(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best economic condition books

yes, but who built the machines? this is why marx says that capitalists fetishize technological innovation.

yes, the idea is that labor is the only commodity available in the market which produces surplus value. Value, in marx, is defined as 'socially necessary labor time.' one should never lose sight of this definition and confuse value with either the money form of capital or which capital sui generis.

also, let us look at the reason why machines do not produce (absolute) surplus value, but only relative surplus value. machines, again, are commodities and as such are available to the market (or at least portions of it). Let us assume a certain business invests in a $25,000 machine which will eliminate several jobs, saving the company $50,000 a year. wow, thats really great, now the company can be more competitive with their pricing or, at the very least, will have a greater surplus this year. but what happens when this company's competitors start investing in these similar machines, and start undercutting our hypothetical company's profit margin. well now we see that the surplus value that the machine created was really only relative to that singular company. over time, as the machine or technological solution (or new organizational structure, or new process, or new space....) becomes the norm of the industry, the surplus value diminishes and it becomes an assumed cost of doing business.

marx again is making a class or macro-economic argument here: he does not care too much about singular capitalists making larger profits (he does in the sense that they are useful for his data on capitalists society), he is concerned with how a class of persons is able to exploit another class. within the capitalist class, yes, some are able to gain a better competitive advantage over other capitalists by being the first to utilize the latest technological achievement; however, that advantage will either spread to the entire industry as a commonplace necessity, or the company will begin to monopolize the industry.

labor as a surplus value producing commodity is useful for the entire capital class over the working class. it is the law of economics in general that labor must produce and it is the only thing capable of turning raw (or semi-raw) materials into use values. it is the law of capitalism that to produce a profit one must hire workers at a salary less than the sum of your revenue.

i would suggest reading some david harvey. he is a contemporary and really does a fantastic job at explaining marxism for the 21st century. i suggest either a companion to marx's capital vol i or the enigma of capital. the former address your question specifically in chapter 6 'relative surplus value'.

let me know if any of this is unclear or if you would like to discuss further. cheers and happy new year comrade.

I think your idea of seeking assistance is an excellent one. Most people don't realize the impact of mental health in tackling intellectually challenging tasks. An athlete knows that to perform well, they must take care of their physical health by working out, controlling diet, etc... Similarly, one with intellectual pursuits need to take care of their mental health, but often they are unfamiliar on how to do so. Sleeping well, eating properly, etc. are very important, and instead of a coach, as in the case of an athlete, counselling services, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc. can help in training for mental health.

Be honest when working with Counselling Services or psychotherapists. If CS hasn't been working well for you, explain to them why you think that is. They will provide you with a list of psychologists / therapists in the area. The University Health Insurance Policy (UHIP) covers 80% of the costs of a psychologist. CS will explain this to you in greater detail.

Other than that, I can recommend a few things to get in better (mental) shape.

• Hit the Gym. Working out is the best all-around fix for every problem in life. Visit /r/fitness and read the starter's list. Before you know it, you'll be sleeping well, feeling energetic and more motivated than you've every been in your life.
  
  
• Read books about things that you like. For example, if you're looking forward to a career in finance, read The Big Short. Also read some books that might help you get motivated. I recommend Talent is Overrated.
  
  
• Continue working with CS or a psychotherapist and get (mentally) fit. Even the faculty and staff at the University also take advantage of these services, because they know its importance.
  
  And remember, this is exactly why you're here in University! This is part of your education, and as you tackle these challenges, you will grow as a person. Good luck!

If I was going to provide someone with a list of books that best expressed my current thinking on the Political Economy these would be my top ones:

1. The Law - While over a century old this books stands as the perfect intro to the ideas of Classical Liberalism. When you understand the core message of this book you understand why people oppose so many aspects of government action.
   
2. Seeing Like A State - The idea that society can be rebuilt from the top down is well demolished in this dense but important read. The concept of Legibility was a game changer for my brain.
   
3. Stubborn Attachments - This books presents a compelling philosophical argument for the importance of economic growth. It's hard to overstate how important getting the balance of economic growth vs other considerations actually is.
   
4. The Breakdown of Nations - A classic text on why the trend toward "bigger" isn't a good thing. While various nits can be picked with this book I think its general thesis is holding up well in our increasingly bifurcated age.
   
5. The Joy of Freedom - Lots of books, many objectively better, could have gone here but this book was my personal pivot point which sent me away from Socialism and towards capitalism. This introduction to "Libertarian Capitalism" is a bit dated now but it was powerful.
   
   There are, of course many more books that could go on this list. But the above list is a good sampling of my personal philosophy of political economy. It is not meant as a list of books to change your mind but simply as a list of books that are descriptive of my current belief that we should be orientated towards high (sustainable) economic growth & more decentralization.
   
   Some honorable mentions:
   
   As a self proclaimed "Libertarian Crunchy Con" I have to add The Quest for Community & Crunchy Cons
   
   The book The Fourth Economy fundamentally changed my professional direction in life.
   
   Anti-Fragile was another book full of mind blowing ideas and shifted my approach to many things.
   
   The End of Jobs is a great combination of The Fourth Economy & Anti-Fragile (among other concepts) into a more real-world useful set of ideas.
   
   Markets Not Capitalism is a powerful reminder that it is not Capitalism per se that is important but the transformational power of markets that need be unleashed.
   
   You will note that I left out pure economic books, this was on purpose. There are tons of good intro to econ type books and any non-trained economist should read a bunch from a bunch of different perspectives. With that said I am currently working my way through the book Choice and if it stays as good as it has started that will probably get added to my core list.
   
   So many more I could I list like The Left, The Right, & The State or The Problem of Political Authority and on it goes...
   I am still looking for a "manifesto" of sorts for the broad movement towards decentralization (I have a few possibilities on my 'to read list') so if you know of any that might fit that description let me know.

Book list:

Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin. The author discusses this same theme of The Great Turning. Argues that people in modern western society are pathologically orientated towards adolescent things, and among our main problems is that few of us mature fully, and few of us can ever be considered elders who guide each other towards a wise way of life. He also argues that we historically have developed equally in both nature and culture, but modern people spend their lives solely in culture, and lack understanding of the natural world.

