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Articles by Notes OnLiberty
Bitcoin Is ‘Resistance Money’ | AIER
Bitcoin looks different to everyone observing it, a modern parable of the blind men and the elephant. To economists, it looks like inferior money since it doesn’t have a supply response. To regulators, it looks like sneaky attempts to launder money and evade taxes. To the wider public, it looks something like the hideous offspring of financial speculators and technobabbling preppers. Most people therefore ignore it.
Bitcoin Mining and Icelandic Bananas
In a throwaway line of green marketing for her country, Iceland’s Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir told the Financial Times in late March that her island in the mid-Atlantic should use its abundant energy not for bitcoin mining but for… growing corn(!).
Eating The Rich Won’t Feed the Beast
Wealth in a free society is a rough tallying score of how much economic value someone has provided to the rest of us. A rich person’s wealth — bar inheritance and cronyism — is a testament to how much they enriched us. As Johan Norberg writes in The Capitalist Manifesto If anything remains of the revenue when employees, suppliers and lenders have been paid for their efforts, it is called ‘profit’ and we are very angry when it’s a large sum.
How to Rationally Consume News
Twitter’s “Muted Words” function is a godsend. For a long time, every major event that takes place in the world — think wars, elections, politicking — has quickly generated a half-dozen new words that I ask Twitter to block from my view: “Gaza” and “Hamas” are the latest additions; “the Donald” and all versions of “election” have been there for a long time. Because of this, two beneficial things have happened to my use of this information-sharing platform.
How to Rationally Consume News
Twitter’s “Muted Words” function is a godsend. For a long time, every major event that takes place in the world — think wars, elections, politicking — has quickly generated a half-dozen new words that I ask Twitter to block from my view: “Gaza” and “Hamas” are the latest additions; “the Donald” and all versions of “election” have been there for a long time. Because of this, two beneficial things have happened to my use of this information-sharing platform.
Where Does Saifedean Think Money Comes From?
Print In his new book The Fiat Standard, it’s clear that Saifedean Ammous thinks all bad things come from the government. Specifically, everything wrong in American life stems from the money-printing that is under the government’s control. To Saifedean, or Saif as his followers call him, Fiat means something more than a monetary system backed by nothing but a nation state’s promise to steward it well.
Everything Is the Fed’s Fault: A Review of the Fiat Standard
Print St Thomas More, an English statesman and one of the 100 Greatest Britons, is rumored to have said the following on the eve of his execution: Some men say the earth is flat. Some men say the earth is round. But if it is flat, could Parliament make it round? And if it is round, could the King’s command flatten it? This quotation is likely apocryphal, attributed to More only because he seems like the heretical, idealistic, humanist character who would say something like that.
On Price And Output Volatility: How Bad Is Bitcoin’s Flaw?
Added by Mark Caviezel on December 22, 2021. Saved under Finance/Investing, International Tags: AIER, Bitcoin, Flaw, Joakim Book by Joakim Book In the olden days from which our modern economic world sprung, prices were usually long-term stable but short-term unpredictable.
The Five Transitions to Modernity
Print When Vaclav Smil speaks, the educated mind would do well to listen. Or at least read, since he stays out of the chattering limelight – and assuming that you could keep up with one of our time’s most prolific and brilliant researchers.
How Societies Save For an Uncertain Future
Print Last week I wrote about how money is society’s technology for moving value across time. Without defining it more narrowly (which monetary economists do to their heart’s content), money is the technology by which we arrange the division of labor: I do my thing; you do yours; and we can trade the surplus production with one another.
We Pretend to Work and You Pretend to Pay Us
Print Sometimes I dream about revolution. One of those sweeping, all-consuming, ideological changes that brush away the corrupt old and bring in the undefiled new. Anything but this mad chaos, please! Thankfully, I’m not in a position to unleash those changes – and more importantly, I’ve studied enough history to know that revolutions rarely progress as smoothly and beneficially as their proponents intend.
The Bubble That Never Was: Finance’s Definition Problem
Print A seemingly simple question has bothered the discipline of finance for decades: what is a bubble? In a theoretical sense it’s a banal question: if the price of an asset is trading much higher than what it’s actually worth, it’s a bubble; if not, then it isn’t. But who says? It’s not like we can rock up to the Chicago trading pits or the New York Stock Exchange and just observe an “actual” value next to the price, and quickly calculate a bubble ratio.
Fighting Invisible Enemies
Print In a galaxy not so far far away, we used to fight real enemies. Tangible ones, with guns or cannons or bows-and-arrows, who shot back when we invaded their lands or defended our own keeps against their aggressions. In the twenty-first century, many things have changed – most of them, luckily, for the better – but one change is, if not worse, then at least seriously disturbing.
