There was a somewhat crazy blogger on the fringes of Austrian economics I used to link to, who erased his blog because he didn’t want his name associated with his previous dorkier interests (I won’t censor any comments, but I request that folks not say who it is right here). He said he had saved all his posts for possible republication, but there were actually comments of my own over there I linked to in a number of places because I better expressed some ideas that I can’t even remember now (I have a vague recollection that I touched on the consciousness of vegetables). Well the good news is that his original posts have reappeared, although the new blog name isn’t as snazzy as the old.
October 13, 2011
Some information wants to be indestructible
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[20] Comments
October 13, 2011 at 5:40 am
Wait….he stopped writing about the intersection of political-economy, epistemology, and metaphysics to write about…fashion?
October 13, 2011 at 7:07 am
Off Topic:
I haven’t seen it published yet, but the irony jumps out at me of the US sanctioning a somewhat liberal democracy (Iran) for its attempts to assasinate the ambassador of a rather repressive non-democracy (Saudi Arabia). I’m not taking an actual position on the merits yet -I don’t know enough to have an intuition on it.
October 15, 2011 at 6:30 pm
“Somewhat liberal democracy”? I don’t know, relative to Saudi Arabia, but in most contexts people wouldn’t refer to Iran that way.
I personally don’t what the U.S deciding on its friends vs enemies based on regime type, but I think our association with Saudi Arabia is very problematic. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudi and members of the royal family are rumored to have funded them. Same thing for Pakistan.
October 15, 2011 at 10:15 pm
Perhaps he means inadvertently liberal, or at least they put up with a lot.
October 16, 2011 at 1:33 am
Oh C’mon. Can’t you buy and sell your organs in Iran? I think its fair to say they are in the genre of liberal democracy, even if they aren’t Sweden or Taiwan.
October 16, 2011 at 3:07 pm
I think the organ system involves compensated donations or something like that. I give them credit for it, but they’re still not a liberal democracy. Most obviously, they have a “Supreme Leader”* who holds the real power and is selected by unelected clerics. The revolutionary regime was founded on the idea of a guardianship of clerics to maintain the regime’s islamic character. So of course they are going to reject many pillars of liberal democracy, such as free speech. Because they have scruples about executing virgins, they rape girls before killing them.
*That Supreme Leader recently said that the Western system of Liberal Democracy will be annihilated same is its predecessor the satanic Soviet Union.
I would invite people to do a google experiment to see how many results come up with the phrase “X is a liberal democracy” for different values of X. I think google gives different results for different people, but googlefight may be more constant. Googlefight gives two results for both Iran and Saudi Arabia. As I said, Iran is more democratic (and just using google that S.A results appear to be people saying it obviously isn’t one), but these are such low values random error plays a larger role.
October 16, 2011 at 3:42 pm
I accept the challenge, with a few throat-clearing disclaimers and caveats, of course. The first is obviously I’m searching in English. Second is the word problem, i.e., do I put in “America is” or “US is” or “United States is”? I decided to add up obvious synonymous national terms. The converse problem is when “China” is used for both PRoC and Taiwan, and same for Korea. I’m too lazy to worry too much about it.
Finally, a lot of search results are negative, so “it would be absurd to claim that China is a liberal Democracy” shows up as a result. And of course I’m sure there are various other Googleisms (I’m using the “About X results” number) which require special correction or attention and which I’m disregarding. Nevertheless, here we go, by order of declining population:
China: 6
India: 81,100
US: 632,000
Indonesia: 9
Brazil: 1,890
Nigeria: 0
Bangladesh: 2,060
Russia: 9
Mexico: 0
Philippines: 3
Vietnam: 2
Ethiopia: 0
Germany: 26,400
Egypt: 1 (forward-looking)
Iran: 2 (1 of which calls this “stupid”)
Turkey: 7
Thailand: 5
Congo: 0
France: 16,500
UK: 35,740
Italy: 4
South Africa: 22,700
Korea: 13,800
Myanmar: 0
Colombia: 2,010
Spain: 7
Ukraine: 0
Tanzania: 0
Argentina: 1
Ok, I think that’s enough. Some of the results make a lot of sense, some seem a bit .. suspect. Spain, Italy, and Mexico, for example. But there you have it. You’re welcome, internet.
October 16, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Kudos, Handle. I’ve elevated your comment to a top-level post.
