well said comment. I can't express enough how refreshing it is to occasionally get someone who doesn't agree with me to at least engage in a somewhat friendly, and what I consider to be a satisfying way (i.e. I don't have to "win" or convince anybody. . .I just like to see that at least my points are being countered, not talked past. . .i.e. a meeting of the minds).
+1 and /u/changetip 2 mBTC
>You misunderstand my point, I think. I am not saying that our government is well-managed, or even good at its job. I am saying that there are some things that a free market may not be able to provide.
The latter part (i.e. some things markets just can't provide), is how I interpreted it.
>The highway system, for instance, would probably not exist. The same with GPS, and the space missions as a whole. TOR would have been at the very least significantly delayed.
You're right; the highway system (as it exists now) would probably not exist. But then again, what would exist instead? Or, what would society have done with that wealth that we spent on those highways (and in the one very particular way that government built and administered them)? Or, what urban sprawl, congestion, and lack of more eco-friendly transportation networks would we have avoided had government not built out the highways? Nothing in a careful study of the history of road building (long before it was a task considered solely the domain of governments) could lead one to believe that private roads and highways (built with various types of funding and for various incentives and purposes) are either an impossibility, or even unlikely. They're not even a particularly (non-rivalrous, non-excludable) public good to provide, and history and theory also give us plenty of reason to trust in voluntary interactions (a.k.a. the market) to overcome these hurdles to production and to internalize negative externalities. While the dreaded toll booth is very likely to be a part of some private highway infrastructure; the toll booth is by no means much more than a first world problem anyway (especially when considering the larger expense of government largess and overreach in lieu of being given roadbuilding power and coffers and eminent domain). . .and it is also a problem which technology has already provided ways of diffusing the inconveniences of anyway. Again, not all roads and highways will need to be funded by toll booths. Here's good read in that vein.
GPS? Again, maybe so. . . but I'm going to again, suggest that you look at the world not as some inevitable outcome of a manifest destiny, where any event which took place is necessarily the best way history could have gone. . .but understand the issue of subjective value and opportunity costs (i.e., the essence of the problem of economic calculation). I'll put it another way: how can we be certain that the funds and resources of society which went in to developing and deploying GPS satellites and creating the standards of the technology (especially when taken in consideration with the incalculable costs of the war machine which almost necessarily precluded it's development). . how can we know or be certain that this was the best use of society's scarce resources? Without markets, we can't know. And of course this goes for everything else the government does by way of taxation confiscation: as useful and wonderful as a lot of this technology is, we can't know (though intuition and a simple look at the poverty of much more basic things around the globe should give us a clue) whether there was not a more productive use of those resources. Only the price signals on a voluntary market can most accurately convey that information throughout the complexities of an economy, to end up with the least arbitrary arrangement of capital (physical, human, social, and all other forms of capital). The U.S. or any other mixed economy doesn't have to be full-blown socialist, or nationalist or fascist or whatever, in order to suffer the inescapable consequences of the economic knowledge problem. . . the same forces which caused the soviet union to collapse and which make the black markets in North Korea the only reason why there are any living human souls left. You might be very interested to look at some research from a Terrence Kealy who shows pretty clear empirical evidence to suggest that, while there are certainly short-run science and R&D capabilities which can be unleashed by a government (e.g. Russia beat the U.S. in manned space flight, and almost beat us to the moon, despite their relative poverty. . . because they poored all of their society's resources into it; the Egyptians built great pyramids, but doesn't say much about what that did to the living standard of the average person then), that in the long run; free markets tend to produce more basic and specific scientific research, and progress technology faster. Don't ever forget that while DARPA "invented" the internet, and NASA advanced space flight: both these agencies took almost everything they knew from previous private projects. . . (i.e. Goddard, parcnet and others) and also don't forget that we still can't know whether TCP/IP is the best use of the resources and R&D that went in to connecting computers on an open network. There were other competing network protocols being developed privately at the time. Who is to say that one of these other one's wouldn't have succeeded over TCP/IP, had it had the same advantage of gov't funding. I often wonder whether people would say the same things about air flight (i.e. we wouldn't have air travel without government), if the Smithsonian institute, who were hot on the heels of the Wright Brothers, had successfully accomplished manned flight first.
