I really like economics. I think about the field a great deal and read loads of books, papers and articles about it.

However it is a field with a lot of potential, but perhaps no future, because it is full of liars — and the best sorts of fabulists, too, as they don’t even know they are making things up.

Like this. The data is fine. Nothing wrong with it. The interpretation however leaves much to be desired.

Funny how decreases in productivity growth have nothing at all to do with vast increases in inequality, the weakening of labor and various “free” trade treaties that discourage automation.*

No, this of all things is the explanation.

Rather, the important factor after 2003 is slower growth in innovation.

No. This is stupid. The benefits of innovation have barely even been realized because we never even tried it. Instead, we destroyed labor, thus making it artificially cheap and then thought it was great having 20 burger flippers making $7.25 an hour rather than two robot burger flippers and a single human robot minder.

The paper I linked is mendacious by omission; it ignores many of the largest factors causing a productivity stall in Western countries and cites the one that almost definitely is not true.

Some way to run a “science.”

*If all the gains accrue only to capital owners, it’s not clear that automation is actually beneficial and almost certainly would not be as things stand now.

My partner and I saw a gator this large in the wild in Lake City, FL, a few years ago.

Seeing an alligator in Florida is not hard. Just, like, go near water and look around. But one this large is a bit rarer.

BTW those people are way too close — even a gator that large can move at 20mph or so if it wants to. I know it looks lethargic and poky. But it ain’t when it don’t wanna be.

Given productivity increases, the “natural” minimum wage is probably ~$20 per hour.

I’d not expect to see large disemployment effects in most of the US for any level set below that.

I do agree with economists that the minimum wage can in principle product such effects, just not that it does so at $7.25 an hour, and even if it does so the social benefits by far outweigh the drawbacks.

As a digression, economists drooling over validation by physicists and mathematicians have caused almost as much harm as straight ideology per se. The consequences of inter-academic signaling and prestige hierarchies is under-examined, IMO.

If quantum physics weren’t true, the calmest fire would emit copiously at every frequency, including in the x-ray and gamma ray range. The smallest fire would, in other words, kill you if you stood close to it.

Of course if quantum physics were untrue, you wouldn’t be alive anyway.

Just some assorted crap I was thinking about.

How can people believe that probability exists sans humans, or at least sans consciousness?

Humans created probability. In the universe absent us, events simply occur or they do not. No probability. Not even the possibility of probability.

Much of science seems intent on importing human biases into areas where they only obscure, not illuminate.

The first 10 in today’s playlist:

Anyone who inflicts infinite scroll on me via their website should be launched into the sun.

It’s a bit odd that after all the music videos I watched during the ’80s, ’90s and early ’00s, I did not have a favorite until Lorde’s “Tennis Court” in 2013. Doing so much so well with so little impresses me just as much as Lorde’s allusive antipathetic expressiveness.

Let’s watch it again.

By the way, as the Great Forgetting is already occurring, it was an actual and verified Clinton strategy to popularize Trump, and to urge strongly that the media do so. The thinking went that there was no way Clinton could lose to such a narcissistic, unqualified oaf.

Well, it turns out the most unpopular Democratic candidate in recorded history can lose to nearly any-damn-one, an orange Cheeto included.

The first ten songs on my playlist today:

Girl I palled around in high school after seeing me play a shooting game:

“You are scary. That is scary.”

She looks around a little more.

“Wait are you cheating? You have to be cheating.”

I wasn’t cheating. Don’t remember the name of the game, though. It wasn’t Resident Evil, that’s all I know, though it was one with a plastic gun controller. Those I am good at. With a regular controller, I am not as good.

Half the work people do can be automated: McKinsey.

This is using currently-existing technology. No innovation or invention required.

I agree, by the way. The other day I drafted a post that I got tired of writing that noted that I could with my own technical skills automate out of existence 50% of the jobs at my current workplace given enough time. With a team of programmers and a year, it’d probably be closer to 90%. (The study looked at automatable tasks at a more granular level.)

Why this does not occur in general (not comfortable discussing the specifics of my own workplace in this forum) I don’t feel like going into detail exploring, but the reasons are an amalgam of bureaucratic inertia, domain protection, financial and other blockers.

