Eric Schliesser — Social Modality and Ideology (on [Walter] Lippmann, Stanley L.A. Paul and Adam Smith)

On ideology.

Digressions&Impressions

Social Modality and Ideology (on Lippmann, Stanley L.A. Paul and Adam Smith)
Eric Schliesser | BOF Research Professor in Philosophy and Moral Sciences, Ghent University

My journey to trading success and why the mental game is everything. And introducing, "Norman's Law."

I have been trading for 35 years. I've been a member of four exchanges, a floor trader, prop trader for a major international bank, commodity trading advisor, trader for a major hedge fund and all around money manager.

With all this experience I can tell you positively, unequivocally, that the secret to successful trading is mental. One hundred percent mental. No systems, no charts, no quants, no algorithms...just mental. Once you understand that; once you can master the YOU in trading, you can trade pretty much continuously with uninterrupted profitability.

So why don't people do it?

Basing Policy on "GPD" - Group Public Discourse As A Dynamic Measure of Cultural Adaptive Rate

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)




How useful is GDP as a policy metric? Not very. Even the most rudimentary analysis shows that reliance upon GDP as a metric is embarrassingly naive.

In fact, even the simplest thoughts constantly remind us of the utter failure of the economics field to stay relevant to national demands, let alone national options. Let's try some added perspective. Look at our situation this way.

The culture of a nation-state is an organism, as alive as any one of it's citizens.

How do nation-states survive? By the agility of their national behavior, of course.

Given of course, that the agility of other nations changes, how do we keep the Adaptive Rate of our nation chugging along, within striking distance of the leaders in this endless marathon of human evolution?

Rumplestatskin — When ‘culture’ is the best explanation

A recent blog post about ‘culture’ making a lousy explanation of social and economic phenomena sheds even more light on the bizarre culture that is economics.

The core criticism is that “since “culture” is compatible with any conceivable set of facts, it is not falsifiable.” Which is surprising for a member of the economics club that subscribes to the unfalsifiable belief that some utility function drives all human behaviour.

In a stroke of irony their argument boils down to “our culture is to not accept culture as an explanation of behaviour”.
So why am I so defensive about culture as a useful principle in economic theory?

I guess I should first offer an economic definition of culture. Culture is the total learnt cooperative behaviours of a society, which includes the way members of that society draw meaning from the behaviour of others. Society simply means the relevant group – such as country, State, club, school, workplace, or family.
To be more clear, culture is the way we understand the meaning of signals....

Macrobusiness (Oz)
When ‘culture’ is the best explanation
Rumplestatskin | professional economist with a background in property development, environmental economics research and economic regulation

(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

There are four essential aspects of social life that tend to be ignored in mainstream economics — language, culture, institutions, and related norms. All of these are reducible to rules and rule-following.

Noah Smith — Why bother with microfoundations in macro?

Read it at Noahpinion
Why bother with microfoundations?

by Noah Smith

The problem with present microfoundations is that they are based on simplistic models of human action derived from a superficial understanding of behaviorism when psychology and the social sciences have moved beyond this simplistic view of human nature and beyond behaviorism as the dominant model. Economics needs to catch up, which means that economists need to come out of their closets and get out more.

Review: A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution— Samuel Bowles And Herbert Gintis

A prescription for how human cooperation evolved will provoke much-needed debate about the origins of society

Read it at Nature

Not so selfish
by Peter Richerson