Future Primal by Louis Herman. The author lays out a big picture view of human history and how the solutions for the future we face can be found in the past among primitive cultures. He links his own personal struggles to the planetary struggles we face, and shows that it is true that the personal and planetary are linked.

The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein. Lays out huamn history, and "how the illusion of a seperate self has led to our modern crisises".

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein. Looks at how primitive economies differed from our own, and how we can come to a different understanding of economics and wealth in our own society.

The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible by Charles Eisenstein. Lays out a vision for what the world could be and how we could organize ourselves in a wiser way.

Limited Wants, Unlimited Means an analysis of the economics of hunter-gatherer societies by an actual Economist. Very in depth look at the different foundational beliefs and practices. This is the most scientific and in depth book I've ever come across on this subject.

Eaarth by Bill McKibben. Goes into great detail on the the stark reality of the effects that climate change have already had and will likely have over the next decades and century. Finsihes by making reccommendations for how to make a life on a rough new planet.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. A look at the deep history of our species. This book presents an understanding about what humans are and where we've come from that I think is hard to get anywhere else, really great work.

Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken. Very similar to the theme of my above post, the author explains how this new movement is much larger than you might think, and could soon become one of the largest cultural movements in all of human history.

Active Hope by Joanna Macy. On "how to deal with the mess we are in without going crazy".

Greening of the Self by Joanna Macy. An exploration into the idea that we are interdependent with the ecology around us.

Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and others. A look at how we can start a green industrial revolution.

The Green Collar Economy by Van Jones. Lays out the idea that one solution- work on constructing a sustainable infrastructure- can fix our two biggest problems: the ecological crisis, and the rampant poverty and inequality in our society.

Spiritual Ecology: the cry of the Earth by Thich Nhat Hanh, Joanna Macy, and others. Outlines a spiritual perspective of what is happening to the world, and how we can remedy it, rooted in Buddhist thought.

Changes in the Land by William Cronon. A look at how the ecology of New England has been altered since Europeans first set foot there.

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. This is one of the classics of nature writing by a great naturalist. I include it here because I think it fits, and shows how much of this in not new thinking. Leopold talks about his experiences in nature and from living off the land, and lays out his own 'land ethic' for how best to coexist in nature.

The Evolving Self: a psychology for the third millennium by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi. Explains the authors view of psychology and how to find meaning in the modern world. Talks about playing an active role in the evolutionary processes of life, and linking that up with your own personal evolution.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimerer. Brings together scientific understanding, indigenous wisdom, and respect for nature and for plants, in a very poetic book.

The Future of Life by E. O. Wilson. Wilson is one of the greatest biologists of our time, and gave us many of the foundational concepts that we use today, such as popularizing the idea of "biodiversity" and the desire to preserve it. Here he talks about the future of life and the challenges we face in preserving the Earths biodiversity.

Half Earth by E.O. Wilson. Here Wilson lays out his strategy for saving the biodiversity of the Earth and preserving it through the hard times it will face in the future, by devoting fully half of the surface of the Earth to wildlife habitats. This book just came out so you might not be able to order a copy yet.

If you know of any other books or media in this sort of genre feel free to post it.

This will be the third such large-scale social transition.

The first was from foraging to agriculture - humans had to transition from hunting game/foraging and working relatively few hours to working the soil and working many hours.

Then the industrial transition describe here.

The lives of agricultural and industrial people look utterly alien to foraging people. (Arguably, the story of genesis is an allegory about the transition to agriculture). For example, from Scott Alexander's review of Empire of the Summer Moon:

> So there was a bit of traffic back and forth between America and Comancheria in the 19th century. White people being captured and raised by Comanches. The captives being recaptured years later and taken back into normal white society. Indians being defeated and settled on reservations and taught to adopt white lifestyles. And throughout the book's description of these events, there was one constant:

>All of the white people who joined Indian tribes loved it and refused to go back to white civilization. All the Indians who joined white civilization hated it and did everything they could to go back to their previous tribal lives.

>There was much to like about tribal life. The men had no jobs except to occasionally hunt some buffalo and if they felt courageous to go to war. The women did have jobs like cooking and preparing buffalo, but they still seemed to be getting off easy compared to the white pioneer women or, for that matter, women today. The whole culture was nomadic, basically riding horses wherever they wanted through the vast open plains without any property or buildings or walls. And everyone was amazingly good at what they did; the Comanche men were probably the best archers and horsemen in the history of history, and even women and children had wilderness survival and tracking skills that put even the best white frontiersmen to shame. It sounds like a life of leisure, strong traditions, excellence, and enjoyment of nature, and it doesn't surprise me that people liked it better than the awful white frontier life of backbreaking farming and endless religious sermons.

However idyllic the word "artisan" seems, it's nowhere near as idyllic as the prospect of living like a foraging person is.

Quoth Robin Hanson from the introduction to The Age of Em:

> Like most of your kind, you probably feel superior to your ancestors. Oh, you don't blame them for learning what they were taught. But you'd shudder to hear of many of your distant farmer ancestors' habits and attitudes on sanitation, sex, marriage, gender, religion, slavery, war, bosses, inequality, nature, conformity, and family obligations. And you'd also shudder to hear of many habits and attitudes of your even more ancient forager ancestors. Yes, you admit that lacking your wealth your ancestors couldn't copy some of you habits. Even so, you tend to think that humanity has learned that your ways are better. That is, you believe in social and moral progress.

> The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants' habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you'd realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite stranger. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants.

(If you want to feel both of these things at once, try reading science fiction written in the '50's)

Point of all this: we can't look to the past as a guide to how we'll be in the future.

Our nation is experiencing nation crippling wealth disparity that the GOP not only would like to ignore, but they actually want to make it much, much worse... as a fix... against all evidence that it would just create more wealth disparity.

Welcome, everyone, we now live in our two-tiered society. They won. If you happen to be born into a wealthy family, you win. College is paid for, connections already made, all you have to do is get out of bed and follow directions. We no longer reward hard work. We no longer offer hope and opportunity to Americans born to those families that need the most hope and opportunity... we simply take all we can from them... to help them! Yay America! We're smart!

