4.3 KiB
Less Wrong Reading Club... FYI
-
Author: u/None *
-
Score: 6
-
Created: 2014-01-16T16:41:27
Post:
Comments:
u/None [+4] (2 days later)
You think if they read enough rationality lessons they'll be able to figure out why they shouldn't be anarcho-capitalists?
u/Sparkwitch [+1] (2 days later)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
That would imply an-caps make money off spouting that stuff. Most of them actually don't, which is what makes it so perplexing.
u/None [+1] (8 days later)
Think this thread is far enough down for people not to notice? Tutor me on economics. I must be doing something wrong. I've been a subscriber to the voluntaryist / ancap / agorist viewpoint for a few years now, and genuinely think it's the best we could come up with in a scarcity environment. What am I doing wrong? Or better yet: Why shouldn't I be libertarian?
(Though for the record I better think of myself as "Up", but that's yet to be a "thing".)
u/None [+2] (8 days later)
In extremely short form: the most common mistake in economics is the is-ought fallacy. This is also the most common driver of ancap thinking: "this sounds Very Good ethically, so it must work economically".
Well, the problem is, it's hard to have a predictive ancap economics outside of Austrian School economics and Chicago School economics. Austrian... well, it's not even wrong: "praxeology" is used to explicitly disclaim any empirical testing and instead treat economics as a form of pure mathematics done axiomatically. Chicago School, as far as I can tell, doesn't quite pull the same trick, but also doesn't have very much predictive power.
What does have predictive power? The three competing schools I know of are: neoclassical synthesis (mainstream, considered "right-wing"), neo-Keynesianism (mainstream, considered "left-wing"), and Market Monetary Theory (formerly heterodox, has been gaining prominence among economists since the financial crisis). These are the primary schools that publish papers in academia, run statistics, and come up with predictive theories regarding real-world economies; they have their disagreements with each other, but you can "put them to the sword" of prediction and falsification when they do.
What are some interestingly predictive heterodox schools? Currently (and here's where we get political again): Marxian economics and various revived forms of interest-wage-profit-rent classical economics. The latter are being used to make improved models of how the crises of post-70s neoliberal capitalism have functioned; my favorite economist from this school is Michael Hudson. The former... Marxists have a tendency to thunder on and to be wrong very often as long as the economy is regulated and managed, but the more you go laissez-faire, the more correct they start to seem.
I can sum up Marxist observations of capitalism as, "Capitalism is a hill-climbing optimization process whose utility metric is capital accumulation. It will work its way into terrible crises when it finds local maxima in its utility space: situations in which capital becomes so concentrated that little new profit can be accumulated and the entire system, reliant on ever-growing profits, grinds to a halt and a fiery death. It will not get out of these situations on its own, because from the perspective of its utility function, extreme socioeconomic inequality driven by extreme accumulations of all existing capital are a good thing. We can thus observe that even given scarcity, capitalism is very bad for people, as it considers optimal states in which we observe that human beings are fucking miserable."
The core observation of Keynesianism, by the way, can be summed up as, "government action can be used to force capitalism out of those local maxima to eventually hit points of higher utility. Doing so is both good for capitalism and good for people."
u/None [+1] (8 days later)
Oh, brilliant. You're fantastic. Thanks a bunch!