October 16, 2011 at 4:10 pm
[...] gave a task to my readers and before I knew it Handle carried it out. I copy his findings below. I accept the challenge, with a few throat-clearing disclaimers and [...]
October 16, 2011 at 8:07 pm
” Most obviously, they have a “Supreme Leader”* who holds the real power and is selected by unelected clerics.”
Is this true? My understanding is that the “clerics” (technically I think they’re called an “assembly of experts” or some such thing and pass an exam which includes islamic literacy rather than belonging to the islamic clergy) are elected by 18+ year old citizens (I think it’s citizens rather than limited to males, but I’m not going back to wikipedia to check) every 8 years.
Our earlier discussion sparked my interest and I went to wikipedia earlier. I thought of them as meeting the threshhold of liberal democracy because they seem to have real opposition and political disagreement, and real elections. I was aware of the “Supreme Leader” but given that contested elections and political variation seemed real there didn’t seem to me to be in a real sense an autocracy. I learned about their assembly of experts from wikipedia, which (although it’s as silly that the exam focuses on islamic culture as if it focused on latin literacy) is impressively technocratic to me and reminds me of how the French select their civil servants and how South Korea selects their judges (national examination for both, I believe).
I think google results are good to get a sense of empirical variation of memes, but not so much to get empirical determination of the best model of reality based on google results.
I’m not an apologist for Iran -in fact, I think unlike some populations (anglos, ashkenazis, brahmin indians) the world could probably get along fine without any Iranians at all. Their smart fraction doesn’t substantively contribute to the world’s smart fraction, it seems to me.
Nevertheless, Iran seems more in the genre of liberal democracy and technocracy to me. The theocratic elements seem straussian to me, particularly after reading about the Assembly of Experts. The top performers on a written exam seem more likely to me to be sophists than true believers, much like the top performers on written exams everywhere else in the world. The Taliban they’re not. Which of course is why rivals are afraid of their technical ability to actually manufacture nuclear weapons.
October 17, 2011 at 7:25 pm
I agree that the Iranian regime is not like the Taliban, but if we can if we can consider both functional and dysfunctional states to be “authoritarian” then I think we could say they are both theocracies though Iran is relatively functional and has significant democratic elements (many Gulf autocracies have started adding such elements, though to a lesser extent than Iran). It appears I was wrong about who can vote for the Assembly, I could have sworn my comparative government text said they were self-selecting.
Islam does not have an equivalent of the Catholic Church which ordains clergy, it is said to be more like Protestantism where anyone can gather some followers and become a preacher. However, Shi’ism is supposed to be less “protestant” in that respect with descent from the Prophet’s family being considered a requirement for the highest levels of leadership. I’ve seen some people say all members of the body must be clerics but I don’t know if they are just taking that as an implicit result of requiring such knowledge.
Interesting point about insincerity. People often analogize late-revolutionary Iran to the Soviet Union, and the same thing was presumably the case for Marxism there. I disagree that it’s a Straussian screening for technocracy though, the USSR was known for mediocrity in most things (exceptions are chess, spying, and the space program where they wanted to show off internationally). This is my related to my disagreement about Iran being no big loss, they do quite well in the math olympiad (Gene Expression had a post on that but it seems to only exist in google results now). So they probably have a decent “smart fraction” that is being held back by dysfunctional institutions for which we may hold their particular regime type partly responsible.
October 18, 2011 at 2:54 am
“the USSR was known for mediocrity in most things (exceptions are chess, spying, and the space program where they wanted to show off internationally).”
Although this may just end up a battle of definitions, this doesn’t seem right to me. Although the USSR was counterintuitively shitty at a range of things where better use of markets and decentralized autonomy would’ve helped (consumer manufacturing, etc.) they seem to me to have been scientifically productive well beyond the space program. It’s not all Lysenko, it seems to me -but my intuition would probably benefit a lot from more knowledge about USSR history during this period.
October 18, 2011 at 2:58 am
This reminds me, USSR was basically founded on an (the first?) macroeconomic historian’s ideology. I wonder how they engaged the Keynes, Hicks, other top tier macroeconomic scientists? It seems to me they didn’t, and it cost them a lot of wealth. But what was their rationalization if that’s true? I guess if you don’t think populations should be allowed to boom and bust in markets, there’s nothing countercyclical for the government to do?
