The Rentier Empire Strikes Back?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



The decades from 1970-2000 are looming as an abject failure of situational awareness and assessment. The class war Luddites were just waiting for faintly plausible excuses to continue old ideology?

200 years of Revolution, writing a Constitution, reinventing democracy, waging civil war, trust busting, Square Deals, New Deals & 2 world wars .... and then we go back to idiotic, class-based NeoLiberalism?

How pathetic. Where's the Greatest Generation, and how do we get them back?

Ignore aggregate demand & general welfare of the people, & return to previously discredited ideas? Werks fer mi!

And subsequently also throw out any attempt at regulating our own frauds?

Madness Posing as Hyper-Rationality: OMB's Assault on Effective Regulation

"Beyond Squid" making fiat credit functions as simple as possible, but no simpler

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson; hat tip to EconIntersect)



When a VC whirs its blender vanes in Silicon Valley, it's never too late to short John Deere? :(

So get yer synthetic food while it's cheap .... 'cuz Vampire Squid is coming to town.

“How I Stopped Eating Food”

Initial ingredients posted here.

These techie inventors initially seemed a bit naive about basic food & fiber operations (e.g., distinction between more-hydrolyzed canola oil vs, say, less-hydrolyzed olive oil - since corrected, apparently) - not to mention water itself.

Maybe Monsanto has already patented a follow-on, Colon Cleanser, derived from ... non-GMO-FOOD!!! [Nobody could have predicted that, right?]

Regardless, the biggest revelation is that extracted nutrients are currently so much cheaper than raw food! Ponder the likelihood. That outcome is a byproduct of existing but transient industrial and tax policy. An "externality," you might say - and therefore subject to arbitrage.

Next? Look for Goldman Sachs to start buying & hoarding basic nutritional ingredients, in the same warehouses* as their aluminum & copper & politician stockpiles? Just like rentiers buy up cultural information, and hoard it as "copyrighted" material, instead of serving culture, by distributing it wherever & whenever useful.

Per the classic plot line of Greek Tragicomedy, after Guar Gum Wars story appears, look for the inevitable Return of the Rentiers.

And in subsequently expected episodes: The Vampire Strikes Back, followed by something featuring colon-cancer rates and an unfinished Barf Star doomsday weapon.

Actually, all this also leads directly to a proposed OpenSource or fiat book:

 "Beyond Squid"

making fiat credit functions as simple as possible, but no simpler

If OpenSource-Fiat is the basic medium of information, which binds all culture together, then the SquidSide of the farce is the inevitable parasite, opposing culture. A Squid Lord, you say? Supposedly extinct for 80 years? And how could one exist undetected in the midst of Democracy? Hmmm. Always tentacles there are. So which is the Squid, and which are the suckers?** To unravel this mystery, we need to travel back through UMKC, to the center of the universe, and on further, to Ogden, Utah, where local prophesy holds that another Marriner will someday bring nuance to the farce.*** Even those in Darwin should approve.

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* Congress is merely a Goldman Sachs warehouse? Where bankers stockpile policy, before doling it out to the highest bidders?

** Hiding in plain sight, as rentier & renters?

** but only when ready, these electorates are

What An Obscene Concept - The NAIRU Straight Jacket

(commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

NAIRU Straight Jacket

It was malformed from the start, by starting from the unacceptable position that NOMINAL is equatable to REAL.

Hint to Uncle Milt. Try starting from an axiom based on the unceasing demand for unpredictable adaptation, rather than mal-adaptation. NAIRU is what you get if a rentier takes a stab at redefining reality.

An offshoot of Creationism?

How did Economic Creationism become "mainstream?" When Luddite rentiers made a stab for uber-merchant supremacy over nominal vs real policy? And the tail-end "succeeded" in wagging the Middle Class dog? (And thereby began to kill the Middle Class.*)

Watch “OECD NAIRU stupidity” on YouTube.

Then consider reconsidering EVERYTHING about how you vote.

For our Adaptive Rate to stay the same (or preferably increase), everything must change? Why? In order to adapt to unfolding reality ... NOT just to arbitrarily nominal imagination, or merchant preferences (which obviously must float, in order to continuously chase unpredictable reality).


* Note, a tail wagging a dog is equivalent to a parasite wagging the host it lives within. The parasites only real choice is to let both live, or kill both. Everything in between is tilted one way or the other.

"Rent Theory" as a Symptom?

After reading Michael Hudson's essay, "Veblen’s Institutionalist Elaboration of Rent Theory," one can't help seeing rampant rentier mentality as a symptom, not the original cause.

Component momentum in a system comes as no surprise at all within biology or system theory, or even psychology or anthropology.

From other system perspectives, runaway rent-seeking habits are one specific that falls under the more general heading of institutional momentum. Other names are phenotypic persistence, principal of prior plausibility, etc, etc ... or just random habits unrestrained.

The deeper issue is why the group momentum of such habits isn't recognized, diverted & shaped to other purposes sooner. That comes down to failure at group-wide, situational awareness, followed by failure to automatically trigger appropriate checks & balances in a complex system - a topic well discussed by the framers of our Constitution.

In small tribes, daily or weekly group-wide council discussions address this group awareness requirement. However, given our population size, no current media process parses all our distributed observations fast enough.

That leaves one pondering how far off track we really are, and what the recovery steps are.

Just when we need to be distributing enough resources & time to continually improve the quality of our distributed decision-making abilities ... we've instead gone off the rails.  Our policy decision-making habits are already so concentrated that our population-wide, self-regulation gap may be widening beyond control. Worse, our distributed situational awareness may have lost ability to reconnect. Is the probability of recovery already insignificant? How would we know?  Can that gap be estimated quantitatively?

(And arranging terrorist events just isn't an adequate rallying cry anymore. Black Ops thinking just won't cut it as a continuous mobilization strategy.)

Rampant rent seeking is a symptom of distributed disconnects, & failure to evolve checks & balances as fast as our options are expanding. As a nation, culture or system, we're distracted, and it no longer matters what the distractions are. The core problem is that we can't parse our options fast enough to optimize how we explore them. The result is random policy drift by elites reconstituting Central Planning by any other name.

We need indirection, and the communication throughput to capitalize on best options that some will inevitably stumble upon before all will. It's no longer a question of if HP needs to know that HP knows. Rather, we need to know how quickly HP needs to know what HP knows. There's no other way to drive continuous improvements in group agility.

How WOULD we drive continuous improvement in group agility?  Group practice?  When was the last time YOU acted like an owner of your democracy?

Every day, there are always many things we should start doing differently.  Yet if we don't actually start, it just won't matter what we would'a, could'a, should'a done.