everywhere these days
the dimensions of this new peonage

are realized

 but its a fraud

 proles with pleb heads two sizes too big
are not caught between the grinding wheel

of their mortgage and the gears of their mcjob

 they are proles not peons
take away their credit line and

you don't destroy them

you liberate them

these are the lines that bind

but to what ???

u have no need of stinking credit scores

fuck your lawn fronted
fuckin

money pit

arise and walk away
u have nothing to lose but your lines

labor power uber alles

Posted by pinky at 09:46 PM

what's a “gavin k “???

smith and even plagoristical malthus
refers to marginal labor income

not average total income

naive freshly painted thoughts
on the chrono-dynamics

of clio's

infra marginal social surplus product

from a willfully senile mind ????

no recipe for delight-ful reading

————-

“as the falling productivity of Land
drags down the productivity of Farmers”

bruce
is that how u want to phrase this point ???

fixed land and additional but falling incremental output results
from further applications of toil

means higher land productivity in output per acre

as well as

higher infra marginal rent

even as the productivity

of any marginal unit of labor falls

of course land exhaustion is another matter

perhaps you are talking about
wreckless soil mining

and if so

that's very good point

as intensity of use goes up
the rapidity of exhaustion may also

one tendency countering the other
netting out up or down …either way

Posted by js paine at 06:00 PM

massively wonderful

scripture !!!! even

but as preface 
i hasten to warn u 

johnny k like
all pure reformers

was “sagely ” and humanely assuming

—-for burkean reasons no doubt —-

this guiding maxim:

do minimal damage to society's
” as is “condition

ie
retaining

the hegemonic role of “private firms “

in real productive social investment

ie

he posed a “self evident “

limitation

on solving society's agency choice

as to

methods and institutions

i on the other hand
carrying no brief for corporate capital

pose no such obstacle to my visions

and in roosevelt's

arsenal of democracy paradigm

i see the fleeting ad hoc war time choices

of a time long past

as a better blue print for our at peace future

then any

institutionally constrained

keynesian ingenuity

can possibly offer

but read :

“The state of confidence, as they term it, is a matter to which practical men always pay the closest and most anxious attention. But economists have not analysed it carefully and have been content, as a rule, to discuss it in general terms. …

There is … not much to be said about the state of confidence a priori. Our conclusions must mainly depend upon the actual observation of markets and business psychology. This is the reason why the ensuing digression is on a different level of abstraction from most of this book.

For convenience of exposition we shall assume in the following discussion of the state of confidence that there are no changes in the rate of interest; and we shall write, throughout the following sections, as if changes in the values of investments were solely due to changes in the expectation of their prospective yields and not at all to changes in the rate of interest at which these prospective yields are capitalised. The effect of changes in the rate of interest is, however, easily superimposed on the effect of changes in the state of confidence.

The outstanding fact is the extreme precariousness of the basis of knowledge on which our estimates of prospective yield have to be made. Our knowledge of the factors which will govern the yield of an investment some years hence is usually very slight and often negligible. If we speak frankly, we have to admit that our basis of knowledge for estimating the yield ten years hence … amounts to little and sometimes to nothing; or even five years hence. In fact, those who seriously attempt to make any such estimate are often so much in the minority that their behaviour does not govern the market. …

Some of the factors which accentuate this precariousness may be briefly mentioned. …

(4) …there is one feature in particular which deserves our attention. It might have been supposed that competition between expert professionals, possessing judgment and knowledge beyond that of the average private investor, would correct the vagaries of the ignorant individual left to himself. It happens, however, that the energies and skill of the professional investor and speculator are mainly occupied otherwise. For most of these persons are, in fact, largely concerned, not with making superior long-term forecasts of the probable yield of an investment over its whole life, but with foreseeing changes in the conventional basis of valuation a short time ahead of the general public. They are concerned, not with what an investment is really worth to a man who buys it “for keeps”, but with what the market will value it at, under the influence of mass psychology, three months or a year hence. …

Thus the professional investor is forced to concern himself with the anticipation of impending changes, in the news or in the atmosphere, of the kind by which experience shows that the mass psychology of the market is most influenced. This is the inevitable result of investment markets organised with a view to so-called “liquidity”. Of the maxims of orthodox finance none, surely, is more anti-social than the fetish of liquidity, the doctrine that it is a positive virtue on the part of investment institutions to concentrate their resources upon the holding of “liquid” securities. It forgets that there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole. The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual, private object of the most skilled investment to-day is “to beat the gun”, as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow.

