Doesn’t Matter Who Wins the K Race; We’re All the Same

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Much of what's wrong with economics is that economists have no incentive to mark their beliefs to market, so they don't. Beliefs are rewarded for their usefulness, which is not necessarily correlated with accuracy.

The beliefs of economists are self-reinforcing. If enough believe in the half fictional laws of economics, actors will behave in a manner consistent with those half fictional laws and thus those laws will appear to be real. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reflexivity.asp

And economists more often than not do what their corporate benefactors want them to do. Sure, Krugman bucks the system here and there. And Kreuger (sadly committed suicide last week) bucked it on minimum wage increases. But people like Larry Summers conveniently always find a business-friendly solution to every problem and magically advocate exclusively for neoliberal policies. I think Summers is so in the can for corporate benefactors that he'd argue that free trade helps manufacturing workers in the rust belt.

I just said to you that the right isn't listening. Saying it thinks it's unheard is not really responsive.

If A thinks B is ignoring him, why would A listen to B? That's not how people operate.

Not really sure what this has to do with anything we were just discussing. You went from what the right says about racism to how the right feels aggrieved, which is evergreen and true but also, so what?

The right and left do not understand why the other side feels aggrieved. What's behind the words is important.

In other words, they can understand racism but choose not to. That sounds familiar.

No. That's not what that says at all. What that says is that racism becomes part of a discussion of a million other things, which causes it to get lost in the conversation. Some of that is unintentional (24/7 media flooding everyone), some of it is intentional (right wingers making race part of a broader conversation about less important topics).

I'm not sure what this means, but you so profoundly lost me with this sentence that I refused to read the paragraph that followed on general principle.

http://achievethegreenberetway.com/d...ite-at-a-time/ The left will often bundle together a bunch of problems into a huge mass and raise them all at once, all at the same volume. "We need to fix X, XX, XXX, XXXX, and XXXXX" is overwhelming. If you instead say, "We need to fix X as a first priority, and secondarily, once that's being addressed, we need to address XX, then XXX, then XXXX," you've framed what you want in reasonable, digestible terms. You have a plan, as opposed to a drum circle.

eta: Did you bring up what the right says about racism because you think there's something others might learn from it? Initially I thought that was your point, but in this point you seemed to backtrack away from suggesting there is anything interesting to be learned from the wingers other than that they feel aggrieved at being richer and more politically powerful than the rest of the country, and use that to justify selfishness. Ecclesiastes 1:9.

What I hoped to convey is that the right wing can be moved toward a more enlightened understanding of racism and the need to recognize and address it. As I said, this can be done through a door opened by libertarians and, oddly, the Kochs, and Rick Santorum (early advocate of letting ex-felons* vote).

Comprehensive justice reform, and examination of out entire "penal culture" which jails a higher percentage of citizens than any other nation, necessarily includes a blunt and ugly conversation on systemic racism. And right now, there's an appetite for reform of this on the right. But if this issue is raised among a million others, if a candidate fails to state that this is the most important issue right next to our rapidly changing labor market and economy, and if it gets lumped into a broader conversation about valid but much less significant grievances, the opportunity will be missed.

And white America had better wake up on this issue, because our penal industry, and our law n' order right wingers, are aiming their net at poor whites. There's a huge push to find ways to "control" the obsolete white people who commit a lot of petty crimes. The only reason "broken windows" isn't being applied in rural America is because additional law enforcement needed to implement it requires high tax increases. But the law n' order pricks will find a way around that. They always do.

_______
* Law n' order sorts use "felons." Bullshit. Once you've served your sentence, you're an ex-felon. That's the whole idea of rehabilitative punishment.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The beliefs of economists are self-reinforcing. If enough believe in the half fictional laws of economics, actors will behave in a manner consistent with those half fictional laws and thus those laws will appear to be real. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reflexivity.asp

That's not actually how the economy usually works. The bigger problem is that economists have a hard time predicting what will happen, which undermines their credibility. And....

And economists more often than not do what their corporate benefactors want them to do.