I've barely dipped my toes into the huge, complicated history of the USSR, it's fall, or the privatization myself... but here's some good stuff to start with:


-A super quick rundown of the Voucher Privatization program from the NYT, the year it started. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/10/02/world/russians-getting-share-vouchers-but-ruble-falls.html


-An interview with Paul Klebnikov of the London School of Economics. Talking about the ways the voucher program failed, first through honest mistakes, particularly a misplaced urgency to privatize quickly, and then a few years later through cynical/corrupt policy. https://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02jan-feb/jan-feb02interviewklebniko.html


-Rundown of how the Clinton administration and Harvard economists guided the Russian Federation's process of Privatization and an accounting of some of the foreign money flooding into the country. https://www.thenation.com/article/harvard-boys-do-russia/


You can also check out Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. The author is a Russian expat who came back to the country in the early 2000's to help them produce Western style television programming. It's written a bit romantically, feels a bit exaggerated at times, but it describes the modern Russia in all its corrupt glory. Every new quarter of the Trump Presidency the "exaggerations" feel a little less far-fetched. And excerpt:


>The Night Wolves are just one of the many stars of the new Ostankino cast. There are the Cherubims, who dress in all black emblazoned with skulls and crosses, calling to cleanse Russia of moral darkness; the neo-Nazis with MTV dancer bodies who film themselves beating up gay teenagers in the name of patriotism; the whip-wielding Cossacks attacking performance artists on the streets. And all of them are pushed to the center of the screen to appear on trashy talk shows and star in factual entertainment formats, keeping the TV spinning with oohs and aahs about gays and God, Satan and the CIA. Their emergence is not some bottom-up swell; only a tiny number of Russians go to church. Rather, the Kremlin has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great, 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times can become infectious. For when I talk to many of my old colleagues who are still working in the ranks of Russian media or in state corporations, they might laugh off all the Holy Russia stuff as so much PR (because everything is PR!), but their triumphant cynicism in turn means they can be made to feel there are conspiracies everywhere: because if nothing is true and all motives are corrupt and no one is to be trusted, doesn’t it mean that some dark hand must be behind everything?

​

As per my comment above: "...corporations are neither democratically owned or operated, and they operate towards the goal of earning a direct profit for their shareholders, not for wellbeing of their employees or for the members of the communities they serve. They have absolutely nothing to do with democratic politics, and they shouldn't be represented by our government or our constitution. They are not people, they're democratically run by people, and they shouldn't be afforded constitutional rights. And certainly not the right sell me on a candidate."

Corporations are a legal entity of the market; they are sanctioned by the government to operate within the market. That does not mean that they should be granted constitutional rights as a citizen of the United States, afforded with political power or sovereignty. They should not be able to directly align astronomically high levels of economic and political power behind a candidate that is going to thereby directly represent their interests within our own government.

Even in the section you politely bolded for me, you're contradicting yourself: "any one of those rights or privileges is properly decided by applying basic logic, common sense, and relevant and valid law to an examination of generally accepted reasons why the state grants existence to the legal fiction of the corporate form."

Affording corporations, and even unions given that many are now no longer democratically run, the right to amass huge sums of wealth through organizations that are run with top-down hierarchies, absent of any democratic decision making and run at the benefit of a extreme minority violates basic logic and common sense. It literally allows them to purchase the political process, skew your democracy and by extension the rules of the market in their favor, and to eliminate the power and efficacy of your political voice.

As per the CU wiki, which I did read - thank you, for the recommendation: In the case the conservative lobbying group Citizens United wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts in apparent violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act or "BCRA").[2] Section 203 of BCRA defined an "electioneering communication" as a broadcast, cable, or satellite communication that mentioned a candidate within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary, and prohibited such expenditures by corporations and unions. The United States District Court for the District of Columbia held that §203 of BCRA applied and prohibited Citizens United from advertising the film Hillary: The Movie in broadcasts or paying to have it shown on television within 30 days of the 2008 Democratic primaries.[1][3] The Supreme Court reversed this decision, striking down those provisions of BCRA that prohibited corporations (including nonprofit corporations) and unions from making independent expenditures and "electioneering communications".[2] The majority decision overruled Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990) and partially overruled McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003).[4]

Citizens United, as a for-profit corporations, has absolutely no business voicing an opinion or coordinating with political campaigns in our democracy. They're a structure of the market that is only considered with generating profit - they have no priority or responsibility to the interests/health of society, the community, or our nation, they themselves are not democratic entities, and they should not be engaged in the politics of citizens.

As a happy reading recommendation for yourself, you should read "Saving Capitalism: For the Many not the Few" by Robert Reich: http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Capitalism-For-Many-Not/dp/0385350570

Or "Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity" by Joseph Stiglitz:
http://www.amazon.com/Rewriting-Rules-American-Economy-Prosperity/dp/0393254054

Correction: Just double-checked, CU is a non-profit organization. The points above, in reference to for-profit corporations, still stand however.

> Yes, there are laws that can be (ab)used to encourage CEOs to loot the businesses they run. But please keep in mind that they do so because they profit from doing so; before paying the leadership in stocks was the norm, they tended not to, because they saw that this was not in the (longer-term) interest of the business, of the people they worked with, etc.. It's only since roughly the 1980s that this became in vogue.

Right, well if you're going to bring up the past rather than what is current law. Before these anti-competition laws came into practise, you could screw over consumers by making exclusive agreements no problem. See the law of the past doesn't matter now... because the law of the present is all that matters contextually.

> That said, the legal case is really shoddy, because short-term gains almost always come at the cost of longer-term viability (e.g. cutting out R&D, replacing permanent experienced employees with young inexperienced ones, etc.). And legally, equity is the last in line when it comes to bankruptcy proceedings. Yet we now live in a world where people like to pretend that "shareholders" determine everything. Nonsense.

Well sure shareholders don't determine everything, only a certain set of shareholders have real power. At the end of the day though, you can have someone who owns 85% of the stock in a company and yet a CEO can still make a decision against that shareholder's interest. It's just the way things are. Some people like to screw other people over. But usually CEOs like that are either booted out or they face legal ramifications later on. Point is, short terms gains sometimes translate into long term gains or long term losses. It depends on a case by cases basis and the circumstances that come from the decisions.