The Inevitable Yo-Yo Ride of Pandemic Fortresses
Print It was always tempting for end-stop places of the world to turn their countries into pandemic maximum-security prisons. The reasoning went something like: the disease spreads between people; we can keep people out; and that protects our population. In some of these countries where geography imbued its people with a false sense of security and insulation, lawmakers tried to close their countries from the dangerous world that lay beyond their literal shores.
What Chess Can Teach Us About Economic Justice
Print I’ve been watching a lot of online chess recently. It has me thinking about the fairness (or injustice) of capitalism: What we earn, what we create, what we individually deserve, and what we think governments ought to do with the profits, gains and wealth that emerge from our work. Playing chess online has long been a thing on platforms like chess.com or lichess.org, and learning resources like Chess24 and Chessable – just to name a few.
The Ignorant World and What to Do About It
Print A spectre is haunting the Western world – the spectre of a grossly mistaken understanding of the world. British kids have nightmares about the climate. Half of French respondents think it likely that climate change will cause “the extinction of the human race.” American teachers coddle students who have panic attacks when wildfires rage somewhere on the planet.
Is Opposing Lockdowns Seditious?
Print The pandemic has revealed and reexposed many fault lines in our societies. On the topic of government power, on lopsided risk assessments, on the religious awakening of secular society, on whether strangers are a source of inspiration and cooperation or a lethal threat, and on science and science communication. Many things were broken before we doubled down with heavy government powers on what we may or may not do.
Playing Fast and Loose with Numbers
Print Journalism is hard. To portray the world accurately to a layman audience without delving into the complexities and nuances of the universe we inhabit, writers must always simplify, explain, and make difficult content relatable for their readers. You can do this well and comprehensively, and you can do it poorly.
An Age of Patronage
Print Edmund Burke, the father of conservatism, once said that patronage was “the tribute which opulence owes to genius.” If you were wealthy, it was your moral obligation to give back to the community – not merely by improving the lot of the poor or renovating your local church but also by supporting artists and intellectuals.
Where New Zealand Goes, the World Goes
Print An event in 1989 shook the world and radically changed how critical institutions operated. No, I’m not talking about the fall of communism and the following disintegration of the Soviet bloc, but of an obscure change of public policy in a land far, far away. While the rest of the world intently looked at the Berlin Wall crumbling, the New Zealand government enacted a seemingly inconsequential law that would change the world’s monetary regimes forever. They might be about to do it again.
MMT’s Inflation Battle Will End In A Draw
Print Charles Goodhart, a brilliant banking historian and professor at the London School of Economics, recently said that “I have never seen a theory so criticized, in theory, and actually followed in practice.” He was talking about MMT, Modern Monetary Theory.
Bitcoin Bros Rediscovering Our Monetary Past
Print All eyes on bitcoin, it seems, as the price hits new all-time-highs, its proponents celebrate, and the economists who have long pronounced it dead and useless scratch their head in confusion (any “bubble” pronouncements as of late?) “The discomforting reality for the early idealists,” wrote Izabella Kaminska, a long-time critic of cryptocurrencies, before the price explosion in recent months, “is that 12 years on, the bitcoin ecosystem has more in common with the incumbent one it was...
What Inapt Pandemic Response Is Doing to Our Societies
Print Ronald Reagan famously said that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” The pandemic, or rather how we and our governments chose to act in 2020, turned that enemy into a blessed savior and projected as the external threat an invisible and ever-lurking disease. Suddenly, old rules no longer applied, and governments rushed in to fill the void showering us with shiny gifts (“More money, more power!”).
The Difference Between Copper and Cucumbers
– February 15, 2021 Reading Time: 6 minutes Print David Attenborough, a well-known BBC film presenter and climate activist, has a fantastic quote about growth and economists. It’s so captivating that I suspect it lays at the foundation for ridiculing every sensible environmental comment by economists.
“Sustainability” Misses the Point
Print It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere – a season when environmental concerns seem most strange. (And no, I’m not talking about cold winters providing evidence against global warming, for they are not: Climate is the long-term sum of volatile short-term weather patterns, patterns that themselves can be extreme from one year to the next without indicating a particular climate direction).
That Mystical Monetary Theory
Print MMT, or Modern Monetary Theory, is on everyone’s lips – and it seems that everyone is keen on this long-obscure idea o f how our public finances really work. In an article in the latest issue of Economic Affairs, I try to condense the argument into four propositions that form the core of MMTers’ understanding of the world. I do this by reviewing Stephanie Kelton’s book from June of last year, Kelton being the most vocal and well-known persona in the field.
Voting with Your Feet
Print If Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy met Bryan Caplan’s Open Borders, the result would be Ilya Somin’s great book from last year: Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. In a dense 186-page book Somin does what these two great scholars did separately over hundreds of pages: undermining voting as the most effectful participation in civic life and showing that arguments against foreigners coming to our shores don’t hold water.