Yes, but...

Sure, Krugman bucks the system here and there. And Kreuger (sadly committed suicide last week) bucked it on minimum wage increases. But people like Larry Summers conveniently always find a business-friendly solution to every problem and magically advocate exclusively for neoliberal policies. I think Summers is so in the can for corporate benefactors that he'd argue that free trade helps manufacturing workers in the rust belt.

If you want to pick three economists not beholden to corporate benefactors, those are not the three to start with. Are you picking Democrats instead of Republicans just to troll me?

If A thinks B is ignoring him, why would A listen to B? That's not how people operate.

We were talking about race. You pivoted to right-wing grievances about the media. Do those ideas connect in some way in your brain?

The right and left do not understand why the other side feels aggrieved. What's behind the words is important.

Bullshit to the sentiment here, and bullshit to the notion that when I'm talking about what the right says (which you made the subject, not me), you need to point to the left. Enough whatabboutism. So tired.

No. That's not what that says at all. What that says is that racism becomes part of a discussion of a million other things, which causes it to get lost in the conversation. Some of that is unintentional (24/7 media flooding everyone), some of it is intentional (right wingers making race part of a broader conversation about less important topics).

We were talking about what they say about race. What they say about race, according to you, shows a repeated tendency to ascribe false consciousness to people talking about racism rather than to deal in any way with the fact that our country is, as you said recently, systematically discriminates.

http://achievethegreenberetway.com/d...ite-at-a-time/ The left will often bundle together a bunch of problems into a huge mass and raise them all at once, all at the same volume. "We need to fix X, XX, XXX, XXXX, and XXXXX" is overwhelming. If you instead say, "We need to fix X as a first priority, and secondarily, once that's being addressed, we need to address XX, then XXX, then XXXX," you've framed what you want in reasonable, digestible terms. You have a plan, as opposed to a drum circle.

I didn't read this paragraph either, for the same reason.

What I hoped to convey is that the right wing can be moved toward a more enlightened understanding of racism and the need to recognize and address it. As I said, this can be done through a door opened by libertarians and, oddly, the Kochs, and Rick Santorum (early advocate of letting ex-felons* vote).

Nothing about what you said about what the right actually says about race suggests there is any reason to think this. I admire your optimism, and I want to be an optimistic guy, but seriously?

The right wing has spent a decade moving in the opposite direction.

Comprehensive justice reform, and examination of out entire "penal culture" which jails a higher percentage of citizens than any other nation, necessarily includes a blunt and ugly conversation on systemic racism. And right now, there's an appetite for reform of this on the right. But if this issue is raised among a million others, if a candidate fails to state that this is the most important issue right next to our rapidly changing labor market and economy, and if it gets lumped into a broader conversation about valid but much less significant grievances, the opportunity will be missed.

Why? If people on the right think comprehensive justice reform is the right thing to do and have an appetite for it, why would the broader conversation derail it?

And white America had better wake up on this issue, because our penal industry, and our law n' order right wingers, are aiming their net at poor whites. There's a huge push to find ways to "control" the obsolete white people who commit a lot of petty crimes. The only reason "broken windows" isn't being applied in rural America is because additional law enforcement needed to implement it requires high tax increases. But the law n' order pricks will find a way around that. They always do.

Must every conversation with race move towards a discussing of addressing the feelings of white America? I guess so.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

That's not actually how the economy usually works. The bigger problem is that economists have a hard time predicting what will happen, which undermines their credibility. And....

There is no "how the economy works." But economists' and their adherence to tired theories do impact investment and business decisions which drive the economy.

I know tons of old fart investors who lost tons of money making silly investments on the predicate that interest rates would go sky high after their artificial depression was eased. That didn't happen. But if you followed a lot of conservative economists, and even many liberal ones, that was a reasonable prediction.

If you want to pick three economists not beholden to corporate benefactors, those are not the three to start with. Are you picking Democrats instead of Republicans just to troll me?

