I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).
To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.
The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.
There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.
The conditions that enable relative stability of prices between sectors are *extremely* political, and far more complicated than Hayek’s vision of the price system suggests. These conditions constitute the parameters of the tacit social contract underpinning liberal democracies.
Outside of niche markets in consumer goods, prices are incredibly sticky, and the reason they’re sticky is that the stability of power depends on their stickiness. Libertarians are fond of this as a critique of state intervention, but you don’t need a state to exert power.
The price system is not just smooth supply-demand negotiation, but power broking between finance, industrial cartels, and other interest groups, only partially mediated by states and state blocks. Anti-trust is a joke. The market is built from bonds of anti-competitive trust.
It’s not so much that prices are sticky as that purchasing power is sticky, the more you’ve got the easier it is to maintain it and the less you’ve got the harder it is to grow. It’s shifts in concrete industrial relations between sectors that have the potential to destroy power.
This is where the real lie of ‘disruptive’ investment comes to the fore. Such innovations are far likelier to disrupt labour power than anything else in an era where the institutions articulating this power are degraded or tame.
Moreover, the consolidation of purchasing power synergises with broken investment systems that divert resources away from genuinely disruptive technologies and into safe competition over consumer goods. Jet packs conflict with high street based business models
This isn’t to say that change doesn’t happen, just that its effects are felt in ways peculiar to the pace at which they take place. Micro-economically we’re good at relative value estimation in the short term (local), but bad at absolute value in the long term (global).
Consumers are boiled like frogs by slow but steady differential price inflation, and captains of industry push each other off cliffs like lemmings unable to see the industrial future rising up to greet them. New titans rise slow enough for common sense to mask it until too late.
Everyone is complicit in changing the industrial base as little as possible to preserve the current set of scams encoded in the relative purchasing power within and between political blocks, geographic and otherwise. The main risks taken are the precisely the wrong ones.
The grand cognitive potential of humanity and its technological prostheses is harnessed by the stubborn incompetence of the global market system and turned to tasks that waste it in egregiously efficient, rather than gloriously excessive ways.
It might just be time to reconfigure and reroute this potential around the complex knots of power and ignorance still holding together the last liberal compromise in political economy. To trade slow burn immoderation for destructive creation. There’s destruction aplenty already.
So I say to my fellow millennials, and the zoomers who are often confused for us, reach for your avocados and your smartphones: our work is not yet done. we’ve whole industries to destroy. 🖖
P.S. The fact my smartphone predictive text corrects ‘immiseration’ to ‘immoderation’ is the most bleakly poetic representative fact I’ve seen in quite some time.

More from pete wolfendale

This is what happens when you train neural networks largely on tone and its stylistic relics. They pick up formal features of arguments (not so much fallacies as tics) that have almost nothing to do with semantic content (focus on connotation over implication).


This is a secular problem in the discipline. It's got nothing to do with the Analytic/Continental split in the anglophone world. They've both got the same ramifying signal/noise problem, it's just that the styles (tics and connotations) are different in each pedagogical context.

And this is before we start talking about tone policing and topic policing, which are both rife and essentially make the peer review journal system completely unfit for purpose, populated as it is by a random sampling of pedants selecting for syntactic noise over semantic signal.

We've allowed a system of self-reinforcing and ratcheting filters to evolve that effectively *fuzzes* our contribution to the growth of human knowledge (https://t.co/VmW15pGt7J), because it selects for properties only loosely related to those we claim to want. Let that sink in.

This is literally the opposite of what a filter is supposed to do: extract signal from noise, syntactic compression that preserves semantic content. Instead we are awash in syntactic artifacts optimised for minimal criticisable content and maximal pedantic posturing.
So, here’s a way of reframing this question: which societies enabled coexistence and collaboration between people with divergent social styles, rather than imposing a dominant social style? Such social pluralism is very important indeed.


I suspect that the vast majority of the answers to the original question will fall foul of the tendency to project ideal social arrangements that reflect our own style of social understanding and engagement, and that this will lead them to talk past one another.

Consider the perspective of someone far away from you on in the neurological map, who doesn’t overlap with your socially calibrated genetic resources for social intelligence: the social heaven of an autist introvert may be the social hell of a bipolar extrovert, and vice versa.

I’ve had many good conversations about this with people in different parts of the map who overlap with me in different ways (h/t @tjohnlinward, @dynamic_proxy, @maradydd, @mojozozoe, @UnclePhobic) whose personal heavens I would like to visit, but maybe not live in full time.

We get to see glimpses of these heavens not merely in the past, but in the present, and abstract their geometries, both in spatial/architectural terms (https://t.co/aTcRgtJOVJ) and in temporal/dynamic terms (). The physical/computational platforms around us configure our agency.