This battle of wits to anticipate the basis of conventional valuation a few months hence, rather than the prospective yield of an investment over a long term of years, does not even require gulls amongst the public to feed the maws of the professional; — it can be played by professionals amongst themselves. Nor is it necessary that anyone should keep his simple faith in the conventional basis of valuation having any genuine long-term validity. For it is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs — a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops. These games can be played with zest and enjoyment, though all the players know that it is the Old Maid which is circulating, or that when the music stops some of the players will find themselves unseated.

Or, to change the metaphor slightly, professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

If the reader interjects that there must surely be large profits to be gained from the other players in the long run by a skilled individual who, unperturbed by the prevailing pastime, continues to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame, he must be answered, first of all, that there are, indeed, such serious-minded individuals and that it makes a vast difference to an investment market whether or not they predominate in their influence over the game-players. But we must also add that there are several factors which jeopardise the predominance of such individuals in modern investment markets. Investment based on genuine long-term expectation is so difficult to-day as to be scarcely practicable. He who attempts it must surely lead much more laborious days and run greater risks than he who tries to guess better than the crowd how the crowd will behave; and, given equal intelligence, he may make more disastrous mistakes. There is no clear evidence from experience that the investment policy which is socially advantageous coincides with that which is most profitable. It needs more intelligence to defeat the forces of time and our ignorance of the future than to beat the gun. Moreover, life is not long enough; — human nature desires quick results, there is a peculiar zest in making money quickly, and remoter gains are discounted by the average man at a very high rate. … Finally it is the long-term investor, he who most promotes the public interest, who will in practice come in for most criticism, wherever investment funds are managed by committees or boards or banks.⁴ For it is in the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. …

These considerations should not lie beyond the purview of the economist. But they must be relegated to their right perspective. If I may be allowed to appropriate the term speculation for the activity of forecasting the psychology of the market, and the term enterprise for the activity of forecasting the prospective yield of assets over their whole life, it is by no means always the case that speculation predominates over enterprise. As the organisation of investment markets improves, the risk of the predominance of speculation does, however, increase. In one of the greatest investment markets in the world, namely, New York, the influence of speculation (in the above sense) is enormous. Even outside the field of finance, Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market. It is rare, one is told, for an American to invest, as many Englishmen still do, “for income”; and he will not readily purchase an investment except in the hope of capital appreciation. This is only another way of saying that, when he purchases an investment, the American is attaching his hopes, not so much to its prospective yield, as to a favourable change in the conventional basis of valuation, i.e. that he is, in the above sense, a speculator. Speculators may do no harm as bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. But the position is serious when enterprise becomes the bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. The measure of success attained by Wall Street, regarded as an institution of which the proper social purpose is to direct new investment into the most profitable channels in terms of future yield, cannot be claimed as one of the outstanding triumphs of laissez-faire capitalism — which is not surprising, if I am right in thinking that the best brains of Wall Street have been in fact directed towards a different object.

These tendencies are a scarcely avoidable outcome of our having successfully organised “liquid” investment markets. It is usually agreed that casinos should, in the public interest, be inaccessible and expensive. And perhaps the same is true of Stock Exchanges. That the sins of the London Stock Exchange are less than those of Wall Street may be due, not so much to differences in national character, as to the fact that to the average Englishman Throgmorton Street is, compared with Wall Street to the average American, inaccessible and very expensive. … The introduction of a substantial Government transfer tax on all transactions might prove the most serviceable reform available, with a view to mitigating the predominance of speculation over enterprise in the United States.