Let's not even forget to mention that we are right now on a forum dedicated to discussion of one of the most fantastic and useful technologies the world has seen for a long time; which is/was privately developed and funded, and which fills or is filling a complex societal service, which is something of a public good, and is succeeding. . . despite or in spite of governments persecuting it and incumbent industries trying to squash it. Bitcoin is the embodiment of the type of solutions which markets produce, which render old problems obsolete, instead of worrying about finding archaic ways to regulate problems into submission.
>For all its flaws, it seems to me that government is currently a good thing.
As you are probably beginning to see, the theoretical construct which leads me to hate the state, has very little to do with the present corruption or condition of politics, in the U.S. or any other nation-state. . . or some bad experience I had with the IRS. I'm not concerned with "good" cops/politicians/judges or "bad" ones. They are all structurally and systematically perpetuating a bad system, regardless of how good their intentions may be. It is not even about the technical merits or intelligence of those who oversee complex systems of centrally governed society. The disagreement with all statist philosphies is primarily an economic one, and fundamental to the nature of value and role of prices and markets in society. My beef is only secondarily a moral one and borne of any particular bad taste I have in my mouth for paying taxes.
Anyhow, happy to go on, but I think this comment will waste enough of your time as is, so I'll stop.
Huge part! Merchants dove head first into war profiteering. The Continental Congress was issuing IOUs to any company that was willing to help. This book spends a considerable amount of time discussing all the ship builders, gun makers, and fur traders that made a killing with the war.
https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Democracy-Political-History-American/dp/0767905342
The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony: Petrodollar Recycling and International Markets
Everyone forgets that in the 60's Israeli were the nutjobs and Saudi were our BFFs !!!
Where would you begin? There are books dedicated to demonstrate particular instances of the gold standard being miserable.
Or we could just focus on why active adjustment of monetary policy is a good thing and provide some classic case studies of inaction. Another paper comparing policy choices.
Of course this will all probably be a waste of time if we don't first have a nice sit down chat about what inflation is.
Then they'll stubbornly ignore it as they've ignored more articulate criticisms of the gold standard. Might be slightly bitter about a past post on economic policy.
[Couldn't think of a pithy comment about fiscal hawks and Europe. Also lacking a good book on the panic of 1907.Shoutout to Kindleberg's Lender of Last Resort Relevant for the End the Feddies.]
Here you are
https://www.amazon.com/Son-Also-Rises-Surnames-Princeton/dp/0691168377
Nah, that book is framed in very orthodox economic stories and it's filled with economistic and game theory nonsense, and as historian of science Philip Mirowski points out in his book Machine Dreams, even of the founders of game theory John von Neumann, didn't think that what he was inventing had much if anything to do with the real world.
P.S: One of the contributors to that book, Herbert Gintis, is one the most insufferable "sociobiologist" out there.
This book discusses it more in detail. Then entire book takes you through American History and explains how the state actually harmed the growth of America, starting with the subject mentioned here.
Norman Borlaug was the greatest scientist of the 20th century.
His accomplishments were far, far more important than e.g. Einstein, Oppenheimer, etc.
My favorite book on him (that isn't a straight biography) is The Rational Optimist.
Those interested in learning more about how economics has borrowed heavily, and often metaphorically, from various natural sciences should read Mirowski's More Heat Than Light (neoclassical econ borrowing from 19th Century physics) and Machine Dreams (Austrian/Chicago econ borrowing from 20th C. cybernetics).
http://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Hand-American-Hegemony-International/dp/080142884X
It seems like you are getting more emotional answers, but something else to look at is quality of life. You hear about crime, disease, poverty, destruction of the environment, overpopulation and would think that overall things keep getting worse. The reality is the opposite. Quality of life keeps getting better for almost everyone (as measured, not using emotion). I strongly recommend watching this video - be a rational optimist.
Or to put it another way - even if you spend the rest of your life alone in a basement you will get continued improvements in medicine, food, travel, entertainment, culture, communication etc with ever larger increases in selection and many more cheaper or free choices.
Age 40. I don't smoke, drink or party either and as an atheist this is the one and only life I get.
I appreciate your response. I'll try to keep my parting remarks brief.
> To scrap capitalism though is insane. The reason for this is that it is more efficient than any other system.