> If you're interested, I'd really recommend you pick up https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Host-Financial-Parasites-Bondage-ebook/dp/B014IAV9MK/ , because this logic is also eating up Intel, IBM, and hundreds if not thousands of other corporations who are going heavily into debt to pay dividends, at a huge cost to their future profitability, simply because the incentive structure is set up that way. (And NV is doing something similar.)

Sure if I have any spare time from my law degree. I'll give it a read.

It's kind of shame that there aren't more good books out there on these topics. And that a lot of what is out there is shameless self-help-style wankery.

Here's what I'd suggest: Jump straight into good stories about finance, and pick-up the lingo and concepts as you go. Investopedia -- despite the cheesey name -- is a great resource for when you encounter an idea with which you're unfamiliar.

Good stories about finance include:

• Michael Lewis has, to my knowledge, never written a bad book, but Liar's Poker and The Big Short are great places to start.
  
• Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed is a good story about the hubris of hedge funds.
  
• James Stewart's Den of Thieves does a great job of covering the bond market and the white-collar insider-trading scandals of the 1980s. His Disney War is also a great introduction to corporate governance, in addition to being a novel-esque good read.
  
  On a more abstract, less story-based level, you might also look at:
  
  
  
• Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, the precursor to the much-lauded "Black Swan" (and in my opinion, the much superior book).
  
• Bernstein's Against the Gods, which gives a broad (and accessible) tour of how humans throughout history came to understand and build whole markets around probability and risk.
  
  Good luck!

> Wrong. Technically, the bond supplier (fund demander) is losing a bond in the sense that interest that, at the time of the bonds maturity (whenever the funds must be repaid with interest) the bond supplier loses the Face value of the bond plus the interest (which is essentially a loss of a bond in the future).

wrong. There is no guarantee of interest of "other things the bond purchaser could have otherwise bought". It's simply a promise.

The "supplier" doesn't lose them because it implies they were "found" from the start as an asset. It's only an asset once it transfers from promiser to promisee.

The bond supplier doesn't "lose the face value" because it's the one who chose what that 'face value' was to begin with. Otherwise the bond supplier could just assign any "face value" any other amount of promises with no consequence.

Want me to send you an IOU for $57T ? Same principle. I don't "lose the face value" for anything. Like promises are exiting my warehouse.

>The suggestion here would be that lines themselves make graphs invalid so long as the grapher is an idiot.

or that imaginary goods and widgets are unscientific and shouldn't be taken seriously.

>The validity of the graphs?

Correct. When are the graphs you're showing me "Invalid"? Upon what criteria makes for an invalid orientation? Another question is "Why are supply and demand graphs always located in Cartesian Quadrant I when we see negative interest rates"? If "price" is "kinda like an interest rate" per your other posting.

>Yes, you could, but it would be an invalid argument as it is a logical fallacy to base an idea off of an individuals work.

which logical fallacy is it to "base an idea off of a scientific work"? Where is the invalidation logical deduction which says "yep, you just can't look to the moon on May 29th, 1919 to find Beads Einstein predicted"? Which logical fallacy is that?

>To be clear I do not mean to say that the work regarding the idea itself cannot be utilized, only that concurrent works not regarding the idea are insufficient evidence.

right; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. This has nothing to do with logical fallacies or invalid arguments.

> Einstein's work on reativity can be assessed utilizing the information Einstein has provided regarding relativity

No, Einstein's work resulted in a Scientific Formula, properly balancing relative speeds and gravitational effects. One which will be retestable forever and based on disprovable demarcation boundaries. Universal such that anyone on planet earth can reconstruct this equation devoid of introduction to social concepts (such as value, property, taxes, marginal utility) to predict light refraction from a gravitational body.

>believe the model was logical

no, I don't use "logical" models in my vernacular at all.

>The default risk that a bank faces when loaning funds is based solely on the ifnormation granted to them by the bond-supplier's financial standings and financial history.

and the information about what zip code the loan is going to. Oh and the tax rate of that zip code. Oh and the Transunion FICO credit score metrics. oh and the number of children. oh and the last 3 places of employment. oh and the up-to-date utility bills with an electric company. And that electric company's bond rating and street address.

>You continuously make claims without backing them up.

I'm making claims based on the documentation I had to sign in June to buy a house. It takes about 2 hours in a lawyer office where these exact financial history documents are reviewed. For a mortgage loan.

Conversely, you seem to just link to the first google result with as many pop-up ads as possible.

>What do you mean by "when assets take down"

"Toxic Assets and Systematic Leverage". heres an abstract for you I googled note the thing about "far from being competitive". another way to think of it is a "Troubled Assets and Relief Program" where the "Buyer of Last Resort" liquidates these assets.

>t seems to have nothing to do with banking.

this book shows how Barclays, Vanguard, State Street, and other firms' collusion of asset-trading is the norm, and that the "individual firms are gonna compete" is largely a myth at the rich-end of the economic sectors.

>they paid the price as well as the banks they worked with.

yet none of them missed a vacation and will still be able to retire. I'm sure they really learned their lesson and have been forever humbled. Not serious.

>You do understand that delving into personal experiences and history is the opposite of logical assessment.

wasn't for George Boole.

>If you are not willing to believe in studies or data then I suggest you concede.

dude I spiritually conceded like 9 posts ago. You can "win" the internet argument. I'm after knowledge.

>s. You want your theory to be right so bad that you make it right.

What's my theory?

>When an item is cheap, more people buy it. When an item is expensive fewer people buy it.

My shopping experience is similar. The "number of people" is also part of clientele. In retail, clothing that doesn't sell doesn't get burned for the most part, it's offloaded to other vendors.

> I have done the math a million times in undergrad.

I don't doubt it. It seems second nature to you.

>The idea that people only buy based on their "budget room" and do not consider the price of the item itself aside from their ability to purchase is a fairly rudimentary view.

It's more that people are going to get what they need to survive whether or not that plays nice with "supply-and-demand". There is no "rudimentary view" here. Because there is no "forward-thinking" contrary position. People still, in the USA in 2019, are pressured to "live within their means" else they gotta show up in court.

>However, stemming from that, there the calculation of utility and opportunity cost for every individual for every product.

what about economics textbooks marked down on the ? I got a used Economics Statistics book once for $1.25. Clearly I missed out on the difference my money could have made me had I invested that $1.25 in a top performing blue-chip firm.

