Pollock and Kupiec on Central Bank bankruptcies; Shikha Dalmia on the New Right; John Halpin on the loneliness epidemic; Dylan Pahman on cutting democracy down to size;
I think Pahman is misinterpreting the reason Senators were selected by states under the original Constitutional scheme, and is also confusing the way the Electoral College works with selection by a legislative body. The People elected the House directly which then elected its Constitutional leader, the Speaker, directly. The States elected, via their state government, the Senate but the people indirectly elected via the Electoral College its Constitutional leader, the Vice-President. The People selected the Electoral College which then elected the chief governmental executive, the President. Given the symmetry of those operations I don't the scheme was just an accident or done to give the VP a reason to live in DC. Factional politics, however, meant that the VP was quickly superseded by the Majority Leader in the Senate, and the House Speaker has rarely if ever not also been a member of the majority party in the House even though he's not required to be a Representative.
I also think you immediately run into huge agency problems, even or maybe especially at the very lowest levels, when the way to advance in politics is convincing your peers they'll benefit by advancing you, rather than voters in general.
The way to advance in politics today is still convincing your peers they'll benefit by advancing you. We just cover it with a facade of voting for the candidate directly in a two party (one party now, I believe) system.
Agency problems abound, but compared to what? Seems to me that if each level of government was accountable to fewer than say 1,000 people the agency problems would be fewer, not greater?
Last year we went to my towns Christmas lighting. We really enjoyed it. It was a lot less crowded than this year and while there was one particular "woke" thing, the high school chorus wore masks when they sung, the official activities were pretty short.
This year we went and I found it a bit insufferable. It was a lot more crowded. The official activities went on at least 3x as long. We had to sit through a long cringe inducing recitation from the Boy Scouts of how every single obscure faith and group many of which you never heard of all believe in the golden rule/love/spirit of Christmas in their language (they were still wearing masks). There were a few other woke things. The mayor (democrat, nimby) recited the names of the town council and some members of the crowd semi boo-ed at the mention of the mayoral candidate that just lost to him (republican, yimby). I was reminded that that same mayor canceled most of the town events for throughout COVID but violated his own rules to hold a BLM rally at town hall summer 2020.
Overall, I don't think we are going to the tree lighting next year. I see no reason to sit through such ideological pollution to watch my small towns Christmas tree get lit.
Pahman's idea is one that I have supported previously. The Founders made a terrible error in having direct election of the President (at least at the state level), but the truth is that they never actually believed that was what they were doing. I think they expected most elections to ultimately be decided by the House because they expected more than two actual candidates in every election.
Most of the other mistakes were made later, including the direct election of Senators, and the Civil Service rules and regulations. We have lost the ability to fire the government.
There is something to what John Halpin is writing, but I wouldn't necessarily try to inject politics into it, or over inject politics perhaps. There was a twitter thread some months ago by cognitive & evolutionary anthropology Manvir Singh, "In the 1970s & 80s, anthropologists working in small-scale, non-industrial societies fastidiously noted down what people were doing throughout the day. I’ve been exploring the data & am struck by one of the most popular activities: doing nothing." This was equivalent between men and women in terms of the time spent do nothing and this would suggest to me that the scales for extraversion and introversion might be one area where men and women do not differ. On the more speculative side I would postulate this may have some contribution to the increased happiness of these groups, instead of the conclusion of the elite happiness researchers that have inequality and status obsessions and then graft them onto other groups. https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888
It looks like Pahman has responded to the Twitter Files as Trump. Both want to change electoral rules, not to terminate the Constitution as said by the WH's clowns, the BBC ando other suppliers of fake news.
Since all radical leftists hate other people --regardless of how often they use markets-- I wonder if such hate violates the aphorism. It looks like Dalmia, Tyler Coward, and you ignore why we hate those whose ambition for power requires to kill us. I think Dalmia's post is a joke, and given what you wrote a few days ago about radical leftists I thought you'd have also taken it as a joke.