The spectacle of modern investment markets has sometimes moved me towards the conclusion that to make the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage, except by reason of death or other grave cause, might be a useful remedy for our contemporary evils. For this would force the investor to direct his mind to the long-term prospects and to those only. But a little consideration of this expedient brings us up against a dilemma, and shows us how the liquidity of investment markets often facilitates, though it sometimes impedes, the course of new investment. …

Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than on a mathematical expectation, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits — of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities. Enterprise only pretends to itself to be mainly actuated by the statements in its own prospectus, however candid and sincere. Only a little more than an expedition to the South Pole, is it based on an exact calculation of benefits to come. Thus if the animal spirits are dimmed and the spontaneous optimism falters, leaving us to depend on nothing but a mathematical expectation, enterprise will fade and die; — though fears of loss may have a basis no more reasonable than hopes of profit had before.

It is safe to say that enterprise which depends on hopes stretching into the future benefits the community as a whole. But individual initiative will only be adequate when reasonable calculation is supplemented and supported by animal spirits, so that the thought of ultimate loss which often overtakes pioneers, as experience undoubtedly tells us and them, is put aside as a healthy man puts aside the expectation of death.

This means, unfortunately, not only that slumps and depressions are exaggerated in degree, but that economic prosperity is excessively dependent on a political and social atmosphere which is congenial to the average business man. …

We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.

There are, moreover, certain important factors which somewhat mitigate in practice the effects of our ignorance of the future. Owing to the operation of compound interest combined with the likelihood of obsolescence with the passage of time, there are many individual investments of which the prospective yield is legitimately dominated by the returns of the comparatively near future. In the case of the most important class of very long-term investments, namely buildings, the risk can be frequently transferred from the investor to the occupier, or at least shared between them, by means of long-term contracts… In the case of another important class of long-term investments, namely public utilities, a substantial proportion of the prospective yield is practically guaranteed by monopoly privileges coupled with the right to charge such rates as will provide a certain stipulated margin. Finally there is a growing class of investments entered upon by, or at the risk of, public authorities, which are frankly influenced in making the investment by a general presumption of there being prospective social advantages from the investment, whatever its commercial yield may prove to be within a wide range, and without seeking to be satisfied that the mathematical expectation of the yield is at least equal to the current rate of interest, — though the rate which the public authority has to pay may still play a decisive part in determining the scale of investment operations which it can afford.

Thus after giving full weight to the importance of the influence of short-period changes in the state of long-term expectation as distinct from changes in the rate of interest, we are still entitled to return to the latter as exercising, at any rate, in normal circumstances, a great, though not a decisive, influence on the rate of investment. Only experience, however, can show how far management of the rate of interest is capable of continuously stimulating the appropriate volume of investment.

For my own part I am now somewhat sceptical of the success of a merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest. …”

Posted by js paine at 05:55 PM

” People for a Mathematically Perfected Economy “

org name worthy of jonathan swift

————-
the house lot boom led to

a miss allocation of ” capital” ???

a house used as a residence
is a consumer durable no ???

so what did the values spiral do ??

build too much house
wrong type house

too many houses

too fuel intensive

too lot intensive

too room intensive

too many up scale pads in the mix ???

what ??

these houses as built
were they a case

like our over large suv fleet

now

wacking into

an era of rapidly rising fuel prices ??

i think not

i think the bubble was in
lot values not house values

houses any type of houses

can be built almost any where

for a price …period

and if we're talking
an over investment in lots

this means nothing in itself that's “real “

lots being just “there “

on this posts contrast of two locales
eugene and bend ore

tim is finding what ??

a density externality ground rent effect type meme
behind the parting of ways between eugene and bend

lot values

this must in the long run rely on what ??

