tags: economics

All living organisms are dependent on steady states:

I was actually first introduced to Marxist crisis theory while reading a fantasy novel, Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. My simplistic one-liner about crisis theory is that it predicts that increasing prosperity actually diminishes the ability of labor to produce the same amount of profit, inevitably leading to a clash between capital and labor. But mathematically speaking, what this means is that the normal progression of a capitalist economy starts off high, but steadily declines, eventually approaching 0 asymptotically (although never actually reaching zero). There is probably a critical point where crisis occurs, and wealth becomes redistributed in some manner (usually violently.) This restarts the engine of capital expansion, which again inevitably declines.

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2008

January

2008 Jan 6

markets

I stumbled upon this debate about the future of markets. Part of the problem is that “market” is so poorly defined. Instead of digging through centuries of capitalist tracts or recycling paleomarxism, my understanding of markets is that they are simply the mechanism by which transactions of resources, manufactured goods, or financial instruments take place. Anywhere there is supply and demand for a particular thing, that creates a market.

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2015

July

2015 Jul 8

Skynet deferred

I think it's going to be a while before all human manual laborers are going to be replaced by robots.

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2016

February

2016 Feb 17

The Selective Advantage of Empathy

While Ayn Rand's writing is an exercise in sophistry trying to justify utter, base selflessness as the highest virtue, it is not only morally abhorrent, but it goes against what we know of human behavior.

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