Lockdowns Don’t Prevent Coronavirus Spread
Print Much has been said about the terrifying models that in the spring projected such a staggering number of deaths from the novel coronavirus. In hindsight, as bad as the pandemic has been, it never even approached the dismal numbers suggested ‒ the very numbers that rationalized society-wide lockdowns in Italy, the U.K., New York City, and then in many other places as the pandemic spread. What researchers have struggled with since then is how to measure the impact of various actions taken.
Bitcoin’s Impressive Year in Perspective
Print Bitcoin’s returns are no longer astronomical. At this time last year, the financial press was filled with stories of bitcoin’s outsized returns. The controversial cryptocurrency had been the highest performing asset of the 2010s, by orders of magnitudes besides. CNN reported that its decadal returns were in the millions of percent. Vildana Hajric at Bloomberg kept repeating the 9,000,000% return figure. Crypto Twitter was filled with people celebrating bitcoin’s financial success.
Feelings Over Facts Is Dangerous to Human Liberty
– December 31, 2020 Reading Time: 6 minutes Print What I most clearly remember from the 2016 Presidential Election was a bumper sticker with the enlightened message “Trump 2016: F*** Your Feelings!” Four years later, after a harrowing election and a moralizing society even more at war with itself, this is the message we desperately need. For feelings have conquered the world, at least if we are to believe William Davies’ book Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World.
Oxford’s Stringency Index is Falling Apart
Print Since the pandemic started, the chattering classes ‒ and particularly those of us who have been somewhat skeptical of the policy interventions ‒ have used a chart tool from Our World in Data. This site, run by Oxford researcher Max Roser with a great team of scholars and communicators, is a fantastic tool for visualizing and condensing the world’s scientific data. I use it almost every day.
The Year Populism Was Right and the Experts Weren’t
– December 22, 2020 Reading Time: 5 minutes Print Two thousand and twenty has been an odd year. A year on which more books, unqualified articles, and uninformed opinions will be voiced than possibly any other year in the history of our species. Then again, we all have megaphones of various sizes these days ‒ and access to blogs and Twitter and newsletters and informational overloads such that this year’s informational misuse is not exactly an achievement.
You’re Not Underpaid ‒ But LeBron Is
Print I have a friend who constantly complains about her low pay. All things considered, she’s rather privileged: lives a good and healthy life, in a safe and beautiful country; she’s thinking of buying a house; she controls her own hours (her work is corona proof); she doesn’t have a possessive boss breathing down her neck.
Value Is What I Say It Is
– November 30, 2020 Reading Time: 5 minutes Print As a profession centered around choice, prices, production, information and values, economics is not always particularly good on those topics. As the saying goes, “An economist is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” With the onset of subjective value theory in the late 1800s this ceased to be true ‒ or began to be true, depending on your point of view.
How Bad is Our Social Dilemma?
– November 25, 2020 Reading Time: 6 minutes Print I have spent some time with Tristan Harris lately. Online, of course, and as a passive consumer of his words, delivered to me through popular podcasts and social media recommendations (for example here, here, and here). I’m not the only one, as the new tech documentary The Social Dilemma in which he’s a leading character has been viewed by some .
The Tide-Theory of Climate Change
Print I was watching the tide today and thought of climate change. Yes, they are different phenomena; the tide is predictable, well-known, and reverses itself like clockwork roughly every six hours, whereas climate change is unpredictable, uncertain, and (still) irreversible. Nevertheless, it serves as a relevant illustration of what we are often overlooking in the climate debate. The tide moves continuously; slowly and gradually, not suddenly or surprisingly.
Will Things Ever Go Back To Normal?
Print Early in the pandemic I advised readers to zone out, take a break, and read fiction and other works of art that have stood the test of time. There’s only so much crazy we can deal with and there’s only so much mental benefits to be had from intensively monitoring a pile of political trash. Over a long enough time frame, the madness of 2020 will fade. However awful the damage is now and however many people’s lives are ruined by asinine government policies, the world will recover.
The Obsession with Funders
Print One of many flaws in today’s scientific and political discussion is the emphasis of money. Campaign donations in politics, funding declarations for scientists in academia, concern about from where an NGO receives its donations. It’s as if money rules the roost, that “money makes the world go ‘round.’” It doesn’t in politics, it doesn’t in career choices, and it doesn’t in academia.
The Swedish Bumblebee
Print There is this odd story about bumblebees and flying. You know, these oval, buzzing, funny-looking insects that we often find hovering around our gardens in summer. The story, as I heard it, is that the bumblebee defies the laws of aerodynamics: it shouldn’t be capable of flying with those tiny wings and that monster of a body (for an insect, anyway). Allegedly, it doesn’t generate enough lifting power for its chubby body to take flight.
Brazilians Should Keep Slashing Their Rainforest
Print A couple of news cycles ago – before the corona scare had embraced us all, central banks went mad and governments operated at their worst – trees were briefly all the rage. Ranging from apocalyptic scares for cutting them down to utopian schemes for planting them, the debates over trees hardly ever seemed balanced.
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