Dalmia has just sent a new post. It's about Trump's response to The Twitter Files and of course he repeats the WH's statement. So Dalmia, like Tyler Coward, is another little servant of radical leftists.
Re Pahlman, if I only have to convince 50% +1 people to vote for me in any given “tier” of office, then the amount of support from the base population is essentially something like 50% ^ n level of tier I am in. This leads to massive incentive problems that James Buchanan and the Virginia Public Choice School studied pretty extensively, and is the reason no super-parliamentary experiment of this sort has ever survived for a long while.
On loneliness... I distanced myself from social media in 2015 once Trump started getting traction. The vitriol coming into my feed from both sides completely turned me off.
And maybe that "saved" me?
I read about loneliness and isolation and it sounds like it's being written about another country
I am very involved in my synagogue. I also run two separate father/son Dungeons and Dragons games per week. Yes, maybe that sounds silly, but I am having a blast with my teenage son, several friends, and THEIR sons twice per week. Loneliness and isolation level Zero
One thing I and the four other men in our DnD groups have in common is that we all either don't have a Facebook account or only use it to wish people "Happy Birthday"
Perhaps Facebook and other social media are like alcohol? Best if used only occasionally and in moderation? And if you use it every day your life will spin out of control and leave you alone and alienated from everyone you love, your only true remaining friendship with "the bottle"
Many central banks would end up with negative equity if it wasn't for accounting tricks like classifying certain losses as deferred assets (FED, ECB). Nothing dramatic but it might involve tax payers money and it is embarrassing.
The across the board central bank losses sound terrifying. But should they be? My admittedly very amateur understanding is that they can choose to fulfill their obligations by printing money. This could create very high inflation, but if EVERYONE is doing it won't relative currency valuations then stay more or less stable? Am I missing something? Or maybe I am not understanding fully?
Regarding central banking. Although I have already argued that no state bank or enterprise needs to have "capital", let me say it again: including capital in a state organization's balance sheet makes no economic and political sense. When state banks and enterprises were being "reformed" in China, I advised them to forget about capital and to pay attention to the relationship with their relevant political authorities. I had a lot of pressure from my bosses not to say that because both the IMF and WB used to require private accounting for all state banks and enterprises (their ideas, however, had been totally ignored by Argentina many times and at the end of the day they accepted Argentina's fake accounts). Or you can go back to early 1983, the first time in my life when I was asked about a central bank's capital: the Chilean government increased the central bank's accounting capital by issuing a special IOU for the amount of the huge subsidy the government accepted to pay to borrowers as an "unseen" consequence of abandoning the fixed exchange rate in June 14, 1982 and which the CB financed by depleting their foreign-exchange reserves.
Dalmia's bias should have meant no pass, and the mostly not right but not fully wrong description of the Right as full of hate of the left is just how the Democrats try to demonize all conservatives. The division and description of the 4 corner legs of the New Right, as a demonizing leftist sees them, is quite outside of my usual bubble of reading:
Flight 93ers - Claremonsters, >> they alone see themselves not as anti-liberals but adherents of the true liberalism. <<
Integralists - Catholics (Post-Liberal Order) who see >>[progressive leftism] as a natural outgrowth of the political individualism. << so of course they oppose, hate,
>> the rise of sexual promiscuity, pornography, abortion and radical demands for gender self-authorship of the woke movement. <<
National Conservatives, NatCons - other anti-leftist, MAGA folk who favor
>> an anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda. Specifically, American NatCons want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools. << With a key figure
>>Yoram Hazony with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism. <<
Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros - Curtis Yarvin & The Cathedral >> Yarvin believes that a complex of progressive elite institutions—the press, academia and the federal bureaucracy or the Deep State—run the country and exercise control more totalitarian than authoritarian China—a country that he admires precisely because it is so openly authoritarian in contrast to liberal states that mask their true intentions behind mind-numbing pieties. <<
With more mostly negative details about each group, clearly focused on supporting the demonization project which fills the Democrats current plans in discussing many problems. Yet with quite a bit of truth, like its concluding note on Yarvin's faction, and the article:
>>liberalism is a degraded and degrading system that empowers the wrong people.<<
Which is true - and indicates liberalism is either needing radical repair, or is broken. Can it be repaired?
