Quotulatiousness

March 5, 2018

Genghis Khan – The Debut of Temüjin Khan – Extra History – #3

Filed under: Asia, China, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 3 Mar 2018

Jamukha and Temüjin were officially fighting for control of the Mongolian steppes, appointing themselves the titles of “khan.” But each man practiced wildly different strategies to gain prestige — Jamukha showed no mercy, but Temüjin took a more egalitarian route.

The economic failure of Iain Banks’s Culture stories

Filed under: Books, Economics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR points out the weak spot in the Culture series of novels:

There’s a lot of buzz about Iain Banks’s Culture universe lately, what with Elon Musk naming his drone ships in Banksian style and a TV series in the works.

I enjoyed the Culture books too, but they were a guilty pleasure for me because in a fundamental way they are bad SF.

They’re bad SF because the Culture’s economics is impossible. That ship hits a rock called “Hayek’s Calculation Problem” and sinks – even superintelligent Minds can’t make central planning work, because without price signals and elicited preferences you can’t know where to allocate resources. What you get is accelerating malinvestment to collapse.

This is what happened to the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Hayek predicted it fifty years in advance. Huge factories in Siberia destroyed wealth by producing trucks nobody needed from resources that would have been better spent on other things – but nobody could know that because there weren’t any price signals. Eventually the SU wore out its pre-Communist infrastructure, fell down, went boom.

The problem is epistemic and fundamental – can’t be solved by good intentions or piling on computational capacity. An SF writer is every bit as obligated to know what won’t work in economics as he is not to make elementary blunders about chemistry and physics. The concept of “deadweight loss” matters as much as “entropy”.

Banks’s lifelong friend and fellow Trotskyite Ken McLeod actually managed not to flunk this. In a long and revealing interview about the genesis of one of his early series (the “October Revolution” books IIRC) he once revealed that for years he read free-market economics on the know-your-enemy principle, then woke up one day realizing he couldn’t refute them. Subsequently his books took a decidedly libertarian turn. This demonstrates that Marxists can clean up their shit; alas, Banks never made it that far.

Gender War

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Owen Benjamin
Published on 10 Mar 2017

Watch this video to understand how men think, how women think, and why this narrative of gender conflict hurts everyone. I do it in a funny way because I’m a comedian, but there is a lot of truth in this. Not because I’m smart, but because I’ve made an unbelievable amount of mistakes in my life and don’t like to repeat them.

if you want to listen to my podcasts or see me live check out hugepianist.com
much love.

H/T to Rick McGinnis for the link.

QotD: Mercantilism

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

According to the mercantilist dogma held by nearly all politicians and pundits (and, yes, also by the People), the best possible outcome for any country – call it country A – whose government is negotiating a trade deal is the following: the government of A arranges for the maximum possible number of citizens of A to work the maximum possible number of hours producing goods and services of maximum possible value to be exported to the maximum possible number of foreigners whose governments agree to prevent those foreigners from ever sending in return to the people of country A even as much as a single wooden toothpick.

The optimal trade deal for country A – according to mercantilist dogma – is one that commits the people of A to work for foreigners without compensation. This optimal trade deal, in effect, turns the workers of country A into slaves for foreigners. (Such a deal would have country A workers paid, in real goods and services, absolutely nothing – which is a wage well below the minimum wage that many of the mercantilist leaders, in other contexts, support!)

According to mercantilist dogma, were the diplomats and ‘leaders’ of country A able to negotiate such an outcome, those diplomats and ‘leaders’ would be hailed has having secured a huge and unconditional trade victory of the sort that history has never before witnessed. Country A would be renowned worldwide as the greatest “winner” ever in matters of international trade.

According to mercantilist dogma, it is therefore unfortunate for the people of country A that the diplomats and ‘leaders’ of countries B through X are unwilling to grant such splendid terms to A. The diplomats and ‘leaders’ of countries B through X each would also like to secure such an ideal outcome, as described above, for their countries. But the necessity of compromise prevents any country from winning such an unalloyed and stupendous victory. The result of the compromise for all countries is an imperfect trade deal under which each country reluctantly agrees to receive valuable goods and services from foreigners as the price that must be paid for the privilege of sending domestically produced good and services to foreigners.

Don Boudreaux, “The Idiocy of Mercantilism”, Café Hayek, 2016-06-25.

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