Everything net
Everything relevant to the thought
... I think most Americans underestimate how much more dysfunctional our constitutional/political system could become. I think people mostly still think about the changes of the last 30 years in terms of the tone of political arguments getting nastier: annoying but ultimately not that important. ...
... But I think the governments ability to deal proactively with emerging problems has been degraded significantly. Many aspects of government are coasting along, overseen by agencies created between 1932 and 1972 but whose enabling legislation is increasingly out of date. ...
... Meanwhile I think we are going to continue to have more government shutdowns, 1/6 style chaos, etc. at some point this will coincide with an emergency and it will cause big problems. ...
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... There's a widespread view in inflation hawk circles that the BLS came under political pressure (in the 1990s and maybe before) to modify the CPI to reduced the measured inflation rate and hence reduce how much the government would have to pay in Social Security benefits. ...
... An interesting challenge for this theory is that the government has two inflation indices, the CPI (calculated by the BLS) and the PCE price index (calculated by the BEA). The CPI, the one used for adjusting Social Security benefits, tends to come in higher than the PCE index. ...
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... Newtonian mechanics is also governed by algebraic equalities, so it is symmetric, telling us that f=ma is as valid as a=f/m. Where causality comes in is when we venture to model the 1/2 https://t.co/AmgYUOenjq ...
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... When a sluggish recovery finally started to gain steam in 2004-5, triggering a housing boom, people once again over-estimated its frothiness. This bubble frame caused the Fed to react too slowly to the onset of the Great Recession from December 2007 to September 2008. ...
... I suspect that with better monetary policy 2006 probably could have been the middle of another 1990s-style boom rather than the end of a brief and weak recovery. ...
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... Here I've compared the US to four major Eurozone countries that had "bubbles" in the 2000s (Germany didn't). https://t.co/XauaEPtn54 This chart definitely complicates my argument, since Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands all experienced significant downturns in housing prices. ...
... And those rate hikes are believed to have hurt "periphery" countries like Spain and Italy the most. And that's what I think you see in this chart. ...
... Tight money put downward pressure on home prices throughout the Eurozone, but the effect was biggest for countries like Spain and Italy whose economies were otherwise most negatively affected by ECB policies. ...
... That would have meant a milder recession and perhaps no financial crisis in 2008. Oops I linked to the wrong article at the top of this thread. See more charts that explain the economy here. https://t.co/gtVBWwesGH ...
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... Price controls VERY occasionally have their uses — during wartime when rationing is rampant and perceived fairness/lack of profiteering are important 2/ There's also a *possible* argument for temporary controls to break a wage-price spiral that is persisting despite a weak economy — although making ...
... that work is so hard that it would be a strategy of last resort 3/ But we don't have a weak economy; we have inflation because we have a booming economy, with supply chains having trouble keeping up with the boom in goods consumption. ...
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... What's funny is that there are a bunch of countries that experienced similarly large housing booms in the 2000s, never had a comparable crash, and are now at even higher levels. https://t.co/EbuqEoSkxP https://t.co/KnigE1W2SJ To be fair, some countries, including Spain and Ireland, did have US-style ...
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... The so-called democracy is basically populist politics normalized in an oligarchy. The legitimacy problem - i.e. how the members of the society accept the political institution, is only a problem within the elites. ...
... For the non-elite population, such questions can be easily settled through political manipulation, like Cesar and Hitler. When there is a legitimacy crisis, it's a crisis among the elite. ...
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... Rather, the historical lack of rule of law explains better the dominance of the patrimonial mode of inter-person relationships in Chinese society. This theory is inspired by Fukuyama's theory that patrimonial political order is the default that humans fall back to. ...
... Personally, I think the key still lies in the power balance between society and state. It remains to be seen how the advance in information technology affects that balance but signs show that it tips the scale more towards the side of the state. ...
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... As long as social groups still compete against each other, the political structure of those groups has to serve the function of competition. The so-called liberalism democracy as of now is still more like an oligarchy republic (as envisioned by the founding father). ...
... Then the government (human or AI) will simply produce a policy that maximize utility for the entire human population. ...
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... The mind itself, far from being an independent power, is simply "a bundle of perceptions" without unity or cohesive quality. The self is nothing but a bundle of experiences linked by the relations of causation and resemblance. ...
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... The cohesive quality or unity of a mind appears when we make an effort to organize our thoughts and ideas into a coherent bundle, for example, when we write books. This is one way to overcome [the bundle theory of personal identity.](https://www.themind.net/hypotheses/N67s-BZmSFiR0V0eHIgD-Q) ...
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