The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End Violently Truth, consequences and pain are on their way. And to the best of what I can tell, no one is prepared psychologically. Quoth the Raven For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken . Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it . The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro ). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least. Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (...

  Ecology Matters More Than Economy An evolutionary perspective on modern economics. Written by Martin Štěpán. My interest as of late has been in the dubious assumptions of mainstream economics. As far as I can tell, the entire job of economists is to figure out ways to maximise some measure that is supposedly good in itself, while ignoring more fundamental human needs. It’s not that I see nothing valid in the field; it’s that practically all economists carry some ideological premises with them—almost invariably liberal, universalist and utilitarian. Even Marxism is basically just a liberal heresy that never disagreed with those premises. Here I want to address specifically how economics runs afoul of evolutionary biology. The first issue is: what is the economy actually for? Most economists believe it’s ultimately for satisfying people’s preferences. But they often treat preferences in a naïve or frankly bizarre way. Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy devised a theory of “rational add...