>Businesses need only calculate this for their own product, but it is good brain-exercise to understand how it works in consumers' minds as well.

again with the mind control. Like we need to keep tabs on habits and use targeted demographic advertising (and coupons!) otherwise it might be (gasp) BAD FOR BUSINESS!!!!! The fucking horror.

> Based on this consumer demand curve, businesses determine their own demand curve for the product derived from wholesale companies who are attempting to maximize their profits from business purchases.

which demand curve puts as many large firms (>8000 people) out of business as fast as possible? asking for a friend. Maybe we can shift and slide this curve to find an optimal price to give the shareholders as convincing as a false-flag as possible, then BAM! the managers go right back to the unemployment line.

For questions 1 and 2.

1. If you are packing the loans into a CDO, they are being sold on the open market. Once it achieves a AAA rating, as most did even though they were mostly subprime, alt a, or arm, it is sold and shipped off the originator's books (While the originator of the CDO collects X% in fees)
   
   Basically how the originator makes their money is by X amount of CDOs they sell. There was no incentive to pick and choose the best borrowers to sell a loan to because how the CDOs were sold they achieved the best rating regardless of the borrowers credit risk.
   
   Due to this model, people are going to try and get as many people into the homes and sell the CDO asap. This caused questionable lending practices to result, NINJA (no income, no job, no assets) loans, manipulating borrowers income, assets, etc.
   
   Things that could be changed to help not have this occur again:
   
   a) Feds monetary policy was pretty meh during this period, due to low interest rates the banks had pretty much an endless supply of money and when all the reasonable ventures dried up they had to explore other opportunities to lend.
   
   b) Ratings agencies need an overhaul in how they receive their commission, preferably they should be being paid by the investor not the person issuing the security. This will help to eliminate the bias that results.
   
   c) Having X% (2-5) remain on the institutions books who created the CDO will help to make them responsibly lend. This is because if they are required to have it remain on their books, they will make better longer term decisions in who to lend to.
   
   I'm pretty sure all of these issues are discussed in Nouriel Roubini's book Crisis Economics
   
   Another Great book already mentioned in this thread is by Michael Lewis The Big Short
   
   If your interested in the European Crisis Michael Lewis also just came out with Boomerang

I appreciate the effort that has gone into this post. It's always good to have accurate facts, and it's good to see the exaggerations of the Left about CEO pay debunked.

There's a book, recently published, that argues that inequality of income/wealth/opportunity as such is not a problem. It's called Equal is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. The whole train of thinking that says economic inequality is bad and equates it with poverty, injustice and economic problems is wrongheaded.

I'm currently reading it, and I highly recommend it. It is a devastating case against the whole way of thinking promulgated by the Left. Many on the right have accepted--to some degree--the basic premise that economic inequality (or inequality of opportunity) is bad and that we should care about minimizing it. Equal is Unfair argues powerfully that we shouldn't care about such inequality at all. What we should care about is freedom and justice. The only type of equality that is compatible with freedom and justice is equality of the protection of rights--that is, equality before the law.

Because people start in unequal circumstances, make unequal choices, and exert unequal amounts of effort, economic inequality (and inequality of opportunity) are inevitable results of freedom. This is reality, and it should be serenely accepted. Those who do well under laissez-faire capitalism, (or in today's society, where cronyism isn't involved) should be celebrated. Life under capitalism is not a zero-sum game, where one person's opportunities and successes come at another's expense. Wealth is not a fixed "pie" to be divided up by "society." Individuals earn wealth by creating wealth and thus improving the lives (and opportunities) of any others who exert any effort to produce wealth, (or produce other values, like the care and raising of children in families.)

Don't worry about the size of economic inequality, or push equality of opportunity as a goal. That's what the Left wants you to do. Read Equal is Unfair.

Not gonna respond point by point (@ work), and I don't have the book in my hands, but the short response to this is that Smith and others were pre-capitalist figures. They simply weren't around to witness the birth of the mega corporation, the financialization of the economy, the rise of the 'shareholder revolution', etc. The kind of wealth and power that now exists was not comparable in 18th century England. It doesn't take much reading of their work to realize they would have detested these aspects of the modern economy. Do you really think classical figures like Smith, Locke, et al would be supportive of massive deregulation of derivatives and the shuffling around of collateralized debt obligations? Take a deep look at Paul Ryan's budgets and the GOP agenda and you'll see that these are the types of policies - the complete elimination of Dodd-Frank, for one - that arise from the modern conservative worldview, which has been extensively polluted by big money and corporate power over the past 40 years. None of this is to even mention the views that came out of the Enlightenment about science and reason. Smith would shudder at the anti-intellectual, anti-science worldview that now dominates the GOP, from Trump and Ryan on down.

I disagree with Chomsky about a lot, but he's actually very good on this topic, and is the one who inspired me to read Wealth of Nations and Moral Sentiments in the first place. You can find some of his thoughts here. Apologies if referencing this to you is "not how arguments work".

I don't understand your pedantry about pointing to Dark Money as a good resource. It takes 2 seconds to read a summary. She goes into scrupulous detail about how the ideas associated with classical liberalism like small government, liberty, etc have been twisted and distorted by big money interests to serve their own agenda. In short, clamoring about the hatred of "big" government is very convenient for people like the Koch brothers who don't want any watchful eyes on them as they pollute the environment and destroy the world.

Maybe we're speaking at cross-purposes to some degree, but my point is that Ryan can only be considered a classical liberal based on a very narrow and cartoonish version of that school of thought. To reduce it to "minimal government" and the "liberty of the individual" is to ignore the larger body of work that really constitutes classical liberalism. The term is now so devoid of all meaning (thanks to people like Rubin and others) that it's historic, pre-capitalist roots now mean nothing. If you actually know the history, it's sort of laughable to describe someone like Ryan like that in my view.

Some more great reads (again, sorry?) are American Amnesia, which dives into anti government ideology in more detail as well, and Saving Capitalism by Robert Reich, who writes about how the idea of a free market in today's economy is a myth.

edited for clarity

Great question - my preferred “leftist” system - social democracy/welfare capitalism with a strong public sector.

