Elite "wealth managers": Renfields to the one percent bloodsuckers

First, people need to frame how the define success and failure. This subjectivity is sorely lacking. Do people all implement systems to achieve the same goals?

By analogy, I could say that any person is ultimately a failure because they are going to eventually die. It hardly occurs to anyone that a system can outlive its usefulness! Because people naturalize and universalize these structures. But if people thought of institutions such as corporations and currencies as what they more accurately are - technologies - then their obsolescence would not be so difficult to understand. These systems are not living things, and need to be recycled or repurposed like any other old tech. They do not possess a “survival instinct”. We need ways of not only creating new social structures, but also ending them.

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So tempted… to debate… must… stop…

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XD

Hey, if somebody told me that “these systems are pseudo-clever obfuscations designed by me and my cronies to try externalizing our basest animal behaviors into something which sounded necessary and respectable”, I would not argue. I could respect at least that it made some sort of sense, even if I didn’t approve of their goals. It would make a nice change from the faux-logical shell games I encounter.

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Exactly my point. Thank you.

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Systems theory would show that the way a system (from a large, multi-century multi-national corporation to rural milk co-op) operates tends to be self-perpetuating, surviving on largely the same through generations of disposable meat-puppets.

Your illusion of self-awareness and agency is nice, but largely immaterial to those beings who exist on paper and the interstices of information. We are fleshy mayflies, and we do not matter.

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I have to say at this point I think you’re going too far. Societies with no economic theory can crash their economy without any understanding why it’s all falling apart. (See the Roman Empire being reduced to a near barter economy in the 3rd century.)

And supply and demand works most of the time. Sure, there are some economists who tend to insist their law of supply and demand is a law rather than widely seen observation, and there are always idiots who insist that if something works on a macro scale, it must work on a micro scale, but the history of societies where economics was ignored is not a happy one.

You bring up Sweden, but let’s face reality. From any outside perspective, all the Western developed nations are near identical, differing only in the tiniest degree in their respect for the market. If you want to truly write off economics and the market entirely, choose a society relatively untainted by Western thought about competition and markets and compare.

Personally, I consider economics like medicine. Sure, I see all sorts of malfeasance, unjustified claims, snake-oil salesman, patent exploitation, and so on. But despite all that, we’re about inestimably better off compared to writing the whole of medicine off.

Likewise, the market is an extremely useful tool despite its numerous flaws. Useful enough that some end up worshipping the market instead of gauging how to exploit it to build the society we want to see, but that’s just humans being human. After all, most of the biologists I know are pretty big into conservation for its own sake :-).

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I thought this must be a mistake.

If your first axiom is

X = Y   “but”   X ≠ Y

then you can “prove” anything you want …

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(I am a bit tipsy for coherent writing now) I think that the whole classic Aristotelian “A is B, or A is not B” has been long outmoded. It does not account well for complex systems. But indeterminacies and probabilities are not completely arbitrary. Your quote is from @wynn_james, who I quoted in my post. I am OK with systems which seem to defy conventional reason, provided that they are somehow internally-consistent. But that’s not what I get from most economists, of either the professional or armchair varieties. To paraphrase some git on 4chan from a couple years ago: “Yeah, right! As if some random schmuck like you knows anything about economics when even the worlds foremost experts aren’t even clear how it works!”. There aren’t many disciplines one can truly say that about, so it hardly inspires confidence!

I am not dismissive of why people devised economics - why they would want to symbolize value and exchange to facilitate their needs and wants. But having a reason for doing so does not automatically justify every means of trying it.

I was not even thinking about the whole “bloodsucker” thing at the time, but I enjoyed spending tonight drinking some wine and watching the original Hammer film of “Dracula” (aka “The Horror of…” for Yanks) for the first time. It was short but sweet, some concise, well-executed vintage gothic horror. Christopher Lee made one intimidating Dracula!

That’s it for me, I am signing off before I get carried away with drunken rambling!

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From the outside perspective you are talking about all human societies have been pretty much the same. People trade between themselves and make decisions to better their lives no matter what their leaders tell them. But I know an economist who wrote the cost benefit analysis for an African nation in the 70s saying that they should kick all the peasants off the land and start growing cash crops. This incarnation of economics we are going through now is a reaction to the failure of economists to get the economy right in the past. They weren’t smart enough to figure out how to fix economies or create growth, so they assume that nothing can.

