The Dimwits Among Capitalists See "Deficits In Fiat" As Public Investment In The "Wrong Types Of Citizens"

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I've got news for capitalists. People like spawning recombinant diversity, including sexual and psychological AND cultural diversity.

And, they naturally cherish the outcomes ... if not perverted by ideology to sociopathic behavior which inevitably triggers tragic outcomes, leaving bewildered perps to claim "nobody could have predicted that!"

Can't Every Aggregate Afford To Generate Their Needed Diversity ... And Have It Too?

Of course they can. In fact, they can't survive if they don't!

As one example, take current Russian culture, PLEASE! :)

"The good news. The deficit is growing, although Gurdgiev interprets this as bad news."

Why? Who convinced Gurdgiev that a "deficit in fiat" is bad news? Does he even know what that means? Did any social democrat ever care about a nominal "deficit in fiat" ... until they came out of the closet as a confused, capitalist gangster?

This brings us back to the recent spate of reconsideration breaking out in yet another generation, and of course in the politicians who pander to any and every forming crowd.

If we're an evolving culture, what is it that we aren't teaching to our students, to prepare them for unstoppable evolution, instead of fitful emergency changes? Does cultural evolution HAVE to involve Boom/Bust/Boom/Bust cycles, aka repression/escape/repression/escape?

Of course not. So what would YOU suggest as ways to smooth out our tortuous paths? Here are a couple of items now on my short list of "stupid educator tricks" that aren't at all funny.

1) teach all students, by age 10, the simple reality of fiat currency operations
(actually, that was done, over 100 years ago, in a game called "Monopoly" .. but then the key lessons were mysteriously removed from the game's directions; go figure! It's not like reality is difficult to absorb. A surprising number of key bits of knowledge are active taboos. Ya gotta wonder why. Gang competition?)

2) teach all students, also by age 10, the simple reality of aggregate biology, culture & teamwork
(It's still amazing how many PhD's one meets who know seemingly everything about a narrow discipline, but NOT what it's for. It's not like reality is difficult to absorb. For whatever reason, it's actively deprecated. It's as though some don't want citizens asking too many questions.)

3) teach all students, also by age 10, the simple rudiments of scalable project coordination
(These rudiments are published periodically in the news, and promptly ignored yet again. Here's yet another example of 2 simple messages I now wonder why they never taught us in what was supposed to be a "graduate" school. It's not like they're difficult to absorb. [Are you getting the sense that there's a LOT of misguided repression floating around? No surprise. Anthropologists find that every culture is chock-full of arbitrary taboos.*])

“The key to the success in any business is strong controls in two areas. Administrative and finance.
a) You have to enforce [aggregate] discipline. . . . You've got to make the numbers work.
b) On the administrative side, it’s controlling people once you hire them.”

Pity capitalists can't extrapolate that - through indirection - to making the RIGHT numbers work, and letting aggregates control themselves. Understanding the art of extrapolation via indirection requires understanding the Fallacy of Scale, another simple thing every student should learn by age 10.

Isn't it odd that the biggest critics of Central Planning are themselves obsessed with controlling others? 

Dominance seems to go hand-in-glove with a wide stance.

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* ps: The half-life of taboos in a culture are a good indicator of that culture's Adaptive Rate. Why? Because there's a solution to every novel cultural challenge, and that solution involves yet another layer of indirection ... to circumvent our own, bureaucratic taboos.