Halpin's POV is excellent: "Social cohesion today is maintained less through affinity to a collective set of values or activities and more through social disapproval and shunning of those who do not go along. "
The difference between unity in favor of something as compared to disapproval of those who disagree is sad, but important.
>>So what do I do during the “solo”? Literally nothing. During the week I am held hostage by inputs: Texts. Notifications. Podcasts. No moment goes un-utilized. On sabbath, no inputs. No podcasts while eating. No checking my phone during down time. No people. No conversations. <<
He does nothing at first, then thinking then questions then:
>> Overtime, you untie the mental knots that keep popping up. Tensions you have with people. Limiting beliefs you have about yourself. Other bottlenecks that are preventing you from connecting with yourself, and thus, other people. Then the feelings come. Regret at mistakes you made. Anger. Pain. Sadness. You haven’t felt actual feelings in so long. Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only solitude can help you find them again. <<
Halpin seems correct that as social groups, like Arnold's increasingly Woke affirming Jewish Church, require affirmations so as to disapprove those who disagree, such social groups will exclude the free thinkers. Plus, with fewer who disagree, the groups get less tolerant.
Yes. I think of him as somewhat of a kindred spirit, more interested in ideas than in PR. The initial announcement of his death was so terse that I worried that it was suicide. But it was heart failure.
>>thus concluded that markets generally produce better results than government, not because of superior incentives, but because they offer better opportunities for trial-and-error learning.<<
I always think it's both incentives and error-correction, but don't always think of both in every comment supporting markets over gov't.
I think Pahman is misinterpreting the reason Senators were selected by states under the original Constitutional scheme, and is also confusing the way the Electoral College works with selection by a legislative body. The People elected the House directly which then elected its Constitutional leader, the Speaker, directly. The States elected, via their state government, the Senate but the people indirectly elected via the Electoral College its Constitutional leader, the Vice-President. The People selected the Electoral College which then elected the chief governmental executive, the President. Given the symmetry of those operations I don't the scheme was just an accident or done to give the VP a reason to live in DC. Factional politics, however, meant that the VP was quickly superseded by the Majority Leader in the Senate, and the House Speaker has rarely if ever not also been a member of the majority party in the House even though he's not required to be a Representative.
I also think you immediately run into huge agency problems, even or maybe especially at the very lowest levels, when the way to advance in politics is convincing your peers they'll benefit by advancing you, rather than voters in general.
The way to advance in politics today is still convincing your peers they'll benefit by advancing you. We just cover it with a facade of voting for the candidate directly in a two party (one party now, I believe) system.
Agency problems abound, but compared to what? Seems to me that if each level of government was accountable to fewer than say 1,000 people the agency problems would be fewer, not greater?
Last year we went to my towns Christmas lighting. We really enjoyed it. It was a lot less crowded than this year and while there was one particular "woke" thing, the high school chorus wore masks when they sung, the official activities were pretty short.
This year we went and I found it a bit insufferable. It was a lot more crowded. The official activities went on at least 3x as long. We had to sit through a long cringe inducing recitation from the Boy Scouts of how every single obscure faith and group many of which you never heard of all believe in the golden rule/love/spirit of Christmas in their language (they were still wearing masks). There were a few other woke things. The mayor (democrat, nimby) recited the names of the town council and some members of the crowd semi boo-ed at the mention of the mayoral candidate that just lost to him (republican, yimby). I was reminded that that same mayor canceled most of the town events for throughout COVID but violated his own rules to hold a BLM rally at town hall summer 2020.
Overall, I don't think we are going to the tree lighting next year. I see no reason to sit through such ideological pollution to watch my small towns Christmas tree get lit.
Pahman's idea is one that I have supported previously. The Founders made a terrible error in having direct election of the President (at least at the state level), but the truth is that they never actually believed that was what they were doing. I think they expected most elections to ultimately be decided by the House because they expected more than two actual candidates in every election.
