Lacking All Conviction: exploring the future from the center

My friend Charles is fond of a certain graph that shows a negative correlation between Economic Freedom, as defined by the Heritage Foundation, and Gini index scores, which measure inequality. The argument that accompanies the graph is that free market neoliberal policies, the effects of which are ostensibly measure by the freedom index, correlate positively with equality. I wonder if Charles is unconsciously choosing which correlations to see meaning in, while ignoring other stronger correlations that don't comport with his worldview. However, there is a correlation there that is relatively unlikely to be mere coincidence. Before I go further, I merely want to propose that in general, one correlation of Gini scores should be balanced against other correlations that are similar or greater in their explanatory power. Here is the graph that he cites: A modest but visible correlation. Ok, say I, there may be something going on with these two variables. I've reproduced his grap...

Today I'm going to take a look at some less conventional measures of economic power that have special importance for a robot-fueled, automatized future economy. One of the most common tools to measure the strength of an economy is per capita income, and although the United States is the richest country in the world in terms of GDP, there are a few other countries that eclipse it in terms of PPP income per capita. However, most or all of these are tiny countries like Luxembourg and/or large oil exporters like UAE or Norway, which makes them less useful as models for other economies to follow. Another complication in measuring per capita income is the difference between before and after tax income. Most developed countries have higher tax rates than the United States, so when looking at gross income, countries like Germany and the Netherlands are very close to the US, and Norway is actually a ways above it. The income per capita picture changes in favor of the US when you deduct ta...

Re:http://www.adividedworld.com/political-ideas/the-ideological-nature-of-authoritarian-government/#comment-422 Charles' analysis shows that Nazism was anti-capitalist, and that it shares certain characteristics with Marxist socialism. There is nothing in his writing demonstrating that a capitalist ideology inoculates a movement from helping an authoritarian to power, which is what really matters about whether a movement can be considered authoritarian or not. Trump is a trade protectionist/capitalist/flip flopper whose economic theory, in its peculiar flexibility, should remind one of Hitler's stated theory: "the basic feature of our economic theory is that we have no theory at all." But his theory doesn't really matter. Most politicians are unconcerned with theory, so one can forgive Trump for some of his apparent lack of integrity. What matters is whether Trump's supporters are capable of supporting a president in acting against the interests and struct...

Background: Mustache wearer, blogger and ostensible physics maven Charles Thorington has questioned the validity of economic progressivism on the grounds that it serves no useful function in a capitalism economy. I countered by suggesting that progressivism is the compromise which enabled western capitalism to survive the threat of socialist revolution, and that automation-led job losses would force us again to acknowledge its usefulness. He countered that the price mechanism is sufficient to allow automation to improve productivity and safeguard public welfare in the face of massive structural changes to the economy. Here is his response in full: http://www.adividedworld.com/economic-ideas/will-automation-require-progressive-unemployment-solutions/ Here is my response to him: I appreciate your invocation of price mechanism here, which, on the contrary, I often find repetitious in your writing. It does very well to explain how a rising tide lifts all ships, in an absolute sen...

It seems to me that some factor or combination of factors, by they structural/macroeconomic, tax policy related, or other, have had in recent decades the effect of disproportionately rewarding a class of ultra-rich people who happened to be more politically progressive than the previous generation's billionaires. My main piece evidence for these trends is the increase of self-made billionaires, and decrease in inherited wealth among the Forbes 400 over recent years, as documented by  Forbes . It stands to reason that the more self-made prominent billionaires you have, the less relative power inheritance billionaires have, who will tend to be relatively more conservative. This tendency may be shown in recent studies such as " Stealth Politics by US Billionaires ", which attempts to document the political leanings of those at the very top of the economic hierarchy. I thought it was an interesting hypothesis, and one that may predict significant political and social i...

If Trump wins, I will know who to blame. Not the people who vote for him, the downtrodden victims of his charismatic authoritarian personality, but economists and politicians who enable each other to shape our lives with disregard for human dignity. Those who have been treating human beings as mere variables, who, like any other variable, exist only within equations where productivity is the goal. In economic practice, these variables do not become human again until increased productivity is mathematically guaranteed. This is a mistake. Observe this Capuchin monkey reacting angrily to inequitable treatment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg Now imagine millions of much smarter and stronger primates slowly coming to terms with the scale of economic inequality in America today. This should be a primary, not secondary, concern of economists and especially politicians.  The belief that human beings are capable of withstanding unlimited indignities and hardships, of adap...

How the hell should I know? A perpetual dilemma of economics is the lack of certainty about what is signal and what is noise, in terms of policy and effect, and we are in a sense blinded by this lack of predictive power of economic models. Thus there will continue to be great risks entailed by every possible policy path that we could take. A suitable metaphor is that we are jogging on a cliffside path, and we need to find our way without falling, but our senses won't tell us that we've found the edge for sure until we start to fall. The only way I can think to survive such a scenario is to have some mechanism to catch ourselves once we begin to fall  and this, I believe, is why the most economically successful countries have central banks that are willing to step in and lift their industries out of free-fall. This safety feature, I believe, is a very powerful tool that an economy can use in order to experiment with different policies in a situation where models lack predictive ...

The following was written as a response to the blogger who writes at www.adividedworld.com. Please see the comment section of the following page for the background to this post. http://www.adividedworld.com/scientific-issues/clouds-and-global-warming/ Hello again Charles. I have been thinking about the things we disagree on over the past few months, and trying to figure out a way to respond to one of them without putting the rest of my life on hold. You've altered the way I think about climate change on an emotional or intuitive level, if not a logical one. I have long been aware of the lack of predictive validity of climate simulations, an ambiguity that naturally accompanies any simulation of sufficient complexity. Call it chaos theory or simply bad science, the result is that the margins of error in the field are unfortunately huge. I had previously been unmoved on an emotional level by any non-AGW theory due to their seeming to me to be reactions against pro-AGW theor...

Background:              TLDR: The official poverty measure is confusing as hell Upon Googling "Bernie Sanders", an interesting combination of words appeared: "Forbes.com" "Policies for Bernie Sanders" The article  was a rather facile examination of the relative merits of conditional vs. non-conditional cash transfers, as in food stamps vs. cash benefits. There are better articles about this subject such as this one in the Economist and this one on a Norwegian website. But what immediately caught my eye, and what takes up the bulk of the article, is a claim that the author, Tim Worstall, makes about the childhood poverty rate, namely that it is only 2-3%. Of all the metrics that you could use to argue that poverty in America isn't as bad as some people say it is, the childhood poverty rate is probably the least likely to convince someone who has access to the official statistics. I confronted Tim about his lack of citations in the c...