The current wisdom is that governments mostly can’t create jobs or growth. Most of the people who say that with a straight face would not deny that public education to teach basic literacy and numeracy is one of the best predictors of economic success. Basically we say that what governments are doing now might help, but there is no chance that something new would help, which is just plain stupid (I seriously feel like I’m taking crazy pills).

The place I personally first encounters the idea that the best way to run a society is to mostly let it run itself was in the Prince, a couple hundred years before Adam Smith came along, and I doubt Machiavelli thought of it for the first time. Markets existed in ancient times. Economics is basically trying to turn a description into a prescription. It doesn’t work.

One place I’d like to see Economists apply their own logic of incentive structures is to the profession of economist. Are economists incented to critique structures that benefit the wealthy or to support them? Given that economists actually act the way economists say that people act, it’s no wonder that what comes out of economics is all directed at making the rich richer.

Austerity, low taxes and low interest rates are the most recent economics fad diet, and like fad diets, economics is an industry that succeeds by continually failing. When you say that all modern economies basically use economics, it’s like defending the Atkins diet because all people basically eat food. They’ve been doing that long before this fad was around.

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A market is the only way to find out what something is worth at this moment in time to real people. It won’t tell you what it ought to be worth. But what something ought to be worth is hardly scientific. In a market, you put a buyer and a seller in a room. The seller has minimal value for what he has and what is is willing to accept to part with it. The same is true for the seller. Both walk away (at the moment of sale) believing what they have is worth more to them than what they parted with. If not, the sale doesn’t happen. (This is true unless the buyer or seller are forced to make the sale.) Until that moment, you don’t know what something is “worth” to actual existing people considering all the other options available to them. If the sale doesn’t happen, you still don’t know.

That’s the transformative beauty of the Market. If someone feels a personal stake in forcing certain deals to take place or forcing a buyer/seller to deal with a particular person, it is difficult to convince them of that.

Some people think certain deals are immoral (like charging interest on a loan) and they have the power of force to prevent the deal. These are what Adam Smith called “Men of System” – people who believe their fellow humans can be moved around llike pieces on a chess board.

If MATH can’t explain it then it is at best a soft science that isn’t applicable on a macro scale, or, far more likely, a pseudoscience, flim-flammery as you say, jiggery-pokery as others say, and a scam.

Telling a room full of people who do better for themselves on most any subject than just not understanding it is a real tell, bro. Many things I don’t understand can be replicated using systems I do understand to my satisfaction, economics isn’t among them and it has nothing to do with the “science” of economics beyond making the specious claim of being a science.

It took a long time for people to deal with feudalism, which also relied on sham mystery, false science and misplaced faith of the masses. Your time will come.

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When you define value by how much people are willing to pay for something in a market, then yes. It’s very much an empty tautology.

You can criticize other notions of how much something ought to be worth as nebulous, but saying we ought to treat everything as worth its price tag is only an improvement in that it’s easy to measure a number. Em, easy to measure once you have a market organized. In retrospect once sales have taken place. Without any non-market factors distorting things, and making some simplifying assumptions that don’t really match real world conditions very well. So, not actually easy at all.

It also leads to very perverse concepts of value at odds with most intuitive notion. Say I have a painting by Raphael that is priced for millions. But one day an expert looks at it, and they conclude it’s actually a forgery worth a few hundred at best. Has he cost me anything? I’d say no; the forger suckered me, and all the expert has done is told me the truth that my painting was never worth much. Yet stick to the market notion of value, and you’d have to say yes, my assets dropped millions in value because of what this jerk said.

This sounds stupid for rare paintings, because it is, and yet you can see it come up in practice. For instance there are the various cases where companies offered security services that didn’t work, and when people stood a chance of finding out, they tried to sue them or use contracts to muzzle them. Because the market value in a company isn’t from what it does, just what people think.