Most of the other mistakes were made later, including the direct election of Senators, and the Civil Service rules and regulations. We have lost the ability to fire the government.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I thought the Founders specified that presidential electors were to be specified by the state legislatures.
I think you are correct, but like you, am too lazy this afternoon to check.
There is something to what John Halpin is writing, but I wouldn't necessarily try to inject politics into it, or over inject politics perhaps. There was a twitter thread some months ago by cognitive & evolutionary anthropology Manvir Singh, "In the 1970s & 80s, anthropologists working in small-scale, non-industrial societies fastidiously noted down what people were doing throughout the day. I’ve been exploring the data & am struck by one of the most popular activities: doing nothing." This was equivalent between men and women in terms of the time spent do nothing and this would suggest to me that the scales for extraversion and introversion might be one area where men and women do not differ. On the more speculative side I would postulate this may have some contribution to the increased happiness of these groups, instead of the conclusion of the elite happiness researchers that have inequality and status obsessions and then graft them onto other groups. https://twitter.com/mnvrsngh/status/1510978995269029888
It looks like Pahman has responded to the Twitter Files as Trump. Both want to change electoral rules, not to terminate the Constitution as said by the WH's clowns, the BBC ando other suppliers of fake news.
Since all radical leftists hate other people --regardless of how often they use markets-- I wonder if such hate violates the aphorism. It looks like Dalmia, Tyler Coward, and you ignore why we hate those whose ambition for power requires to kill us. I think Dalmia's post is a joke, and given what you wrote a few days ago about radical leftists I thought you'd have also taken it as a joke.
Dalmia has just sent a new post. It's about Trump's response to The Twitter Files and of course he repeats the WH's statement. So Dalmia, like Tyler Coward, is another little servant of radical leftists.
Re Pahlman, if I only have to convince 50% +1 people to vote for me in any given “tier” of office, then the amount of support from the base population is essentially something like 50% ^ n level of tier I am in. This leads to massive incentive problems that James Buchanan and the Virginia Public Choice School studied pretty extensively, and is the reason no super-parliamentary experiment of this sort has ever survived for a long while.
The real problem with elections is electing the electors. Voting is a heavy responsibility and the vast majority of humans are not suited to it.
On loneliness... I distanced myself from social media in 2015 once Trump started getting traction. The vitriol coming into my feed from both sides completely turned me off.
And maybe that "saved" me?
I read about loneliness and isolation and it sounds like it's being written about another country
I am very involved in my synagogue. I also run two separate father/son Dungeons and Dragons games per week. Yes, maybe that sounds silly, but I am having a blast with my teenage son, several friends, and THEIR sons twice per week. Loneliness and isolation level Zero
One thing I and the four other men in our DnD groups have in common is that we all either don't have a Facebook account or only use it to wish people "Happy Birthday"
Perhaps Facebook and other social media are like alcohol? Best if used only occasionally and in moderation? And if you use it every day your life will spin out of control and leave you alone and alienated from everyone you love, your only true remaining friendship with "the bottle"
Many central banks would end up with negative equity if it wasn't for accounting tricks like classifying certain losses as deferred assets (FED, ECB). Nothing dramatic but it might involve tax payers money and it is embarrassing.
The across the board central bank losses sound terrifying. But should they be? My admittedly very amateur understanding is that they can choose to fulfill their obligations by printing money. This could create very high inflation, but if EVERYONE is doing it won't relative currency valuations then stay more or less stable? Am I missing something? Or maybe I am not understanding fully?
Regarding central banking. Although I have already argued that no state bank or enterprise needs to have "capital", let me say it again: including capital in a state organization's balance sheet makes no economic and political sense. When state banks and enterprises were being "reformed" in China, I advised them to forget about capital and to pay attention to the relationship with their relevant political authorities. I had a lot of pressure from my bosses not to say that because both the IMF and WB used to require private accounting for all state banks and enterprises (their ideas, however, had been totally ignored by Argentina many times and at the end of the day they accepted Argentina's fake accounts). Or you can go back to early 1983, the first time in my life when I was asked about a central bank's capital: the Chilean government increased the central bank's accounting capital by issuing a special IOU for the amount of the huge subsidy the government accepted to pay to borrowers as an "unseen" consequence of abandoning the fixed exchange rate in June 14, 1982 and which the CB financed by depleting their foreign-exchange reserves.
