When a government moves left, it damages the economy. When it moves left far enough and fast enough, this becomes embarrassing, so it lies about the economy. North Korea, Cuba, and Argentina are infamous examples of this, the Soviet Union used to be an infamous example. Lately the USA has been understating inflation and overstating real GDP growth. How far out of contact with reality have things gone?
Category: economics
On ripple
Ripple is a scam cryptocurrency. Pity, since the alleged design is more scalable than bitcoin. A cryptocurrency is mainly worth its speculative value, worth the possibility it could replace the US$. Obviously Ripple is not going to replace the US$, being a wholly controlled muppet of Cathedral minions. If Ripple was funded by Baidu rather than Google, I would be on it like a tomcat on a pussy in heat.
Selecting for stupid
Before Google became a huge success, it tried to select for the smartest people, in so far as it was legally possible to do. It then became a huge success. Today, Google’s chief human resources officer tells us selecting for smart does not work, so Google does not do it any more. (Hat tip, Lion of the Blogosphere) What do you think is more likely: That selecting for smart does …
Economic efficiency of slavery
For tasks requiring intelligence and independent judgement, for the kind of job where one would ordinarily employ a contractor or high level free employee, slave owners generally gave one of their best slaves an incentive environment approximating that of a high level free employee, where the slave had a future career path, the opportunity to save and invest, to own money and buy assets, including buying other slaves, indicating that …
Bitcoin scaling problems
When bitcoin was first proposed, I argued that the proposed algorithm failed to scale. Well, when getting started, scaling does not matter. Now, however, a bitcoin wallet is starting to cost substantial bandwidth and processing power. There are plans to address this, but I am underwhelmed by those plans. The proposed plans will make bitcoin more centralized, and will still have scaling issues. Seems to me that we need an algorithm …
Moldbug’s Liquidation
Moldbugs liquidation would be a Pareto improvement on the present government. Large numbers of people would be made better off, and no one would be made worse off. Once upon a time there was a man who was infested with parasites, that were gnawing his flesh and relieving themselves in his blood. The man said to the parasites: Why don’t you come out of me, and I will serve you …
Mestizos and National Wealth
Conservatives are fleeing the evil witch and horrible heretic Jason Richwine. Richwine pointed out what everyone knows, but no one can say: That mestizos are genetically low intelligence, and that importing a low intelligence underclass will cost Americans a lot of money, and that this underclass, even if, unlike blacks, they really want to assimilate, can never assimilate, and will forever resent their failure to assimilate, forever blaming it on …
US economic decline
Supposing the official cpi to be true, US real GDP per capita has been growing at about 1% per year in recent years. Supposing the big mac index to be true, US real GDP per capita has been falling at about 1% per year in recent years. Motor vehicles per capita, according to world bank statistics, have been falling about 1% per year in recent years. Electricity consumption per capita, …
Stimulus
Byran Caplan assures us that progressives have the easy painless cure for unemployment, but somehow, due the pernicious influence of cruel heartless free marketers who just do not care about the unemployed, the government is just too right wing to apply the magic. The magic cure is, of course, to print more money. If it has not worked yet, obviously that proves we have not printed enough. Whosoever doubts this …
Japan succeeds in inducing inflation
Every time Keynesianism fails, they say is evidence it was not done hard enough. In Japan, they decided that this time they really would do it hard enough. And it worked. Rapid inflation ensued. Employment and production did not.