freer to build more and closer together

can kick off a higher “central ” lots pricing spiral

only if the build it and they will come

yes enough of em will come

this is what's believed in by boom town specs

even if region wide pop stays uneffected ???

if so
then

this means lower lot values on the outer margin no ???

but if the region sucks in extra boom movers
from outside the region….

and if eugene's restrictions run opposite

then

hey…. we have a value trajectory split 

complex ??
yup

get bad ass model fired up

and a big fast machine calculator

to run it on

this gets to have too many moving parts
real fast

at least for one meat calculator

using a simple vickrey type model

Posted by js paine at 11:07 PM

this gets very tedious

lower then otherwise consumer prices
racing lower then otherwise wage rates

add in distributional variations

like high hu cap vs no hu cap jobblers

and

then on top

of that

non wage incomes

to owners of “the property factors “

will some one please
put a nice little

ge model on the internet

to show these basic comp stats off

for the ass hole innocent bystanding public ??

————-

some one named joe

craves a gloss:

——-
the jobblers or job class

is a combo of economic classes

of the wagery and the non official salariat
and the semi independent professional class

that all get their revenue/income/lively-hood

from corporate amerika

dean baker wants to end the split
in income fates

between the high hu cap

vs no-low hu cap

i share his aim
but his method at least for “show”

is expose the high hu caps to the same

open border treatment as the no'lows now get

my take unite the two by raising the no low caps
thru a ppp wage forex policy

and balanced trade chock full employment mandate

a popular frontamong all job holder class strata
a pigs for all of us approach

vs

dean's kill his pigs approach

ps dean is prolly only using this as agit prop
to get the clinton-obama merit class types

to dump their open borders

for the lower orders bias

and move in solidarity

with the trade and undoc battered “native “wagery

note:

baker is keen to attack
globally enforced intellectual property “rights”

this is really key

the right to this million patent monopoly march
around the earth

this very minute—- as we all know too well——

is in the process of literally killing off

millions in black africa

…
joe asks also

who is the asshole innocent bystanding public

I am that A.I.B.P
and perhaps so are u

with all the claims and counter claims

my desire
a publically transparent general trade model

that at least stakes out

to the best of our science's ability

the boundary

of real possibility here

why comp stat
not dyno-comp ????

the claims are pretty clearly long run claims
couched in static terms

ie the pathway is not laid out

all sides
even the most ardent open widers

if pressed will notice

the massive job casualties

and the high tally

of border/trade policy induced

individual

misery

we'll pass thru along

the choppy

gear shifting

white water producing

transition route

to this long run

pareto improving

global

development path

—-

seems i embolden herr joe

———

joe just caught your latest post

it has a chilly finality
as if like too many here

you command

the relevent facts

and

powers of logic

to x ray

the trade and imigo fronts

ill shaped axioms
are for high school

double dome wonders

and greg mankiw

“those of us middle-class people who are “scrimpers and savers” are not all that thrilled with the “high-consumption/no savings casino” national economic model underlying the oodles of cheap crap.”

that statement contains an unholy gaggle of cross hatchings

help me understand

i note
don't

the rare saver in a spend thrift economy

get a higher return

then

the scotsman in a land of thrifty kilts ???

ie

why care about the grasshoppers mr ant ??

thought
could the fear be

the grasshoppers

after their ultimo crash

into a time of dearth and need

take mr ant's horde from him ???

“Why is the free movement of labor, as Adam Smith advocated, not part of globlization of the economy?”