Dalmia's bias should have meant no pass, and the mostly not right but not fully wrong description of the Right as full of hate of the left is just how the Democrats try to demonize all conservatives. The division and description of the 4 corner legs of the New Right, as a demonizing leftist sees them, is quite outside of my usual bubble of reading:
Flight 93ers - Claremonsters, >> they alone see themselves not as anti-liberals but adherents of the true liberalism. <<
Integralists - Catholics (Post-Liberal Order) who see >>[progressive leftism] as a natural outgrowth of the political individualism. << so of course they oppose, hate,
>> the rise of sexual promiscuity, pornography, abortion and radical demands for gender self-authorship of the woke movement. <<
National Conservatives, NatCons - other anti-leftist, MAGA folk who favor
>> an anti-immigration, anti-market, and anti-woke agenda. Specifically, American NatCons want to break up tech companies, defund the left, impose trade barriers, build a border wall, increase the size of the child tax credit and put God back in schools. << With a key figure
>>Yoram Hazony with his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism. <<
Red-Pilled Anarcho Bros - Curtis Yarvin & The Cathedral >> Yarvin believes that a complex of progressive elite institutions—the press, academia and the federal bureaucracy or the Deep State—run the country and exercise control more totalitarian than authoritarian China—a country that he admires precisely because it is so openly authoritarian in contrast to liberal states that mask their true intentions behind mind-numbing pieties. <<
With more mostly negative details about each group, clearly focused on supporting the demonization project which fills the Democrats current plans in discussing many problems. Yet with quite a bit of truth, like its concluding note on Yarvin's faction, and the article:
>>liberalism is a degraded and degrading system that empowers the wrong people.<<
Which is true - and indicates liberalism is either needing radical repair, or is broken. Can it be repaired?
Halpin's POV is excellent: "Social cohesion today is maintained less through affinity to a collective set of values or activities and more through social disapproval and shunning of those who do not go along. "
The difference between unity in favor of something as compared to disapproval of those who disagree is sad, but important.
Quite different than Erik's emphasis: https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/p/on-solitude
>>So what do I do during the “solo”? Literally nothing. During the week I am held hostage by inputs: Texts. Notifications. Podcasts. No moment goes un-utilized. On sabbath, no inputs. No podcasts while eating. No checking my phone during down time. No people. No conversations. <<
He does nothing at first, then thinking then questions then:
>> Overtime, you untie the mental knots that keep popping up. Tensions you have with people. Limiting beliefs you have about yourself. Other bottlenecks that are preventing you from connecting with yourself, and thus, other people. Then the feelings come. Regret at mistakes you made. Anger. Pain. Sadness. You haven’t felt actual feelings in so long. Some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only solitude can help you find them again. <<
Halpin seems correct that as social groups, like Arnold's increasingly Woke affirming Jewish Church, require affirmations so as to disapprove those who disagree, such social groups will exclude the free thinkers. Plus, with fewer who disagree, the groups get less tolerant.
OT but Jeffrey Friedman has died:
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/12/04/jeffrey-friedman-rip/
Yes. I think of him as somewhat of a kindred spirit, more interested in ideas than in PR. The initial announcement of his death was so terse that I worried that it was suicide. But it was heart failure.
So sad about Jeffrey Friedman, who:
>>thus concluded that markets generally produce better results than government, not because of superior incentives, but because they offer better opportunities for trial-and-error learning.<<
I always think it's both incentives and error-correction, but don't always think of both in every comment supporting markets over gov't.
That's quite a surprise. The guy looked very young for his age and only drank water in the time I spent with him at a week-long conference.
If anyone would live to 100 I would think it's him. Sad.
congenital heart defect
Presidents are already elected indirectly