Picking Laffer would undercut my point because he's too laughably in the can for corporate benefactors. So was Friedman. Even Goolsbee, however, will hew to neoliberal doctrine if pressed. And every one of them will profess that the business cycle is a law like gravity. Why? Because if you massage data to fabricate these laws, you make it seem like risk can be managed, which businesses and investors seek to do.

And that leads you to laws like, "The housing market does not go down."

Another neat one of the moment: "We'll never see anything like 2008 again."

We were talking about race. You pivoted to right-wing grievances about the media. Do those ideas connect in some way in your brain?

The right wing is significant contributor to institutional racism. A significant reason that the right wing ignores information about institutional racism is because it thinks the media that tells them about such racism is full of shit.

I'm not arguing for it. But I assure you I'm exposed to more righties than you are, by a long shot (I just left a meeting full of them), so take this knowledge and do what you will with it. But arguing to me that I shouldn't be telling you what I hear from righties in a discussion where we're trying to understand why righties do what they do is a tad counterproductive.

Bullshit to the sentiment here, and bullshit to the notion that when I'm talking about what the right says (which you made the subject, not me), you need to point to the left. Enough whatabboutism. So tired.

All I said there was that the left and right do not understand what the other side is thinking? How is that whataboutism? Unless you're of the naive belief that the left understands the right, but the right does not understand the left. (You have psychoanalyzed the right as though you know this in the past, so maybe that's the case, in which case, absorb this: You're half right, and half deeply wrong.)

A good bit of what irks righties is listening to people like you tell them what they think. You simply don't know. I don't know. But here's the difference between what I'm saying and you're saying: I'm simply repeating what I hear and guessing at the thinking behind it. You flip off these pompous and often clueless pronouncements ("they're all reactionary") as if you know. You don't. That's why we're having the discussion. What makes the right wing tick is a complex subject.

We were talking about what they say about race. What they say about race, according to you, shows a repeated tendency to ascribe false consciousness to people talking about racism rather than to deal in any way with the fact that our country is, as you said recently, systematically discriminates.

I don't know what a false consciousness would be, but I do think the right has a very unlearned view of racism. The question is why. I suspect from what I have heard, some of it is intentional ignorance of the subject. Some of it unintentional. And some of it stems from the left lumping racism in with a million other grievances.

You know very well what eating the elephant means. The systemic inequities in our country are myriad, from wealth inequality to racism to sexism. I could fill 300 lines of text with valid complaints many different groups legitimately hold.

When you try to discuss all of these issues at once, the conversation becomes incoherent. It does not resonate the way a single conversation about racism does. You can point at racism, offer innumerable irrefutable facts showing its rotten impacts on minorities and society generally.

You cannot, as the left often does, mix racism into a stew of other issues which are not as pressing and expect any change. If our huge list of problems in this country is an elephant, then as the saying goes, you must eat the elephant in bites. Not in one bite. If systemic racism is the most important problem of the moment, and I think along with our economy it is, the left should frame it as priority #1. Like Obama framed health care as his priority #1.

Nothing about what you said about what the right actually says about race suggests there is any reason to think this. I admire your optimism, and I want to be an optimistic guy, but seriously?

Corey Booker, Rand Paul, and Trump just pushed through the biggest crim justice reform in the past 30 years. And when it was done, Booker and Paul both said it's not enough. The Kochs' and their foundation, which has $500mil dedicated to electing people with their free trade conservative mission, is pushing for crim justice reform in statehouses right now. Florida just passed a bill giving felons the right to vote, and Rick Santorum campaigned for it.

Yeah, it confuses the hell of me, too. But as I said, I'm not looking that gift horse in the mouth.

Why? If people on the right think comprehensive justice reform is the right thing to do and have an appetite for it, why would the broader conversation derail it?

Because as noted above, when it's mixed in with a dozen other issues, it gets lost. Have you any idea how to strategize messaging? You've conducted a meeting, I know that much. Ever notice how the chance of getting anything done is inversely proportional to the number of items on the agenda?

Ever seen an effective ad campaign for 40 disparate products?