This depend on how you define "efficient". If you mean efficient in the way it has historically unleashed the productive abilities of man, then yes, it is the most efficient system to date. It is so efficient, in fact, that it produces too much capital--so much so that it routinely has to be destroyed, out of fear of a crisis of overproduction. At one time, capitalism was revolutionary (when compared to the previous epoch). Now, it has ran its course.
> You don't want to get rid of it, you want to take its gains and redistribute them as you see fit.
Considering the vast majority of humanity produces the exorbitant wealth enjoyed by an extreme minority, then yes, that is the point. And as the wealth gap steadily widens, more and more people begin to see the current relations for what they really are.
> Your alternative is to make the system produce less, and even then you still have a regulatory burden.
Only if the existing system is kept in place and one works to mitigate the contradictions of capitalism. But this can only be done for so long, before those antagonisms burst asunder and plunge society into crisis, smashing the old order.
In this respect, there is only one path ahead for society, and I'm sure it's one you won't like: world-wide socialist revolution. Genuinely ask yourself: is it more important to produce a array of commodities for sale on the market, some of which are coincidentally necessary for life, or do you want to work toward a society whose productive means are focused on producing for human need first and foremost (and that precludes a market mechanism)?
> Milton Friedman and the Chicago school advocate pure capitalism because it is the most efficient....wherein we use the state to make up for the market's failures and the unfairness that some people experience
Friedman also advocated a negative income tax. He at least saw that some mitigating factor in capitalism was necessary (of course this angered von Mises to no end, so much so that he famously called Friedman a "socialist") to prevent social crisis. Look at what's going on right now in the U.S. It's Keynesian policies in action. When the private sector falls flat, it is the State that must step up as the "employer of last resort". It's either that, or have long-term (and potentially systemic) unemployment. It's a simple tactic to keep social unrest in check, nothing more. The same reasons apply to the extension of unemployment benefits.
> It would be impossible for you to collect all of the necessary data to be able to say "all other things remaining equal, wages have not changed"
Nominal wages may have increased, but real wages have been staid since the early 80's. I'm not going to debate what's widely considered fact. The numbers are out there. Krugman, the favorite economist of liberals, himself admits this.
> I was more interested in microeconomics in school, and my knowledge is skewed towards that arena (applied economics, experimental economics, and game theory, which is considered to be the field that unifies all social sciences). One purpose of this field is to "break theories" using experiments. A professor that I had for a couple of my advanced topics in microeconomics classes is renowned in this field, and I was one of his favorite students. I've also taken a class taught by someone who was taught by Joan Robinson, who was taught by Keynes, who was taught by Marshall. For these reasons, I think that my economic beliefs are fairly well grounded in reality. I wouldn't call myself a proponent of capitalism. I just advocate it because I'm unaware of anything that provides a better end.
I suggest you see Mirkowski's More Heat than Light then. This reviewer says it better than I could:
> This is an amazing book! It exposes what is hidden in Samuelson and every other economics text, namely, that the theory of equilibria and utility were merely lifted from physics (Hamiltonian dynamics) without any support from economic data. What is more amazing is the complete discussion presented by the author that `utility' doesn't exist mathematically because the required differential form is nonintegrable. Economists and statisticians may not be able to undestand this point, but it should be familiar to researchers in dynamical systems theory. The inventors of marginal utility theory, Fisher, Walras, and Pareto, literally did not know enough mathematics to know what they were talking about. Equilibrium can't be reached in a Hamilton system (there is no friction to permit the approach to equilibrium), but this contradiction was no worse than all the others inherent in econo-pseudophysics.
For whatever reason, the social sciences feels it has to legitimize it's existence in the eyes of the "hard" sciences through the construction of mathematical models of society and social interaction. Unfortunately, those same models are simplified to the point where they usually fail to adequately grasp the very phenomena they seek to model in the first place. Economic theories are well and good on the microscopic scale. They can be tested in what resembles a scientific manner. The same cannot be said for macroeconomics and to apply the findings of microeconomics to the macroscopic scale usually results in an impedance mismatch.
Sometimes in science, elegant unifying ideas can be uncovered. One prime example being the Church-Turing thesis (something from my background). Unfortunately, they are usually the exception and not the rule. Grand unifying theories are typically few and far between and always occur in the hard sciences.