Note that here I am not assaying the merits or demerits of automation, but just stating that it is easily possible. Expect to see a whole lot more of it as older managers leave the work force.

What’s happening with Trump looks like the Deep State attempting to sabotage his administration.

He is hostile and a threat to them, he let this be known before the election, and now they are taking their prevenge. I say this not as a Trump supporter, but it does give some clue how Obama would have been treated if he’d seriously attempted to cross them, giving me a bit more sympathy for his lack of reining them in.

I seriously doubt much if any of the Russian “reveals” are true, and if true are irrelevant. That anyone trusts the US intelligence community is a bit shocking to me, especially when liberals aver their rectitude and probity.

What we’re witnessing — like most early takes — is not what’s really happening. It almost never is, especially when dealing with people at this level.

If you think you know what’s going on, you’re an idiot. All I know is that I don’t know what’s going on and I refuse to let party identification or my enmity towards Trump cause me to believe convenient lies.

People are having huge trouble with what’s happening because nothing like this in living memory has ever happened before; their frameworks are broken and they simply cannot cope cognitively or emotionally.

My brain and thought processes are optimized for shit like this, though (and deal less well with “normal” times) so I think that’s why I am having less trouble with it all.

Simply applying normal heuristics to what’s happening now just will not work, and you will and do look foolish.

I use the word “propaganda.” Some use the term “Overton Window.” Some older thinkers have called it the “scope of permitted thought.”

These ideas smear together causes and effects, actions and reactions, but are ultimately attempting to discuss the problem of artificially restricted political thought spaces.

People are convinced that a very narrow range of societal choices are possible; that how we live now is just a result of completely unavoidable predetermination, a result and fait accompli of destiny itself. This belief system is what I call “propaganda,” though it is more the result of propaganda, and that spread out over many years, really.

Historically speaking, Western liberal democracy is anomalous, and now in peril. Obama and Clinton and George W. Bush and now Trump number among those who have imperilled it or are imperilling it. People do not like of course when you lump them all together like that; one of the best tricks the neolib devils ever played was to force you believe there was all that much difference between them.

Sure, they’ll get you to fight it out over Supreme Court picks, over if gay people get to marry or not, but meanwhile, profits go ever up as the earth is despoiled, the climate is altered for the worse, the waters are stolen or polluted or both, and the planet’s wildlife and ecosystem is annihilated.

It doesn’t matter if you can get gay married if you are dead, and if your species has no future. It just doesn’t.

Here’s the truth: Obama is a wannabe granny-starvin’ war criminal. In any sane world, he’d be in prison or in exile far away, or preferably locked up with all the families of the people he’s drone-murdered.

That above isn’t in the scope of permitted thought despite it being just obvious; if anyone not a president of the world’s most (militarily) powerful country in the world did the things Obama has done, they’d be condemned and likely dead or in jail.

Back to the arrangement of society, though. It’s all about to change, and probably not for the better. After it does, people will declaim with great confidence not only that it could not have ended up any other way, but that it in fact never had been any other way at all.

I’ve seen it happen enough times in my life (and very recently with the election) that it is completely predictable.

People seem incapable of dealing with ideas that are averse to their conceptions of themselves as good and nice; I have no illusions that I am good or nice, so the idea that I might be wrong or making a terrible choice is always at the forefront of my mind (hence why I am good at trading).

I think also that if people convince themselves that the arrangement of society is inevitable, is foreordained, it removes the responsibility of doing anything to change it. I mean, of course Obama had to be a middling milquetoast liberal who failed at his greatest opportunity. He had no choice!

Of course the nominee had to be Clinton.

Of course the ACA had to be a giveaway to insurance companies.

Etc.

None of those are true, but it certainly does make everyone — or very nearly so — feel better. And that’s what matters, right? Feeling better, feeling like your favorite politician is cool and competent and dresses like he’s in a Matrix movie? Obviously what’s important here.

People get unaccountably angry when you tell them that their favorite politician isn’t a perfect little angel, no matter how “cool” he is.

I love it. I love making people angry. Sometimes, it means you are just an asshole.

Most of the time, though, it means you are telling them something they need to hear but don’t want to.