A convincing big-picture overview from SoBL:

The Russians and Chinese have slowly been building the infrastructure for a non-dollar system as well as amassing gold. The tough thing is selling this system to others. Couching it in terms immediately for an end to the Ukrainian problem, which anyone in the know started the moment the Ukrainians wanted to sign one deal with the Russians, allows it to frame the Russians and unaligned nations as victims of US foreign policy aggression. This is a pretty easy sell to a world that has seen the US move from missionaries a century ago to airborne robots that bomb supposed targets today. It can also be an easy sell to big players in the dollar recycling system like the Saudis.

Unreported by big US media as Secretary of State John Kerry flew around the Middle East being rebuffed and insulted, Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov visited the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to discuss the Middle East. The Saudis asked Bandar to step down recently, and this rapprochement between Russia and the Saudis feels light years away from Bandar’s threats to Putin last summer. To be a fly on the wall for Lavrov’s visit. This is after al-Faisal visited Sochi on June 3rd to meet with Lavrov and Putin. The Saudis spoke of a need to maintain the territorial integrity of Syria and the integrity of Iraq as a peoples. The Saudis could be more concerned with their regime stability now and do not trust the US. They are not a homogenous nation and witnessed what the US did with the Arab Spring. The Russians (and Chinese) might be able to offer the type of security the regime wants. Keep in mind the Saudis sent billions to the Egyptian military junta and the Russians are making friendly with them while the US still chastises the military leaders for being harsh with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Adam Gurri on Diane Coyle’s new book GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History:

One thing I personally came away from Coyle’s book with is the feeling that NGDP targeting and similar notions are probably a bad bet. Depending on what particular recipe has been agreed upon for calculating GDP, policy can easily end up optimizing to very unproductive ends. For example, Coyle mentions how changes in the recipe ended up far overstating the financial sector’s component. The larger the component of GDP the financial sector makes up, the more likely the government is to bail out big firms to prevent a big collapse — after all, the further headline GDP falls quarter over quarter, the more incumbent politicians sweat about losing their seats.

This blog has already dismissed macroeconomic aggregates as politicized ‘garbage‘ — so I agree.

It’s hard to tell from this short review whether Gurri sees the search for “a better proxy for welfare” as worthwhile or hopelessly Quixotic. Regardless, with utilitarian distractions firmly side-lined, it would be intrinsically valuable to arrive at a realistic measure of economic performance (i.e. improvement in productive capability), to provide guidance for systemic auto-correction. It’s well worth recalling how radically inadequate GDP is for this function.

ADDED: Related conundrums raised in James K. Galbraith’s review of Piketty — measuring capital is difficult.

ADDED: Scott Sumner vs Larry Summers (not an agonizing choice). This is good: “I’m a right wing liberal because I have a counterintuitive view of the world …”

ADDED: Scrap the CPI.

At news aggregator Real Clear World, Frank Ching’s recent article comparing the economic performance of the earth’s two demographic giants was given the tantalizing headline Why India Keeps Falling Behind China. There’s no sign of the “Why?” at the original, published in Taiwan’s China Post. No surprise there.

As Ching notes:

While India and China are both being hailed as rapidly developing emerging markets, the gap between the two countries is widening with India being left behind as China continues to power ahead. China’s growth in 2013 was 7.7 percent while that of India hit a low for the decade of 4.5 percent in the 2012-13 fiscal year.

Despite being positioned for catch-up (i.e. being far poorer), India simply doesn’t grow as fast as China. “The average estimated productivity growth rate of China (5.9%) is more than double that of India (2.4%).” India hasn’t matched Chinese growth rates in any single year since the end of the Mao-era in the late 1970s, even after launching its own much-heralded market-oriented economic reform program in the early 1990s. Despite pulling itself from the dismal 3% “Hindu” growth rate, which was roughly doubled to a 5-6% range, China’s average 9.8% growth rate, sustained over three decades, has remained far out of reach.

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First thing: “Meta-Neocameralism” isn’t anything new, and it certainly isn’t anything post-Moldbuggian. It’s no more than Neocameralism apprehended in its most abstract features, through the coining of a provisional and dispensable term. (It allows for an acronym that doesn’t lead to confusions with North Carolina, while encouraging quite different confusions, which I’m pretending not to notice.)

Locally (to this blog), the “meta-” is the mark of a prolegomenon*, to a disciplined discussion of Neocameralism which has later to take place. Its abstraction is introductory, in accordance with something that is yet to be re-started, or re-animated, in detail. (For existing detail, outside the Moldbug canon itself, look here.)

The excellent comment thread here provides at least a couple of crucial clues:

nydwracu (23/03/2014 at 6:47 pm): Neocameralism doesn’t answer questions like that [on the specifics of social organization]; instead, it’s a mechanism for answering questions like that. … You can ask, “is Coke considered better than RC Cola?”, or you can institute capitalism and find out. You can ask, “are ethno-nationalist states considered better than mixed states?”, or you can institute the patchwork and find out. …

RiverC (23/03/2014 at 3:44 am): Neo-cameralism is, if viewed in this light, a ‘political system system’, it is not a political system but a system for implementing political systems. Of course the same guy who came up with it also invented an operating system (a system for implementing software systems.)

