Roman Atwood?

What a load of bollocks.

TPP and TTIP are fine. Enough with the scaremongering.

What is your opinion on the inconsistencies in economics?

I'm no expert myself, but financial / tax / economic law has been a big part of my education. One of the few things that has always struck me is how inconsistent it is. By that I am refering to the many different schools and economists disagreeing on pretty fundamental things. There are dozens of extremely intelligent and highly educated people with a very good understanding of economics coming to completely opposite conclusions.

One of the cases where this is very apparent is how people criticise institutions (IMF, ECB...) for making terrible choices. I am not defending these institutions one bit, but they are some of the most renowned economic facilities in the world. The people working there are among the best in their field, having spent decades of their life getting an excellent education and a ton of practical experience, yet I've seen you criticise these people who combined have more experience with and insight in economics than we could ever dream of having. Yet all of this aside, I have seen people criticising them and going as far as calling these institutions absolutely moronic for making a certain choice.

I know I'm doing a terrible job at putting this into words, but I hope my point is still somewhat clear.

The problem isn't with the economics, per se, it's how it translates into policy. Economics is an incredibly complex subject, of course, and most economists are probably wrong about something; the more I learn, myself, the more I find myself drifting to the "centre" of the economic debate.

I don't want to denigrate the existing consensus on a number of issues in economics, and we shouldn't forget just how much most economists agree on--you can pick up an intro textbook from Cowen and one from Krugman and they'd say pretty much exactly the same thing, despite the fact one is neoclassical and one is essentially Keynesian. However, it's still a developing subject. There are innumerable variables to track, which can lead otherwise intelligent people like John Taylor to make claims like money was too easy in 2008, and he says this because he's looking at interest rates. There are myriad reasons why you shouldn't look at interest rates to judge monetary policy, yet economists often do because various models like the IS-LM lead towards such a bias. Using interest rates can be useful, because then you're quicker to realise whether or not you've entered a liquidity trap. . . That is, if you think liquidity traps matter.

And that's what disagreements usually come down to: trying to interpret the wealth of empirical data resulting in innumerable variables. But like I say, that doesn't mean economists don't make progress; we know where Keynes went wrong, we know where Friedman went wrong, we know where most economists have historically gone wrong.

I also think the extent to which there are "schools" in economics is exaggerated greatly. Certain pop "economists" like Ha-Joon Chang like to politicise the field and say economics is split and divided and they throw in all these neat little categories, despite the fact you could make a model with neoclassical, Keynesian, monetarist and Schumpeterian elements if you so desired. It also depends on the time-horizon you adopt; I, personally, think the business cycle in the short-term corresponds fairly well with some kind of Keynesian model, whereas the medium term is dominated by the real business cycle and then when you reach long-term considerations you enter the world of Solow. There are disagreements about whether or not this is the case, but the disagreements probably aren't as paradigm-breaking as you'd imagine.

When it comes to specific institutions like the ECB, then there's a much simpler explanation. There's a certain political 'ethos' that comes with being a central bank; just look at the pressure on the Fed at the moment from Republicans, despite the fact that the Fed has conducted counter-cyclical monetary policy practically by the book. The problem with the ECB specifically is that the German Bundesbank wields significant influence; not only are there historical issues around inflation in Germany, but there are also "ideological" ones as the Bundesbank is primarily what you might call "Orthodox Monetarist". I can't really tell you why this is the case, but the kind of fear this instils of inflation has been the reason why the ECB has been so loathe to conduct desperately-needed measures like QE.

A good example of this ethos is the way Ben Bernanke basically admitted after leaving the Fed that he could've done more. But while being chair he simply couldn't say things like that; political pressure stopped him from doing what he could've done, and stopped him from speaking out against it.

Hopefully that's coherent enough for you; if you have any other specific examples I'll try to explain them as best I can.

I raped my dog.

like, he thought I was his friend

Jesus, even I feel bad for him.

that's exactly what they did. they said the 14th amendment doesn't support banning gay marriage.

Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhh.

Yeah, ignore me, I'm an idiot.

so they're gonna make it that way, you donut

The job of SCOTUS is to interpret the constitution, not add bits in.

Actually, no, I do give a fuck insofar as the Supreme Court is over-stepping in boundaries here. I'm fairly certain there is no "constitutional right to marriage".

I don't care.

1pm Eastern Time. And questions about Monsanto's business practices are allowed.

"Cockpriests".

I'm stealing that.

bungle

yeah i know





































































































































































IT'S DUSTIN.SHIT

Fuck off, Dustin.

it'll involve distribution of wealth

and the word "ought"

Sounds like you're asking me what I think the distribution of wealth ought to be. I'm going to talk about the distribution of income/consumption, however, simply because it's easier.

Basically, the distribution of income earned from labour should broadly be what the market dictates it ought to be. When W=MPL, it's a productive system. That isn't to say the labour market is perfect; it's far from perfect, you need a whole different paradigm when you're talking about labour compared to pretty much any other microeconomic market. Since earned income at the bottom rungs of society can sometimes be inadequate to finance some basic level of consumption, and since there's usually a significant lag between people going from unemployment to employment (you really need some kind of supply/match model, instead of a supply/demand model, for the labour market), then the minimum wage ought to be abolished and anybody earning zero income should be given a guaranteed minimum income by the government.

Whereas people earning something below an appropriate benchmark would be given a subsidy of some level of the difference between their wage and the benchmark; essentially a wage "top up".

Given current projections of technology and wealth, will my hypothetical grandchildren see the ushering in of a post-scarcity society?

I highly, highly doubt it.