Remember Bobby Sands? Bobby understood that trust is something developed. Margaret Thatcher believed trust is something earned. Britain has Brexit and a death spiral of distrust. Ireland has thriving relationships and trust.
Thatcherism represented everything that's wrong with that dusty old Anglo-Saxon variety of Greco-Roman Imperialism. Indiscriminate mass incarceration, demonization of others, hierarchies, utterly subjective morals and values claimed as universal....just a doom loop.
Jun 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Capitalism and the price mechanism are tools. Without a functional administrative state there's no functional Democracy, without functional Democracy, there's deliberate data set manipulation by special interest groups that lead to maladaptive models. 1/2
backofmind.substack.com/p/it-really-is…
Rational people understand that the customer isn't invariably right. Not individually or in aggregate. Demand for goods and services does not reflect agency. A functional private sector requires a functional institutional structure that maximizes data and information access. 2/2
Jun 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Ideology is a hell of a drug.
Our public health officials are mistrusted precisely because Conservatives and Libertarians have deliberately targeted the American Administrative State with Right Wing propaganda that demonizes our domain experts and civil servants.
Interpersonal and institutional trust is far greater and more well established in Sweden than in the US because the Swedish Administrative State is Constitutionally protected from political interference by wealthy individuals and special interest groups exactly like @BillAckman
Jun 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Money is class war but it doesn't have to be.
What is accounting and math but a story and the calculation to make it true?
What's the difference between *spending* and *investment*? Do you know who decided what the story is, and what it means? 1/
humanjourney.us/the-changing-w…
The fundamental difference between spending and investment is the expected return on each of them.
Who decided that direct Government funding of, for example, education and healthcare, aren't expected to return anything, and is therefore defined as *spending*? 2/
Jun 17, 2023 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Russia lost itself; the Russian people have utterly failed to exercise the necessary degree of psychological autonomy that's required to force their institutional structure to adapt to changing circumstances. (Nobody forced them to adopt Neoliberalism!)
newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…
So on one hand one can say that Russians are victims. Victims of life. But they certainly aren't victims of the West, Neoliberalism or any other ideology; they have spent the last 500 years forcing their restrictive institutions and reductionist doctrines on millions of people!
Jun 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
What exactly do you expect when you don't create a functional Constitution and an independent administrative state that's shielded from political interference?
nytimes.com/live/2023/06/1…
It's not religion, mental illness or ethnic diversity that makes the US an outlier among developed nations in terms of corruption, violence and antisocial behaviors; all those things exist elsewhere.
I guess one has to live in a functional institutional structure for a while in order to realize that this isn't functional....
May 27, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
*kill them all Neoliberalism* wasn't isolated to the University of Chicago, but that's where it was turned into an acceptable ideology that could be marketed to gullible people without running afoul of critical thinking and morals. promarket.org/2023/05/27/the…
Everyone with a functional brain understood in 1945 that socioeconomic development can't be built on simpleminded models of human behavior that don't go beyond coercion and incentives. Yet Libertarians and Neoliberals failed to grasp something so elementary. 1/
May 26, 2023 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
"...while our 21st century world has seen changes that no one would have envisaged even 20 years ago, the classroom and curriculum that evolved with mass education have not adapted. Methodologies that worked when routine jobs were in high demand still dominate." 1/
"In the U.S.... ingrained stereotyping and low expectations, coupled with dramatically reduced public investment in quality public schools for all, have deprived many black, Latino, and poor white children in low-income communities of equitable access to a good education." 2/
May 25, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Two words; ordinary Conservatives.
A functional society requires a functional administrative state but ordinary Conservatives have deliberately destroyed the American Administrative State because they believe in irrational models of human behavior.
There's a simple reason that Sweden is the most stable functional Democracy in the world; it was built on a pre-existing administrative state staffed by domain experts. In 1634 those experts were almost entirely Landed Gentry. Today they are a fully representative body. 1/2
Mar 10, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
How Economists should think of Money, Wealth, Poverty, Technology, and Ideology.
Money is technology, not wealth.
Poverty is a product of exploitation.
Libertarianism is the philosophy of exploitation.
Crypto is the ultimate tool of exploitation. 1/
humanjourney.us/the-changing-w…
So what is wealth? Money is worthless without trust; money is not really wealth because, as everyone that accumulates a lot of money eventually finds out; without trust, goods and services are secured by a thin film of coercion and incentives.
Trust is wealth. 2/
Mar 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Why Poverty Persists in America; Libertarianism.
nyti.ms/3l0mUuO
"We’ve approached the poverty question by pointing to poor people themselves, when we should have been focusing on exploitation."
The unit of selection is not the individual. It's the community. Libertarianism is the dumbest ideology in history.
Mar 9, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Never seen a better example of why Political Science is useless without natural science foundations. Study Biology, Anthropology, and Psychology! 1/
adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-19…
Political Science blinders made fools out of those that had convinced themselves that Russia would not invade, those that thought that Russia would easily win, and those that thought that the US engineered the war. 2/
Jan 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The degree of vitriol directed at the Fed by Perma Bulls and Bears is inverse to desired stock market performance
"Raising money is getting harder for troubled companies." Good. Labor exploitation has been allowed to go on for far too long and a whole series of goods and services have been too inexpensive while cartels have been allowed to drive up prices of housing, education & healthcare.
Jan 5, 2023 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
The central tendency for growth in any system is the technology growth rate. So, labor productivity slows and converges with the technology growth rate which means fewer and fewer people are able to participate directly at the technological frontier; pay people to not work.
You want to maximize aggregate productivity? Then you want to pay a growing share of the population to work less or not at all. Listening to ignorant "Conservative" arguments about economic questions, I am reminded of being a teenager studying economics and biology. 1/
Jan 4, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Openness is the key to the door of trust. Without openness there are hard barriers to progress for companies and nations because human cooperation requires a high degree of interpersonal and institutional trust. Cooperation is primary. Competition only gets us so far. 1/
Look around you at the world today; companies and nations that are failing to open up and create institutions of transparency and accountability to the people, are failing to make the transition from coercion and incentives, to the stage of trust. 2/
Dec 3, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
A crime is a crime. The belief that the intent behind a crime is of any consequence whatsoever is a legacy of feudalism and should be consigned to the trash heap of history along with other unscientific moralizing that has no place in a modern justice system.
We need to grow the hell up. There's no valid psychological reason for why we should believe that capital punishment or long prison sentences deter crime. There's no valid psychological reason to believe that we are able to correctly identify our own thoughts and motives. 1/
Nov 23, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Quite often, gaslighting isn't gaslighting, but a statement of readily observable fact.
Right Wing media has become experts at justifying dysfunctional behavior by claiming that such behaviors are in fact normal. The result is that their organizations are increasingly dominated by people that destroy cohesion of the organizations from within.