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Garett Jones on the Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility Theorem:

Why isn’t Chamley-Judd more central to economic discussion? Why isn’t it part of the canon that all economists breathe in? Why isn’t it in our freshman textbooks? Part of the reason is surely mood affiliation — it’s an uncomfortable result for some to talk about as evidenced by the handwringing I see in most textbook treatments (exception here, big PDF, p.451). The result can’t be waved away as driven by absurd assumptions: It’s not too fragile, it’s too solid. It’s OK to teach Real Business Cycles since we all know (or “know”) that the Federal Reserve and aggregate demand really drive things in the short run. But to tell people that if we care about the long run, the tax on capital income — on interest, profits, dividends — should be zero? And to have only “exotic” counterarguments? Let’s just leave that for the more advanced courses …

(Thanks to Jim for the pointer. “The Chamley-Judd Redistribution Impossibility theorem is economists admitting Ayn Rand was right while trying to sound as if they are not admitting it.”)

“The economists are right about economics but there’s more to life than economics” Nydwracu tweets, with quote marks already attached. Whether economists are right about economics very much depends upon the economists, and those that are most right are those who make least claim to comprehension, but that is another topic than the one to be pursued in this post. It’s the second part of the sentence that matters here and now. The guiding question: Can the economic sphere be rigorously delimited, and thus superseded, by moral-political reason (and associated social institutions)?

It is already to court misunderstanding to pursue this question in terms of ‘economics’, which is (for profound historical reasons) dominated by macroeconomics — i.e. an intellectual project oriented to the facilitation of political control over the economy.  In this regard, the techno-commercial thread of Neoreaction is distinctively characterized by a radical aversion to economics, as the predictable complement of its attachment to the uncontrolled (or laissez-faire) economy. It is not economics that is the primary object of controversy, but capitalism — the free, autonomous, or non-transcended economy.

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Two centuries of US monetary stewardship charted @ ZH:

Click image to enlarge.

Red line is the CPI.
Blue line is the USD / Swiss Franc exchange rate.

History never repeats itself, but it rhymes, runs the suggestive aphorism (falsely?) attributed to Mark Twain.

James Delingpole writes in the Daily Telegraph:

… have you ever tried reading private journals or newspapers from the 1930s? What will surprise you is that right to the very last minute – up to the moment indeed when war actually broke – even the most insightful and informed commentators and writers clung on to the delusion that things would somehow turn out all right. I do hope that history is not about to repeat itself. Unfortunately, the lesson from history is that all too often it does. 

There’s quite a lot of this about.

For one theoretical account of how history might rhyme, on an ominous 80-year cycle, there’s a generational model that sets the beat. “Strauss & Howe have established that history can be broken down into 80 to 100 year Saeculums that consist of four turnings: The High, The Awakening, The Unraveling, and the Crisis.” From a philosophical point of view, it seems a little under-powered, but its empirical plausibility rises by the month.

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A protracted to-and-fro on Twitter with Michael Anissimov has exposed some deliciously ragged and bleeding faultlines in the Neoreaction on the question of capitalism. There were a number of parties involved, but I’m focusing on Anissimov because his position and mine are so strongly polarized on key issues, and especially this one (the status of market-oriented economism). If we were isolated as a dyad, it’s not easy to see anybody finding a strong common root (pity @klintron). It’s only the linkages of ‘family resemblance’ through Moldbug that binds us together, and we each depart from Unqualified Reservations with comparable infidelity, but in exactly opposite directions. (As a fragmentationist, this fissional syndrome is something I strongly appreciate.)

Moldbug’s Neocameralism is a Janus-faced construction. In one direction, it represents a return to monarchical government, whilst in the other it consummates libertarianism by subsuming government into an economic mechanism. A ‘Moldbuggian’ inspiration, therefore, is not an unambiguous thing. Insofar as ‘Neoreaction’ designates this inspiration, it flees Cathedral teleology in (at least) two very different directions — which quite quickly seem profoundly incompatible. In the absence of a secessionist meta-context, in which such differences can be absorbed as geographically-fragmented socio-political variation, their raw inconsistency is almost certainly insurmountable.

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At the point where people have begun to talk about “a positive Black Death effect” do they realize how far they’ve descended into the shadows? The hard-core horror of Malthusian analysis always has some new depths to fathom.

The idea that European living standards rose following the ‘relief’ from Malthusian pressure gifted by bubonic plague is far from new. It is even something approaching an uncontroversial fact of economic history. To take an additional step, however, and attribute the rise of the West to its mid-14th century epidemic devastation, is to wander into unexplored tracts of icy misanthropy. Europe was lucky enough to have enough people die.

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