Must every conversation with race move towards a discussing of addressing the feelings of white America? I guess so.

White people are half the country. And they're the major cause of racism historically. If you want to tackle the problem, dealing with what's in their heads is necessary. Or you can ignore them, pretend you know what the right wing of them is thinking, and talk to fellow travelers. In which case you'll get nowhere most of the time, with an occasional modest bit of progress here and there, largely despite your own self-defeating actions.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Carving this off into an economics-only thread.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

There is no "how the economy works."

No, there actually is. It's super complicated and hard to predict, but there is an empirical reality. You said that economists drive behavior in a way that's self-fulfilling. I won't say that never happens, but that is a lousy theory of how the economy works. If you were right, the Republican tax bill would have spurred a fantastic new era of growth and innovation.

But economists' and their adherence to tired theories do impact investment and business decisions which drive the economy.

I don't really think there's much of that.

I know tons of old fart investors who lost tons of money making silly investments on the predicate that interest rates would go sky high after their artificial depression was eased. That didn't happen. But if you followed a lot of conservative economists, and even many liberal ones, that was a reasonable prediction.

I believe you. But (a) there was a counterparty on each of those trades, and more to the point, (b) this undermines what you were just arguing -- your old fart investors believed the economists, but those beliefs did not drive the economy.

Picking Laffer would undercut my point because he's too laughably in the can for corporate benefactors. So was Friedman. Even Goolsbee, however, will hew to neoliberal doctrine if pressed.

To sum up, then: You see conservative economists who are in the can for corporate benefactors, and lefty economists who believe in neoliberal doctrine.

And every one of them will profess that the business cycle is a law like gravity. Why? Because if you massage data to fabricate these laws, you make it seem like risk can be managed, which businesses and investors seek to do.

I don't know of a single economist who professes that the business cycle is a law like gravity, unless you just mean they think there are business cycles, just like there is gravity.

Risk can be managed to an extent. No one thinks it can be done away with.

And that leads you to laws like, "The housing market does not go down."

Another neat one of the moment: "We'll never see anything like 2008 again."

Not even sure who you're talking about at this point.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Carving this off into an economics-only thread.

No, there actually is. It's super complicated and hard to predict, but there is an empirical reality. You said that economists drive behavior in a way that's self-fulfilling. I won't say that never happens, but that is a lousy theory of how the economy works. If you were right, the Republican tax bill would have spurred a fantastic new era of growth and innovation.

This thing both you and I do where we take a statement the other one of us made describing a phenomenon that contributes to something bigger and assert that the person was saying its the sole cause of that bigger something needs to stop. I pledge to avoid doing it in the future.

I never said that the self-fulfilling rules of economists drive the entire economy. No one thing drives the entire economy. It's made up of a endless parts. Hence, there is no "how the economy works." But economists do inform policy, investing, and business decisions. And they are self-reinforcing because there is a huge amount of herding in both how economists think and among investors who listen to them. It's a big factor in driving economic events. How big? Not all of it. Not even close to all of it. But a significant part.

I don't really think there's much of that.

There's shit tons of that. Economist says X (based on evaluation of data using "economic laws"), copy cat economists follow, analysts follow, managers and brokers follow, and investor capital follows. Businessmen then also follow.

Certain types of algorithms have upset some of this repeating process as they make moves based on momentum and timing more than analysis. But not significantly yet, as there are other types of algorithms built to exploit the self-reinforcing process, which they then accelerate and amplify.

I believe you. But (a) there was a counterparty on each of those trades, and more to the point, (b) this undermines what you were just arguing -- your old fart investors believed the economists, but those beliefs did not drive the economy.

Certainly they drove the economy. They created losses to these people which are economic events.

I don't know of a single economist who professes that the business cycle is a law like gravity, unless you just mean they think there are business cycles, just like there is gravity.

That's rhetoric to an extent, but not a huge extent. If you argue with an economist and suggest the business cycle is something often made up of revisionist history, he'll recoil. It's a sacred concept among them.