October 18, 2011 at 9:18 pm
There was a Soviet economic Nobelist, Leonid Kantorovich. Another Soviet economist, Nikolai Kondratiev, is still discussed for his theory of macroeconomic cycles to this day. Referring to Marx as a “macroeconomic historian” seems odd to me, because there wasn’t really a concept of “macro” back in the classical era. With economics, political science, sociology and history all combined (particularly in Marx’ case) there wasn’t that kind of separation. At the same time, a lot of distinctively “macro” ideas can be traced back to people like Hume or Mill.
I think it is problematic to think of the problem in terms of counter-cyclical policy. We are currently in a period of depressed demand, and so that is salient to us. But that was not the problem of communism. A different section of macro, growth theory, is more relevant. Nick Rowe and Karl Smith already explained the distinction between the two kinds of problems better than I can.
I don’t know much about Soviet achievements in technology. I had heard that a lot of people died from them copying space-shuttle blueprints that Americans (who knew from a Soviet asset this spying) intentionally sabotaged and that the Russian nuclear strategy was just to use large enough warheads to catch a target in the blast radius rather than making better missiles, but that could reflect American bragging I’ve been exposed to.
October 19, 2011 at 11:32 am
I may have a shitty understanding of macroeconomics because to me “macro” means big, so I think it means economic study on the largest order of scale (global economics, or the largest salient subdivisions of global economics). So that studying the effect of policy on the economic wellbeing of the USA would be macroeconomics. In that sense, I see its hard to deny that Marx was a macroeconomic historian.
“Micro” means small, so I think of microeconomics as the study of economics on the smallest scale, and perhaps slightly larger scales that don’t approach the salient features of macroeconomics. So that an experiment of how 100 people behave in a market with certain starting conditions and regulations would be a microeconomic experiment.
Perhaps my understanding of macroeconomics and microeconomics is way off -but then I think that would be an indication that the nomenclature is shitty.
October 20, 2011 at 9:18 pm
Yeah, it’s kind of confusing. Macro is the realm of an entire nation’s economy where we talk about things like GDP, inflation or the money supply, often the national unemployment rate (though micro often deals with that as well). The nominal tends to be more important in macro, whereas micro can often be discussed as if there were merely “real” goods & services being exchanged to (ex ante) increase utility. Micro deals with individuals or firms (isn’t a government sort of like a very large firm? maybe but modeling it’s behavior tends to work different and it can do things like sustain a ponzi scheme indefinitely), how they react to incentives and interact with each other. It can be an infinite number of them, as in models of perfect competitions, but I think it deals less with areas where the fallacy of composition is more important. The distinction between micro and macro is sometimes dated to Keynes and a lot of people don’t like it (particularly those skeptical of macro theory). I’ve heard it said that Alchian told his students “There is no macroeconomics, only price theory”. Price theory is considered part of micro. Macro has a worse reputation because there’s more disagreement, a lot less independent data points, it’s hard to do experiments etc. Since Lucas there has been insistence that macro have micro foundations so that we can understand why we observe certain tendencies and better understand what will happen under different policy regimes. The main thing New Keynesians have added to get micro-founded micro is sticky prices/wages. Nick Rowe often complains that (perhaps due to micro) economists are used to thinking as if everything can be done with barter rather than money, which wouldn’t result in the sticky price problem and the benefits of inflation in the face of downward rigidity.
Taxes and regulations tend to be discussed in micro terms as having real effects. “Tax something and you get less of it, subsidize and you get more of it” is a micro-typical statement. Microeconomists (or to be more specific, labor economists) tend to study minimum wages. I think financial regulation might get into macro territory. Megan McArdle tends to say “Money is weird. Finance is weird”, the kind of statement that sets off alarm bells in my head. But that kind of weirdness tends to go into macro, so Ben Bernanke‘s bank credit mechanism theory of the Great Depression is macro.
October 21, 2011 at 6:39 am
Though I definitely didn’t absorb it all and will probably happily continue to make most of the same errors, great explanation of macro & micro.
October 22, 2011 at 11:01 pm
I wasn’t really satisfied with my random brain dump, so I’m somewhat surprised and glad you found it informative.
October 23, 2011 at 7:32 am
I am reminded (vaguely) of parts of introductory physics… it’s as though macroeconomics was concerned with the economic equivalent of the Ideal Gas Laws, while micro- dealt with the collisions of individual molecules.
October 30, 2011 at 9:35 pm
[...] few posts back, Hopefully Anonymous wrote “Although the USSR was counterintuitively shitty at a range of things where better use of [...]