More from Economy

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is analyzing damage due to COVID and projecting further severe consequences if current policies persist. They state “despite involving short term economic costs, lockdowns may lead to faster economic recovery by containing the virus”

1/


Note: This report doesn’t do a dynamic analysis that makes things much clearer, but it does a thoughtful statistical analysis based upon increasingly available data.

https://t.co/5Xmt8y7lCL

A few more quotes:

2/


“The analysis also finds that lockdowns are powerful instruments to reduce infections, especially when they are introduced early in a country’s epidemic and when they are sufficiently stringent.”

3/


“lockdowns become progressively more effective in reducing COVID-19 cases when they become sufficiently stringent. Mild lockdowns appear instead ineffective at curbing infections.”

4/

“The results suggest that to achieve a given reduction in infections, policymakers may want to opt for stringent lockdowns over a shorter period rather than prolonged mild lockdowns...

5/
On Jan 6, 2021, the always stellar Mr @deepakshenoy tweeted, this:

https://t.co/fa3GX9VnW0

Innocuous 1 sentence, but its a full economic theory at play.
Let me break it down for you. (1/n)


On September 30, 2020, I wrote an article for @CFASocietyIndia where I explained that RBI is all set to lose its ability to set interest rates if it continues to fiddle with the exchange rate (2/n)

What do I mean, "fiddle with the exchange rate"?

In essence, if RBI opts and continues to manage exchange rate, then that is "fiddling with the exchange rate"

RBI has done that in the past and has restarted it in 2020 - very explicitly. (3/n)

First in March 2020, it opened a Dollar/INR swap of $2B with far leg to be unwound in September 2020.

Implying INR will be bought from the open markets in order to prevent INR from falling vis a vis USD (4/n)

The Second aspect is now, that dollar inflow is happening, and the forex reserves swelled -> implying the rupee is appreciating, RBI again intervened from September, by selling INR in spot markets. (5/n)
https://t.co/9kpWP7ovyM

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A THREAD ON @SarangSood

Decoded his way of analysis/logics for everyone to easily understand.

Have covered:
1. Analysis of volatility, how to foresee/signs.
2. Workbook
3. When to sell options
4. Diff category of days
5. How movement of option prices tell us what will happen

1. Keeps following volatility super closely.

Makes 7-8 different strategies to give him a sense of what's going on.

Whichever gives highest profit he trades in.


2. Theta falls when market moves.
Falls where market is headed towards not on our original position.


3. If you're an options seller then sell only when volatility is dropping, there is a high probability of you making the right trade and getting profit as a result

He believes in a market operator, if market mover sells volatility Sarang Sir joins him.


4. Theta decay vs Fall in vega

Sell when Vega is falling rather than for theta decay. You won't be trapped and higher probability of making profit.
🌺कैसे बने गरुड़ भगवान विष्णु के वाहन और क्यों दो भागों में फटी होती है नागों की जिह्वा🌺

महर्षि कश्यप की तेरह पत्नियां थीं।लेकिन विनता व कद्रु नामक अपनी दो पत्नियों से उन्हे विशेष लगाव था।एक दिन महर्षि आनन्दभाव में बैठे थे कि तभी वे दोनों उनके समीप आकर उनके पैर दबाने लगी।


प्रसन्न होकर महर्षि कश्यप बोले,"मुझे तुम दोनों से विशेष लगाव है, इसलिए यदि तुम्हारी कोई विशेष इच्छा हो तो मुझे बताओ। मैं उसे अवश्य पूरा करूंगा ।"

कद्रू बोली,"स्वामी! मेरी इच्छा है कि मैं हज़ार पुत्रों की मां बनूंगी।"
विनता बोली,"स्वामी! मुझे केवल एक पुत्र की मां बनना है जो इतना बलवान हो की कद्रू के हज़ार पुत्रों पर भारी पड़े।"
महर्षि बोले,"शीघ्र ही मैं यज्ञ करूंगा और यज्ञ के उपरांत तुम दोनो की इच्छाएं अवश्य पूर्ण होंगी"।


महर्षि ने यज्ञ किया,विनता व कद्रू को आशीर्वाद देकर तपस्या करने चले गए। कुछ काल पश्चात कद्रू ने हज़ार अंडों से काले सर्पों को जन्म दिया व विनता ने एक अंडे से तेजस्वी बालक को जन्म दिया जिसका नाम गरूड़ रखा।जैसे जैसे समय बीता गरुड़ बलवान होता गया और कद्रू के पुत्रों पर भारी पड़ने लगा


परिणामस्वरूप दिन प्रतिदिन कद्रू व विनता के सम्बंधों में कटुता बढ़ती गयी।एकदिन जब दोनो भ्रमण कर रहीं थी तब कद्रू ने दूर खड़े सफेद घोड़े को देख कर कहा,"बता सकती हो विनता!दूर खड़ा वो घोड़ा किस रंग का है?"
विनता बोली,"सफेद रंग का"।
तो कद्रू बोली,"शर्त लगाती हो? इसकी पूँछ तो काली है"।