Pretty much every important component in an iPhone - touchscreens, internet, search engine algorithms, GPS, microchips, computer memory, would not have been possible without government investment in basic and advanced research. No federal government funding the universities and government organizations conducting this research, no iPhones.

There are multiple examples of the public sector creating or fueling a new markets and future offshoots of innovation.

The problem with leaving innovation to the private sector is that it will usually only invest in things that are obviously able to be monetized. Basic and advanced research, which is absolutely necessary to innovate across a wide range of disciplines, - technology, medicine, transportation, etc - is not something that the private sector is good at because the way to profit from it isn't readily apparent.

Let's take Elon Musk launching a car into space. The technological know-how in order to safely launch and return something from space was done by governments in different countries funding their space programs, like NASA in the U.S. No NASA no Elon Musk launching cars.

The problem with this subreddit is that it sees the public sector vs the private sector as a zero sum game. A strong entrepreneurial public sector creates innovations and markets that the private sector can run with.

If you're serious about having a deeper understanding of this question, pick up the following:

This Financial Times Book of the Year

And this one by a political scientist working out of Yale.

Or, at the very least, read reviews of the books.

Note that Drexler who coined the phrase, doesn't believe in the nanobot-goo scenario any more. He does believe in desktop-scale machines that can replicate themselves, though.

Larger scale self replicating systems are a bit more likely, since they don't depend on nanotech. Instead they are just what happens when you automate the industrial economy from beginning to end (then, optionally, cut out the bits that aren't essential to replicating). Once you get that snake swallowing its tail, you have a self replicating system.

In Robin Hanson's Age of Em he says the duplication time for normal machine shop type machinery is about 1-3 months. Compared to the current doubling rate of robots (about 6 years) that's quite fast. The economy as a whole seems to currently double more slowly still, probably because of the many tasks still done by humans.

In any case, a space based replicating swarm could be a very beneficial thing to humanity, and would work a heck of a lot more efficiently for getting us an off planet foothold than if you manufacture everything on the ground and launch it, even at SpaceX reduced prices. We would want to program very strict safeguards to prevent it from becoming uncontrolled (and hence grey goo), but there are some pretty solid cryptographic approaches to that. We aren't talking about an exact equivalent to protein based viruses and bacteria here, but a digital copying mechanism (which we know can be stabilized with checksums and hashes -- that's what our computers do, particularly when transmitting via the internet).

The main source of material would probably be the asteroids (near-earth ones initially). For some of the high tech components that don't weigh very much, like computer chips, we would (at first) rely on payloads of a few tons at a time launched from earth. Also, shortcomings in the AI could be met by having human teleoperators control the robots directly from earth. This would favor keeping the swarm (or at least, the more complicated parts of it) in near-earth orbits such as LEO, MEO, and GEO, where there are short time delays for communications.

As the AI improves and the swarm grows, and/or as humans form colonies in space, swarms could be deployed to large materials/energy sources further away. It has been suggested that we could use mass from Mercury to form a solar power collection swarm surrounding the entire Sun, for example. (Nearer the sun, power collection apparatus tends to be more efficient, so the bulk of the swarm may end up being positioned at Mercury distance or closer.) The time needed to fully surround the sun would only be a few decades if the doubling rate is a year or less.

So here you can see where people start turning into wild-eyed singularitarians. Once you accept that factories can be fully automated and that industrial processes can be adapted to space, a huge upcoming leap in material processing capacity -- and computational processing as a result -- starts to look kind of inevitable.

I'm not aware of a whole lot of books specifically about accounting, but here are a few recommendations of books about finance, economics, business or that I just think might appeal to /r/accounting.

Anything by Michael Lewis. Liar's Poker has been mentioned elsewhere, but The Big Short is excellent as well.

Ben Mezrich has written some good books about business, but not really accounting specifically. He's most famous for The Accidental Billionaires which is about Facebook (I believe it, along with The Facebook Effect were the main sources for the movie The Social Network) and Bringing Down the House which was about the MIT card counting team and inspiration for the movie 21. You might be interested in Ugly Americans or Rigged though.

Here's a few more that are a little less fiction-y:

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Traders, Guns and Money by Satyajit Das

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay

Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) by William Poundstone

EDIT: Now with links!

That book? nothing but scaremongering. returning to the gold standard? what a crock of shit. Tell me, what is the difference between gold and fiat currency? can you eat gold? can you live in it? can you burn it? Anything useful? no, you can't. Fiat currency works fine as long as their is a perceived value, much like the gold standard, but with the ability to print more to match growth, and to control inflation.

boom and busts existed long before the creation of the federal reserve, hell, the idea of a federal reserve system isn't purely american, the The Bank of England pre-dates the american one by several hundred years, so idea isn't new and it has been tested out before hand, with great success. Probably something about the Rothschilds in their, wouldn't be surprised if it their was a mention of them. Do you have any idea what the Fed does by any chance? You know what they do?

1. they release US t-bills, sovereign debt, in an attempt to balance the BOP (balance of payments)
   
   
2. they set inflationary goals that they try to meet.
   
   
3. they provide economic data.
   
   
4. they provide short term lending to banks, as a way of injecting cash in to the economy ( i stress the term loan, they arn't giving away the cash)
   
   
5. they attempt to catch bubbles and collapsing banks before they get out of hand.
   
   
   please, read these, they are wonderful reads and provide the bases to understanding economics and public financing.
   
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Wealth-Nations-Adam-Smith/dp/161382081X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335219858&sr=1-1
   
   http://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Employment-Interest-Money/dp/1467934925/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335219936&sr=1-1
   
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Ascent-Money-Financial-History/dp/0143116177/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335220011&sr=1-1

You've probably seen the movie, but The Smartest Guys in the Room book is a cracking read. I was engrossed the entire time by how fucked up Enron was and what the wall street mania was like in the late 90's. Superbly written, richly detailed look into how corporations go off the rails and how accounting practices and corporate culture and ethics (or lack thereof) intersect. It's a total page turner - even though I knew Enron collapsed and Skilling and others went to jail.

In a similar vein, The Big Short is a great movie and an even better book. Probably less accounting stuff than The Smartest Guys in the Room, but an engaging, informative and personal look at the sub-prime housing clusterfuck of 2008. Anything by Michael Lewis is a good read generally.