> I don't agree with this just because it disregards the possibility that they aren't, but I see what you're saying. Things need to change, that's obvious.
Well at least you agree that change or some sort of change is needed.
> If I were you, though, I would be seeking change via working with capitalism rather than against it. That's honest advice.
Reformism is a dead end. The German Revolution is a testament to this fact.
I'll leave with a parting thought: if capitalism is such a superior system of social production and distribution, why do so many billions still live in abject poverty?
It's always strange to me how people can be so confident in "knowledge" that is both incorrect and so easy to debunk. I'll give you some sources (and unlike your link, they're not just from some random dude posting to a forum lol). You won't read them, because if you were the type of person to risk having your worldview challenged with facts, you would have already learned that your whole concept of inflation and fiat is wrong.
Oh, and contrary to your prior statement, both the US and Britain were still on gold standards during the depression. You might have been confused by the switch from a gold specie standard to a gold bullion standard. Don't argue with me, argue with wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard#Depression_and_World_War_II
Many economists argue that the great depression was "great" specifically because we were still on the gold standard (and so was much of the world, which is partly why our depression was transmitted to them).
http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Fetters-Depression-1919-1939-Development/dp/0195101138
And lastly, the 1800s faced several giant bounts of deflation, one so large that it is known in history as the "great deflation."
The Great Deflation (1870-1890) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00Q1HZMCW/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1518965063&amp;sr=8-2&amp;pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&amp;keywords=debt
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/we_are_all_the_1_percent
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465019749/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fopo-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0465019749
http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/10/28/attention-protestors-youre-probably-part-of-the-1-.aspx
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2082385/We-1--You-need-34k-income-global-elite--half-worlds-richest-live-U-S.html
The Amazon link is a book by an economist with the World Bank who came up with the $34,000 number.
In the interest of fairness, though, I also found this:
https://publications.credit-suisse.com/tasks/render/file/?fileID=60931FDE-A2D2-F568-B041B58C5EA591A4
That's a Credit Suisse report that backs up your statistic.
Disclaimer: I am not an economist, I don't know what makes a good source here and what doesn't. I also have no idea where any of this data came from (for any of them). All I know is what they said.
With that being said, Needing 800k to be in the global 1% is hard for me to believe. I actually would have thought the number would have been somewhere more between our two numbers. It's possible that the 34k number is assuming the US isn't in the mix at all, though that doesn't make sense to me.
Note: I didn't make this post to prove you wrong or out of spite. It's just an interesting subject to me. So please don't get offended or upset that I replied.
Here is the mobile version of your link
According to Branko Milanovic from the World Bank, income above $34,000 qualifies for the "Global 1%" status (source: Foreign Policy. So if you have more than €26,000 annually, you belong to the Global 1%.
Keep this in mind when whining about how unjust everything here is. Not directed at you Taenk, but generally speaking.
> Sem o estado, ninguém tem nenhuma obrigação de respeitar sua propriedade.
Para dizer isso você deve provar que o único sistema possível para organizar a sociedade seria em um meio jurídico monopolista, ou seja, um sistema de leis policentrico seria impossível.
Porém isso não é verdade, já existiram sistemas legais policentricos, como por exemplo a lex mercatoria, portanto o argumento de que o capitalismo precisa do estado como monopolista da lei para garantir propriedade cai por água abaixo, dizer isso é puro senso comum, coisa de quem não estudou o assunto e está palpitando.
>Se você lesse ao menos os autores do liberalismo clássico não defenderia o terraplanismo da economia.
Ninguém realmente estuda os autores do liberalismo clássico, a história da economia de 100 anos atrás não é importante para os modelos atuais, aliás, você deve até pensar que eu tirei minha teoria da escola austríaca, de Von Mises, Rothbard e afins.
Não, um modelo jurídico não precisa de autores "clássicos" e obsoletos, hoje a economia é trabalhada com modelos matemáticos e resultados testáveis, ninguém lê "autores do liberalismo clássico" para fundamentar seus modelos, essa mentalidade é de 100 anos atrás quando a economia era tratada como filosofia, sem necessidade de modelos testáveis, como Marx e Mises fizeram em suas análises do capitalismo.