I've done it. I've argued to a couple of friends in the field that this "cycle" stuff is largely made up, a simplification. If you extend or contract timelines and select data the right way, you can make almost anything into a cycle. I've never met an economist or even manager who didn't bristle at that. I think because they know it's a very imprecise measure of decreasing value in an economy so increasingly impacted by state actions and interventions.

Risk can be managed to an extent. No one thinks it can be done away with.

The white whale they all chase is the same elusive creature a young lawyer will foolishly chase: Making things effectively risk free. Minimizing risk impact to the smallest of rounding errors.

Not even sure who you're talking about at this point.

From 2003 to 2008, when a person would suggest that something was amiss in the housing market, almost every economist would say, "In the US, housing does not go down." Greenspan even suggested it.

A similar "law" I hear today from people with tons of money in the market who are skittish, and from economists, is "2008 was unique and cannot be repeated." That's true. It was unique. But what happened there in terms of impact can happen again. And it probably will. Not because there's a "cycle" where you get a crisis ever X number of years, which I've also heard from economists. Because the economy is still fragile. And no -- it's not because of Trump. Because we papered over the 2000 recession and 2008 crisis.

Imagine if we'd outlawed stock buybacks in 2008. That'll give you an idea of where the market and economy really ought to have been. I can't calculate what their absence would look like in terms of total impact in the broader economy, but I'm comfortable saying "things would not look like they do right now."

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The right wing is significant contributor to institutional racism. A significant reason that the right wing ignores information about institutional racism is because it thinks the media that tells them about such racism is full of shit.

They may say that, but that's just stupid. No one needs the media to see institutional racism. It's a part of everyone's lives.

But arguing to me that I shouldn't be telling you what I hear from righties in a discussion where we're trying to understand why righties do what they do is a tad counterproductive.

I never said that you shouldn't be telling me what you hear from righties. I'm curious.

All I said there was that the left and right do not understand what the other side is thinking? How is that whataboutism?

We were talking about the right. Are you capable of talking about the right for any length of time without observing that what you are saying is true of the left too? I should think so, but who knows?

A good bit of what irks righties is listening to people like you tell them what they think.

That's certainly true, but I don't think it has much to do with whether I'm right or not.

You simply don't know. I don't know.

I think I know a fair amount, and you do too. You can be a keen observer. If you think I'm not right, it would be more interesting to have that conversation than to have you raise epistemological doubts about how any of us can know what anyone is thinking. That's boring.

But here's the difference between what I'm saying and you're saying: I'm simply repeating what I hear and guessing at the thinking behind it. You flip off these pompous and often clueless pronouncements ("they're all reactionary") as if you know. You don't. That's why we're having the discussion. What makes the right wing tick is a complex subject.

OK, wait a second. I was specifically reacting to what you described. *All* of the comments about racism that you attributed to them (except the last about social media) were dismissals of the idea that concerns about racism are real -- all attributed those concerns to some kind of pretext or false consciousness. That's what you described. That's reactionary. It's not a real set of views about racism, it's a set of reactions to minimize concerns about racism. If you heard them say something else, share it.

And the point about social media is surely correct. There is much more attention now to the fact that cops shoot black people for no good reason because there are so many cameras around now, including on mobile phones, and those stories can get spread through social media instead of having to get picked up by a local newscast.

I don't know what a false consciousness would be...

Ah, OK, you didn't understand my point. You said,

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

On the other side of this debate are a bunch of arguments that fasten together in various ways:

-Wokeness is just victim fetishization
-Metoo, Wokeness, Democratic Socialism's emergence are signs of a declining society, with analogues in every previously collapsed society
-Metoo, Wokeness, Environmentalism are new secular religions (I agree with this to some extent, in regard to certain people - a sentiment best articulated by Alain de Botton elsewhere)
-This is all just a play for a bigger piece of the economic pie via redistribution
-Social media is connecting disenchanted people

The first three of these are different ways to say that people who complain about racism are expressing meritless complaints because they are blinded by some sort of false consciousness -- victim fetishization, a declining society, secular religions. In other words, you can ignore what they say, because they are deluded. The fourth (redistribution) suggests that complaints about racism is just a play for economic benefit. All of these reactions are efforts to delegitimize complaints about racism as grounded in irrationality or bad faith. The fifth is too, because dismissing people as disenchanted suggests they aren't thinking straight.