the wishful implications of
IT for free assuming

open border trade leads to

earth wide FACTOR INCOME EQIALIZATION

aka dba
stopler samuelson

“Free trade with China would probably also come at the expense of unskilled labor in the U.S., but the problem is greatly exacerbated by the currency manipulation”

not necessarily the combo
of a ppp wage min forex policy

and a chock full macro regime

can keep things bottom wage kosher

ie
squeeze the diff by tax and transfer in necessary

out of the ghosts

in america's production machine

the domestic holders

of

“income baring “

property ….”factors “

…
i'm surprised the job mollock of mollocks

“industrial automation”
hasn't raised its head

among us comment critters

or its entire evil clan of molocks

the technology driven
job creation/destruction path

with its bias toward relative hu cap job growth

this clan has really done in joe six pack
low skill production jobs

were the meat and drink of this wrecking crew

the same productivity increase that allowed for dramatic wage rate hikes supported by price pass thrus

but arrive

open borders price comp

with the trans nat corporate win win

of lower market prices

but higher margins

ie

no pass thru wage increases

cause potential wage increases
created by higher value added per hour

got converted instead into consumer surplus

————-

more joe

——————

“In retrospect, are these changes what we wanted, intended or supported”

good questions joe

with regard to
the wide open industrial

trade regime and

chronic industrial product

trade value gap

we've had since john connolly took us off gold

—-answered from a jobholder view point

“wanted “— we were not really consulted on this —-

“intended ” —- if lower then other wise
domestic wages and higher profits

with a tamed price level

was corporate america's intentions

fine for them

but for us jobblers …——

“supported ” —- not knowingly ——

“Models are useful but I don't have the inclination right here and now to try to satisfy your desire for one”

u build one …???
the thought never crossed my mind

but u might refer me to any ones
your familiar with

that have easy public access

and a popularized self presentation

i suspect some hard working academic has to have ventured into these waters

beyond the usual

under grad

text book comp stat H-O flatland

hey do that up disney and it might at least
clear the dialogue decks some

of

shab chic journalistic debris

…

joe's coup de main:

———-

“KEEPING IN MIND WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY

AND CAN MAKE IT ANYTHING WE WANT “

now that's
an” assertion”

worth a thousand nights

of bully back and forth

Posted by js paine at 08:27 PM

laff

you are in a spritely mood today

indeed

its quite becoming

your comment
on j stglitz live

on franco german joint broadcast tv

is very astute

stig has the bite of a clover gorged lamb
even when he's outlining

a multi national

corporate induced doomsday

Posted by js paine at 08:25 PM

krug wants us americans
to condense our pattern of settlement

as a consquence of the fuel price surge

———————

trying to cluster us

sprawl and ramble lovin'
burbs-trash

won't hack it

the attempts by know best types
'round here

goes all the way back

to the boston roundheads

in the 17th century

but the efforst to ordain
close in settlement

didn't “stick “

not back then

and they

won't stick now

even at $15 a gallon gas

like huck finn
and neal cassidy

we crave them wide open spaces

paved or unpaved

country livin'
is the life for meeeeee

———-
reason writes

“I'm still trying to find an up to date figure

with total miles and total fuel “

when u get a handle on
the cost in product mark ups

do to transport charges

all the way from points of origin

to final point of sale to households

using say $10- $15 dollar gas/diesel per gallon

i think you'll

find its not even equal

to a pair of annual increases

in health costs

even using a couple

off years medical price jump wise

the relative size of all these
peak oil

nite mare scenarios

needs a good dressing down and airing out

btw
my personal preference for

human co-habitation

would be vastly dense

an all in one

work /play /shop /sweat /eat /sleep…

mega structure

containing say
20 million tightly inter acting

atomic souls

my motto for a steady state globe

20 billion hu-spirits

packed into one k worth
of super settlements

all round the planet
of insanely mixed ethos

and

all built at the waters edge

——-

some here may cry
along with alex t

paine
your vision

is

“an insult to Mother Nature”

my reply

“bring her on …..!!!!”

———————

count
u say my vision is your night mare

common wals make for bad neighbors

what hasn't 
transylvania

any sound proofing ????

besides
as it is and will ever be

in your sprawlavision world

you'll have to fly

further and further

every nite

to find a lovely fresh nubile neck to bite

won't you
at some point

become too exhausted

from the ardors of the search

to extract a full tanks worth

Posted by js paine at 08:11 PM