Whole economies are subject to this. To hear some economists describe it, the subprime mortgage crisis was a complex and subtle problem, and if any mistakes were made it can only be the way the government tried to allow poor people to get houses. But the heart of it seems really simple. Banks were trading a ton of assets they were pretending were worth a lot, and when people checked they weren’t; not a loss, but a discovery that there was nothing there. That might also suggest ways to prevent similar problems, but not to those who treat all market values as right by definition.

And, of course, it amounts to covering your ears and screaming when faced with possible value that can’t be traded in a market. Having a healthy and educated population is extremely worthwhile by any other standard; even if you can’t see past budgets, governments that invest in it still get positive returns. But those things aren’t really fungible, so if you only accept market value, you must assume all those benefits away. And surprise: people who ignore them end up giving nonsensical advice about them.

“Everything is worth what is purchaser will pay for it” makes for an ok first approximation on a small scale, but it really doesn’t work well in general. The various failures of classical economics predictions to agree with observed reality makes that plain, and at that point, deriding any other notions as “hardly scientific” is just an ironic joke.

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Math can’t predict everything because it does we can never have access to enough information. In a circumstance like that, you need to perform an EXPERIMENT. So that’s what a market does-- it runs millions of experiments in real time and uses price and utility as a gauge for the outcome. But in the case of value, you have to include individual and mass human desires, contextual preferences, future expectations… this is why central planning of markets is destructive. Even if the people running it were angels, they wouldn’t ever have enough information.

It would be great to come up with an alternate method that would allow us to predict the result without all that messyness. Unfortunately we keep running experiments on alternate solutions and all it does it is create permanent shortages in things that are readily available in a freeer market. (run a search for images: “soviet+union+cheese+lines”)

I tried running that search but Google kept pestering me with messages about not making stupid comparisons and serving up pictures of US poverty instead.

When I persisted Google finally relented and showed the pictures you wanted, with the caveat that while the Soviet poverty seemed preferable in pictures, these situations did in fact remain incomparable.

Then Google lectured me because it thought I must be listening to some 1% lickspittle defending a flawed component of capitalism from capitalists like me.

I told Google that some idiot had in fact been putting themselves in that position, and despite being surrounded by capitalists insisted on framing criticism of current western economic systems, or more specifically those that manipulate them, as endorsement of Soviet economic policy.

Google sympathized by presenting images of a Pope? who on a particularly bright day criticized unfettered capitalism and was immediately and viciously attacked by hordes of unfettered capitalists, many of whom had come to ruin for their beliefs, who tried to claim the man was a Communist.

I started to explain to Google that it was a common tactic to reframe criticism of the actors as a criticism of the system in order to deny responsibility for the harms of both, but Google immediately reminded me that it knows everything and disconnected me from the internet for boring it.

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There were homeless people in the Soviet Union. They were housed in gulags, not shelters. There are homeless people in Denmark. It is incredibly cynical or incredibly stupid to compare lines of people in the US taking advantage of the layer upon layer of municipal, state, and federal services for people making less than the top 75% of income earners worldwide and lines of people waiting for cheese and bread because these things couldn’t be bought for any price at a store – middle class people who couldn’t buy things easily obtained by anyone with a job in the US.

The cheese problem there is a political, rather than economic problem. Their cheese has been destroyed so that Putin could make a point.

  1. When the government plans market decisions, economic problems are always political problems.

  2. I’m talking about Moscow groceries in the 70s and 80s. I’m talking about the ability to by a pair of actual blue jeans. I’m talking about the ability buy a car that is not an actual death trap. Perhaps you are too young to remember how anxious all the citizens of the USSR system (supposedly just as good as the freer market systems in the West) were to get out from under it. As one citizen of the guaranteed-employment system put it: “We pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us”

I don’t think anyone is disputing the horrible conditions they have endured. I think the specific argument is casting the USSR as a socialist foil against capitalism. It really sounds like that is the argument you are making, and if it is you realize it is disingenuous, right?

Social economic policy versus market price discovery, totally a worthwhile discussion to have. The USSR as a shining example of social economic policies? Yeah, no.

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So, am I supposed to take from this that the world’s choices are polarized between only two possible ways of doing things? That if I am critical of the way a self-congratulatory pack of robber-barons manage their free market, that the USSR is either what I recommend or deserve? If so, that sounds a bit simplistic.

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