...I do think the right has a very unlearned view of racism. The question is why. I suspect from what I have heard, some of it is intentional ignorance of the subject. Some of it unintentional. And some of it stems from the left lumping racism in with a million other grievances.

You had me until the last sentence, which is bullshit. It is the fault of no one on the left that the right doesn't take racism seriously. When you pick up the Philadelphia newspaper in the morning, the score of last night's San Jose Sharks game is lumped in with a million other pieces of information, and you have to turn to the Sports section and look in the right place to find it. Anyone who is even slightly interested in the Sharks can do that, and will not lack information about the Sharks simply because there's a lot going on in the world. Anyone who is "unlearned" (an odd word, because we are talking about the world we live in, not something you need to go to a dusty library to see) about racism doesn't care.

You know very well what eating the elephant means. The systemic inequities in our country are myriad, from wealth inequality to racism to sexism. I could fill 300 lines of text with valid complaints many different groups legitimately hold.

When you try to discuss all of these issues at once, the conversation becomes incoherent.

Newspapers are famously incoherent, right, because of the way they cover all sorts of issues at once? This is why they have gone extinct, ushered out in favor of this new internet technology that helpfully permits you to only think about one thing at a time.

You cannot, as the left often does, mix racism into a stew of other issues which are not as pressing and expect any change. If our huge list of problems in this country is an elephant, then as the saying goes, you must eat the elephant in bites. Not in one bite. If systemic racism is the most important problem of the moment, and I think along with our economy it is, the left should frame it as priority #1. Like Obama framed health care as his priority #1.

This is inane. Our country has a lot going on, and a lot of problems. "The left" is not one thing. Once the USSR fell apart, we stopped having a Central Committee to take orders from and all started to have our own opinions about things.

It's great that you think systematic racism is a big problem. To make progress on combatting it, you should figure how to respond when people say they can't do anything about it because the left has grievances and that global warming is problem too, etc.

Corey Booker, Rand Paul, and Trump just pushed through the biggest crim justice reform in the past 30 years. And when it was done, Booker and Paul both said it's not enough. The Kochs' and their foundation, which has $500mil dedicated to electing people with their free trade conservative mission, is pushing for crim justice reform in statehouses right now. Florida just passed a bill giving felons the right to vote, and Rick Santorum campaigned for it.

Yeah, it confuses the hell of me, too. But as I said, I'm not looking that gift horse in the mouth.

I'm not confused, I just don't think there's much political commitment to it on the part of the Right. Do you disagree with any of this? Do you think that any of the GOP supporters of that bill will get more votes in GOP primaries because of their support?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

This thing both you and I do where we take a statement the other one of us made describing a phenomenon that contributes to something bigger and assert that the person was saying its the sole cause of that bigger something needs to stop. I pledge to avoid doing it in the future.

I never said that the self-fulfilling rules of economists drive the entire economy. No one thing drives the entire economy. It's made up of a endless parts. Hence, there is no "how the economy works." But economists do inform policy, investing, and business decisions. And they are self-reinforcing because there is a huge amount of herding in both how economists think and among investors who listen to them. It's a big factor in driving economic events. How big? Not all of it. Not even close to all of it. But a significant part.

Agree that people make decisions because of what economists say. Disagree that it shapes how the larger economy responds. You said, "The beliefs of economists are self-reinforcing." I took that as a thesis statement on your part because it was the first sentence of your post. My point is, economists' beliefs are *not* self-reinforcing, but the problem is rather that they do not have good incentives to mark their beliefs to market.

There's shit tons of that. Economist says X (based on evaluation of data using "economic laws"), copy cat economists follow, analysts follow, managers and brokers follow, and investor capital follows. Businessmen then also follow.