Se você tivesse lido um pouco sobre o assunto, saberia que é possível trazer as ferramentas que são utilizadas em economia para a área política, como por exemplo a teoria dos jogos, as mesmas ferramentas que conseguem fundamentar falhas de mercado podem ser utilizadas para analisar falhas de governo, e é dai que se criam modelos que alinham os incentivos dos agentes de uma forma melhor, como é o caso de uma teoria jurídica de lei policentrica, como o anarcocapitalismo. Aqui um livro da Oxford sobre anarcocapitalismo e lei privada policentrica: https://www.amazon.com/Private-Governance-Creating-Economic-Social/dp/0199365164/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
Na real, acho que esse tipo de espantalhação só seria aceito no echochamberdob.
http://np.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/23ga9z/in_defense_of_sweatshops_and_child_labor_a/cgybr6l
You can also buy this book to go more in depth:
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secrets-Nations-Prosperity-ebook/dp/B003Z9L4NA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1398120256&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=bad+samaritans
"Utility theory" and monstrous neoclassical concepts like "pareto efficiency" have absolutely nothing to with mutualism or any real socialism.
Accepting the enemy's ideology from the onset is fighting a losing battle.
For critique of garbage economics take a look at:
"The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for Economics" by André Orléan:
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/empire-value
"The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community" by Harvard Prof. Stephen A. Marglin:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674047228
And the marvelous "More Heat Than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics" by Philip Mirowski:
https://www.amazon.com/More-Heat-than-Light-Perspectives/dp/0521426898
Nice going there, showing a chart from 1987 to explain there was no billionaires in the 70s. I gave you a list, which is correct and you cannot refute. Here's a book that talks in more detail about it. I don't know why you say there was no billionaire before, i gave you example. I guess ludwig made his 2 billions in 2 years after the glorious 70s were over.
You have no grasp of economics, the 70s are why there are so many billionaires today. it was an era of economic prosperity and the beginning of globalisation and agressive capitalism. the reason we have controlled wealth by the top today is the 70s and 80s. I never said having income inequality is good, but fixating on terminology and wealth amount to determine if somone is good or bad for society is so simplistic it hurts. Are you sure you're not a 20-something liberal arts student?
By the way, i would love to put a 70% tax rate on companies but what you think will happen when you do? They'll leave. You need to be realistic. A 70% tax rate will only hurt the businesses that don't have the money to leave. There needs to be drastic changes to reduce income inequality but you are misguided at best if you think all billionaires are bad because they're billionaire.
There are far better pieces of literature than a state funded propaganda newspaper to gain knowlegde about such matters.
You will find that the most informative and insightful articles and books are written by...American authors.
quick examples:
Iran China relations
US petrodollar hegemony
Stop being pretentious...there might be a lot of criticism on Western journalism, but it's still the best the world has to offer. Iranian and Russian political "news" is nothing more than pure dishonest propaganda. You would be a fool for believing otherwise.
But also at this time was the implementation of collectivism and the removal of the kulaks. Not saying the drought and poor harvests had no effect, but the rapid changes also played a massive hand in it. Also because of the 5 year plan, they were exporting the food they harvested for the betterment of all of the USSR so that it could prepare for its eventual industrialization.
Also I just realized you got that quote from an amazon book review
http://www.amazon.com/The-Years-Hunger-Agriculture-Industrialisation/dp/0333311078
Edit: if I may throw in one extra point, I never said this was the result of the evil Kremlin wanting to intentionally kill out people because they're evil geniuses. I just wanted to point out that millions died because of how Stalin wanted things to work in his bullheaded way.
> Initial research is not very profitable and that's why it needs to be subsidized
The Myth of Science as a Public Good
(Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_PVI6V6o-4
'The Economic Laws of Scientific Research,' argues that state funding of science is neither necessary nor beneficial, a thesis that he developed in his recently published analysis of the causes scientific progress, 'Sex, Science and Profits.' In it, he makes the stronger claim that not only is government funding not beneficial, but in fact measurably obstructs scientific progress"
The Economic Laws of Scientific Research - http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Laws-Scientific-Research/dp/0312173067/
2009 - Sources of Funding of R&D in the United States
$247.4 billion - Private Industry
$140 billion - All government and universities.
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-sources-and-uses-of-us-science-funding