Other random books I've enjoyed recently:

• East of Eden by John Stienbeck
  
• Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
  
• The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Airley
  
  

> Good luck explaining that when you have shareholders... You can literally be sued as a company director for not maximising profits of the business, in some countries. In Australia for example, Section 181 of the Australian Corporations Law dictates this.

Yes, there are laws that can be (ab)used to encourage CEOs to loot the businesses they run. But please keep in mind that they do so because they profit from doing so; before paying the leadership in stocks was the norm, they tended not to, because they saw that this was not in the (longer-term) interest of the business, of the people they worked with, etc.. It's only since roughly the 1980s that this became in vogue.

That said, the legal case is really shoddy, because short-term gains almost always come at the cost of longer-term viability (e.g. cutting out R&D, replacing permanent experienced employees with young inexperienced ones, etc.). And legally, equity is the last in line when it comes to bankruptcy proceedings. Yet we now live in a world where people like to pretend that "shareholders" determine everything. Nonsense.

If you're interested, I'd really recommend you pick up https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Host-Financial-Parasites-Bondage-ebook/dp/B014IAV9MK/ , because this logic is also eating up Intel, IBM, and hundreds if not thousands of other corporations who are going heavily into debt to pay dividends, at a huge cost to their future profitability, simply because the incentive structure is set up that way. (And NV is doing something similar.)

As you said you saw the usual classics I'll skip over Hayek, Hazlett, Milton Freedman, Orwell, ect

1.A very interesting read on America's Economic History. Not econ theory, this is the history of our economy crushing it for over 200 years. Will give you the faith that America's best days are always ahead of us as long as we remain capitalist :

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Wealth-History-American-Economic/dp/0060505125

2.The best book on Foreign Policy I've ever read. It's a realist take on internation affairs which is what we are finally back to under this admin.

Nation's will work in thier own self interest, armies need to take territory to win wars, you need a great economy to have a great military, China must be confronted, ect:

https://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Great-Power-Politics-Updated/dp/0393349276

Very interesting article, thanks for posting!

The article mentions several books advocating for UBI, including Annie Lowrey's Give People Money, Andy Stern's Raising the Floor, Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght's Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy, Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future, and Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists. I have not read them, but from the article it sounds like they all make similar arguments in favor of a UBI and differ over the amount it should be. I believe all of them are assuming that it would be done at a national scale - I don't really understand why this couldn't be done at smaller jurisdictions (different states already have different policies about sales and income taxes, and Alaska has the closest thing in the US now to a UBI with its annual oil revenues share), or most ideally (but also more unrealistically) at a global scale (as the article points out a few dollars a week could lift millions of Indians out of extreme poverty.

I hadn't planned to include any of these books in the seminar, but if there is a strong interest in going into more depth on UBI, we could definitely do this. Maybe it would make most sense to select a set of books on the topic and split them amongst the class rather than having everyone read the same book, unless there is one book that is particularly good.

Very interesting. If you have any good books on anarchism I'd love to give them a read.

> perpetuate a system in which wealth inequality is as high as it is

Interesting that wealth inequality is a foundational principle here, but how would you enforce redistribution of wealth without an organized structure with a monopoly on violence? Pragmatically wouldn't those with the most wealth have the most resources to use violence to gain power? Without a structure to limit the use of violence what would stop an organization from exponentially growing using both wealth and force?

Back to inequality though I think you should try giving Equal is Unfair a read. I don't really think its the best book out there but personally, I like reading arguments for and against my foundational principles to better understand where I stand, ya know?

A few points. This is reddit. Since when does anyone care about citations? Oh, only idiots like you when you disagree but have no ability to disagree. I have a Master's in Economics. I'm no expert, but I take liberty to make economic statements and people who challenge me usually can't prove me wrong. I'm sorry but disagreement doesn't automatically prove me wrong or put the onus on me to cite every stupid thing just because random reddit idiot doesn't know history that may be widely known and searchable if you cared. Let's put you in school though.

There's no citation needed for the guns and military comment because it doesn't apply. I'm saying that assuming the ONLY reason to have a 2nd amendment is to protect against our own military is stupid, because there are other reasons to own a gun and the Supreme Court has also already ruled the 2nd amendment applies not only to militias (for the express purpose of that) but also to individuals, but further, the concept of militias in the amendment was actually less to do with protecting from our own military and instead from any military that may arise to fight us. HINT: there was no really organized federal military at the time. The states practically individually did as they wished. Part of why the Articles of Confederation failed and a constitution with more federal power was needed. They were more concerned about the return of the British, the rise of Native Americans, or one state attacking another or something.

As for you needing citations on dictatorships being ECONOMICALLY efficient or slavery being an insanely efficient economical structure that drove our growth and allowed the industrial revolution to come on (pre-dated it), once again, go study some economics. You want a source? I suppose a single good source (I studied hundreds in and out of school) would be "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" by John Steele Gordon (http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Wealth-History-American-Economic/dp/0060505125). Though you'll just argue against it somehow, not read it, or care. You don't want citations, you just want me to be wrong, which I'm not.

>but when other countries are ranking higher in just about every aspect of health and well being

This is under the assumption that these rankings are accurate or consistent, and also depends on the qualifiers used. One example: Part of the reason certain countries don't have the level of discourse we have is because they don't have the freedoms of speech we have. You get out of line, they throw your ass in jail. Better? That's not a statistical argument. It's a value argument, and America is unique in that respect. Applying that here would destroy everything America is. We accept a little bit of problems in order to have our freedoms. Just because something is not perfect doesn't mean anything else would be better.

But I prefer to deal with statistics, and one fact that I love that people hate is when they make these comparisons, they bring up countries like the Nordic countries. Yes, Sweden is amazing statistically. They have great health, etc etc etc. Good for them. Okay, just one small fact. Sweden is 97% Caucasian! Complete and pure homogeneity. Scientifically speaking it is PROVEN that people self-segregate and that assimilation is hard. Part of why America has things so difficult is because we have some of the worlds widest ranges of diversity in races, ethnicities, wealth classes, income streuctures, cultural differences, etc etc etc. America is so damn diverse in so many ways (not just race) that it inherently makes everything messy. People need to learn to accept that what works for some country with thousands of years of background, 97% homogeneity, and deep-rooted cultures that permeate every corner of the country, WILL NOT WORK in a screwed up freedom-embracing, incredibly diversified country as ours.

