This time is [not] different, but where's that Wile E. Coyote Moment?

[alice wellintown]

The truth is that America does make things of value, not only to
Americans, but also to the world. While most Americans complain that
everything is made in China, and while the press continues to give
voice to the idiots who say that the Americans are owned by, in a new
cold war with, are competing with China, this is not the reality. The
Americans don't make toys or shoes or clothes because they choose to
make helicopters and tractors, make math and physics and chemistry
into technologies, to engineer and innovate, and this makes sesne
because the US has intensity not in labor, where China has its
intensity, but in an educated and highly skilled and productive
workforce.

To temper the excesses of market capitalism in America is not to make
us into a Scandinavian model, but to increase and enhance investment
spending, research and development, and, of course, to continue making
improvements in education, eradicating the cycles of poverty that
prevent the poor from taking advantage of the opportunities the law
and affirmative action provides.

We need regulations and we are getting them because we have Obama, who
is far from ideal but better than the alternative. We need to
prosecute the b/gangsters and inside traders and put them in prison.
And so on...and these things, contrary to popular opinion, help
improve the markets and the economy.

The assumption, on the Left, that Wall Street is a bunch of crooks who
want o deregulate  and bubble up the econ omy is simply a bad
assumption, not grounded in facts or reality.

But we can't all be Scandinavians. It is not, as any reader of
Pynchon's novels knows, possible because we are Americans and this is
a very different experiment in democracy. Are the Vibes bad? Yes. Are
the wars bad shit? Of course. But to suck down the rhetoric of the
liberal conscience, from Krugman's editorials, is foolish. And, when
one reads his papers on economics, the reason he won and deserved a
Novel, one finds a very different man.

In the Times he is arrogant; I told you so...so, I wanted to point out
that he was wrong about inflation and the dollar. Bernake got it
right.


In an interdependent world, could all countries adopt the same
egalitarianism reward
structures and institutions? To provide theoretical answers to this
question, we develop a simple model of economic growth in a world in
which all countries benefit and potentially contribute to advances in
the world technology frontier. A greater gap of incomes between
successful and  unsuccessful entrepreneurs (thus greater inequality)
increases entrepreneurial effort and hence a country’s contributions
to the world technology frontier. We show that, under plausible
assumptions, the world equilibrium is necessarily asymmetric: some
countries will opt for a type of cutthroat capitalism that generates
greater inequality and more innovation and will become the technology
leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat incentives of
the leaders and choose a more cuddly form of capitalism.
Paradoxically, those with cuddly reward structures, though poorer, may
have higher welfare than cutthroat capitalists, but in the world
equilibrium, it is not a best response for the cutthroat capitalists
to switch to a more cuddly form of capitalism. We also show that
domestic constraints from social democratic parties or unions
may be beneficial for a country because they prevent cutthroat
capitalism domestically, instead inducing other countries to play this
role.

Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?
Daron Acemoglu  James A. Robinson    Thierry Verdier
March 2012.  Abstract

On 12/26/12, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>  alice wellintown wrote:
>
> hatred even, of b/gangsters and those who make money the old fashion
>> way,  with money,
>
>
> that may be the old fashioned way to make money per se: loan somebody money
> so they can enter a market with an unstoppable advantage, rape the
> competition, take the profits, leave emotional scars on everybody in the
> field who's halfway interesting and nice and creative  ...
> (thus seriously annoying people who were holding their own destructive
> capabilities in abeyance in the interest of a common-wealth, and so forth
> ...
> so yes, perhaps hatred is among the possibilities for an intelligent
> response, though soon eliminated by those who bother to think much, or at
> all...)
>
> however, if you mean, "make something of value", that people who are not
> all callous and nasty will appreciate and enjoy "and charge a fair price
> for it" which still happens more than most pundits will admit...well
> then...
>