"I'm A Multivariate Process Slave, And So Are You." That's The More Appropriate Statement.

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson, hat tip to Russell Huntley.)




The folks at ZeroHedge are doing more harm than good, by promoting one of their standard, pet concepts.

I'm A Fiat Slave, And So Are You

[i.e., fiat currency is bad for you]

This is, sadly, a widely held and actively promoted view of modern fiat currency.

Tragically, it's fiat currency that sets us free from gold-plutocrats & oligarchs who traditionally were more easily able to control & manipulate the currency supply. Yet like all new tools, we have to learn to wield our new degrees of fiat.

The underlying task is to organize faster than our numbers grow.

That's difficult. Imagine how hard sports coaches work, just to train tiny teams. Now imagine if basketball, rugby or football teams added a player a day. No current coach would keep up.

Our most important research topic is our own policy apparatus, and yet it's the thing we most assiduously try to avoid changing. Holding all but one variable constant, and changing just one thing at a time works in the lab, but that is NOT applicable anywhere else in life, where massively parallel, combinatorial experimentation is a given.

I'm A Multivariate Process Slave, And So Are You

That's the more appropriate statement.

As Context Nomads, we're juggling more knives with each changing context we enter. Therefore, unlimited access to more degrees of freedom is an absolute requirement, not an option.

ps: How can we be in debt when the so-called debt is denominated in metrics which we can make in unlimited quantities? That's like becoming personally indebted to one's own personal initiative. Can a fool be convinced that he's indebted to his own myths? Sure! Yet the problem is not with the myths, but with the fool who believes them - and who can't discern the difference between static value and dynamic value, or between fixed correlations and arbitrarily derived variables. Worse, such fools can't discriminate the cost-of-coordination from the return-on-coordination. Maybe they never took high school algebra.

ps: ps: What's next? Because situations are more complex, and demand bigger/faster/leaner aggregate responses every year (i.e., a more agile electorate) ... ZeroHedge will complain that we're all becoming slaves to a growing vocabulary?