I think what you are describing is largely attribution fallacy.

Certain types of algorithms have upset some of this repeating process as they make moves based on momentum and timing more than analysis. But not significantly yet, as there are other types of algorithms built to exploit the self-reinforcing process, which they then accelerate and amplify.

OK, self-reinforcing there, but you have taken economists completely out of the equation, so what's being self-reinforced is not the economists' views.

That's rhetoric to an extent, but not a huge extent. If you argue with an economist and suggest the business cycle is something often made up of revisionist history, he'll recoil. It's a sacred concept among them.

I've done it. I've argued to a couple of friends in the field that this "cycle" stuff is largely made up, a simplification. If you extend or contract timelines and select data the right way, you can make almost anything into a cycle. I've never met an economist or even manager who didn't bristle at that. I think because they know it's a very imprecise measure of decreasing value in an economy so increasingly impacted by state actions and interventions.

The white whale they all chase is the same elusive creature a young lawyer will foolishly chase: Making things effectively risk free. Minimizing risk impact to the smallest of rounding errors.

From 2003 to 2008, when a person would suggest that something was amiss in the housing market, almost every economist would say, "In the US, housing does not go down." Greenspan even suggested it.

A similar "law" I hear today from people with tons of money in the market who are skittish, and from economists, is "2008 was unique and cannot be repeated." That's true. It was unique. But what happened there in terms of impact can happen again. And it probably will. Not because there's a "cycle" where you get a crisis ever X number of years, which I've also heard from economists. Because the economy is still fragile. And no -- it's not because of Trump. Because we papered over the 2000 recession and 2008 crisis.

Imagine if we'd outlawed stock buybacks in 2008. That'll give you an idea of where the market and economy really ought to have been. I can't calculate what their absence would look like in terms of total impact in the broader economy, but I'm comfortable saying "things would not look like they do right now."

Not sure what your point is, but OK. My point is that if you are going to dismiss economists generally as corporate shills, and then point to a bunch of people like Krugman and Summers and complain that they have consistently neoliberal views, you aren't thinking very hard about what you're saying.

[Icky Thump]

Roxy was Tommy Lee’s girl? And Nikki Sixx fucked her? Technically introduced the two. Glad I got an HIV test.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

Roxy was Tommy Lee’s girl? And Nikki Sixx fucked her? Technically introduced the two. Glad I got an HIV test.

You are going to have to provide links because google doesn’t even help.

[Icky Thump]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

You are going to have to provide links because google doesn’t even help.

netflix.com

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

Roxy was Tommy Lee’s girl? And Nikki Sixx fucked her? Technically introduced the two. Glad I got an HIV test.

Jude Law did a good cameo as you.

(I want to watch this movie because it sounds amusing, but I could just never, ever stand their music. Def Leppard, Judas Priest, Van Halen... I have a fair amount of 80s hair music on my phone. But Motley Crue? I could simply never go there.)

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

Roxy was Tommy Lee’s girl? And Nikki Sixx fucked her? Technically introduced the two. Glad I got an HIV test.

Pretty sure Tommy Lee's penis business end was getting to a different neighborhood than where you were playing. You'll be fine.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

From 2003 to 2008, when a person would suggest that something was amiss in the housing market, almost every economist would say, "In the US, housing does not go down." Greenspan even suggested it.

Some people said that. They did not know their history very well. The more sophisticated version of it, which underpinned the high ratings for MBSs, was that housing can go up and down but does not is not correlated across individual markets.

A similar "law" I hear today from people with tons of money in the market who are skittish, and from economists, is "2008 was unique and cannot be repeated."

Anyone saying this who isn't making the very narrow point that it won't happen exactly the same is a moron, and, again, ignorant of history.

You are finding some very dumb "economists" somewhere.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

You knew this was an inevitable for the "Martin Shkreli of Lawyers": https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/25/mich...ank-fraud.html

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Pretty sure Tommy Lee's penis business end was getting to a different neighborhood than where you were playing. You'll be fine.

Is there another end?