Which are the last two? Assuming capitalist development and codes...

By far the most famous geographer studying global capitalism is David Harvey. He recently wrote The Enigma of Capital which is a pretty easy introduction to his work. I think his Spaces of Global Capitalism is a more useful summation. He's very famous for a few other books, but I think the most important work he's done is in The Limits to Capital. The last one is a tough, meticulous book. Also worth checking out is his protege Neil Smith, either his Uneven Development or for a focus on cities The New Urban Frontier.

There really are not many books that take up housing and building code specifically, though Ben-Joseph's The City of Code is a useful introduction. If you're looking for a good rant (and a reliable one) on how we got to the less-than-stellar spatial arrangements of American cities, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere will get your blood pumping. If you're more interested in the cultural politics of place, one of my all time favorites is Landscapes of Privilege by the Duncan's.

I think I've identified our fundamental sticking point.

You believe that rolling back regulations, cutting back taxes, and scrutinizing companies less encourages competition. I think that it's not so simple.

For beer, yes. It's obviously worked, and even Cuomo is fighting for less regulation of ciders and wines in order to bring jobs to the finger lakes region. For simple commodities, deregulation (to a point of public safety) is very often a good thing.

But here's where we have a difference of opinion. Firms hate having to compete. They would much prefer to own the market and face no competition. So a firm that is sufficiently successful will undercut, buy out, and manipulate the market to cut out competition. It's natural. That has to happen in an unregulated free market. Part of competition is success and failure, and the ones who succeed are, by definition, gaining more control of the marketplace. They use this control of the marketplace to take part in anti-competitive practices and shut out new or smaller businesses. Look at Disney, Comcast, Cargill, Microsoft... Proof of that line of thinking is in the pudding. So, in my view, deregulation is anti-competitive in most cases.

If you can stand John Oliver's forced humor, check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00wQYmvfhn4

Now here is a bit of circular logic that my point includes: When corporations get large enough, they are able to lobby government in order to put up legal barriers to entry for new businesses, and use governmental power to cement their positions and grow even more powerful. That's what happened with craft beer, and that's why deregulating works for that industry. Getting rid of nonsensical regulations that only serve one corporation's anti-competitive interests is not the partisan issue that we are discussing. It's incredibly obvious that these regulations should be thrown out.

But libertarianism doesn't solve the root of that issue. It prevents the regulations from legally cementing a monopoly, but it doesn't do anything to solve the other levers they have to stifle competition. It doesn't prevent them from bringing frivolous lawsuits against smaller competitors in an attempt to bury them under legal costs that the competition can't absorb. It doesn't prevent them from undercutting the price of their competition for just long enough to bankrupt the smaller, less adaptable firm. It doesn't prevent them from hiring out all of a rival firm's employees for just long enough to destroy that firm, then having a round of layoffs. It doesn't prevent massive corporate buy-outs that put an entire industry into the hands of a few different companies, many of which have the same people on their boards. These are the kind of anti-competitive actions that firms would love to be able to do, and that libertarianism cannot cope with. Making it harder or impossible for firms to do things like this are the types of regulations that I support - I don't have a blanket love of regulation for its own sake, just like you don't love all deregulation for its own sake.

To me, this isn't even a discussion anymore than arguing what color the sky is. A cursory overview of history shows that we regulated ourselves into prosperity. One of the best books I've read on it is called American Amnesia and I'd recommend at least reading the description. Don't forget that the most libertarian time in our nation's history was called the Guilded Age for a very good reason. Libertarianism gave us the roaring twenties just as much as it gave us the great depression. Government spending and regulations brought us out of that depression and we remember the fifties so fondly because of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Libertarian systems have failed before (for the reasons that I've outlined here) and there is no reason to think that it will be any different if we give it another try.

So back to the high-minded idealism of both of our arguments and getting out of the weeds of healthcare, etc... That is why I believe that libertarianism (even at its best) is an inherently flawed philosophy.

David Blatt is a great guy, I'm a big fan of the data collecting that OKpolicy does.

I think there is a good argument to be made for not subsidizing anything and everything (the technical word is willy-nilly) and probably to have subsidies with set end dates (that are sooner rather than later to encourage innovation.)

Who knows, I'll have to do more research into it.

Oh! Also, if you're interested, I went to the Budget Summit in January that OKPolicy hosted which had Paul Pierson as the keynote speaker who co-wrote a very amazing book called American Amnesia about government intervention in the economy that I clearly need to re-read because I feel like it addresses all of this and I've forgotten it

Seems like all you did was throw some vocab words around without explaining how 2% in any way aligns with the money supply. For one how we calculate GDP is pretty inaccurate since it tends to double count dollars in certain financial transactions as new money being created even though its just shifting the money supply from one sector of the economy to another while keeping the money supply the same.

>Dollar 'value' of course being measured by the relative, price-visible value of the entire portfolio of assets and goods in the economy.

Yes i know how GDP is measured. I also know the fed is completely entrapped to banks and the FIRE sector and act on the behalf of the asset owning class. Especially since they're an unofficial monetary arm of the fed and have to act in a way that sustains a bubble economy since the capital gains class has siphoned off far too much money from households and government via monopoly rent and accumulating interest.

It's completely pseudoscientific to think we need to keep inflation as absurdly low as 2%. The real initiative is rich fucks not wanting to give up money going to their stock options and assets denoted in stocks, but going to worker's wages instead. If workers are allowed to have their wages rise with the decreasing reserved army of the unemployed then inflation WONT overtake their wage increases. Even the fed admitted this policy is fallacious and prevents ppl that sell their labor from being able to enjoy the fruits of the economy.

If we're on book recommendations: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Host-Financial-Parasites-Bondage-ebook/dp/B014IAV9MK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1543588857&sr=1-1&keywords=michael+hudson+killing+the+host

And yeah a non-zero amount of financial trading can reach the real economy (hence the bubble we're in) but relative to workers spending that cash instead of keeping it as low taxed capital gains far more of it circulates in the real economy and prevents this internal imbalance we're experiencing.

> So in a socialist system (public ownership of the means of production), prices and property are managed by the state

No. If no one owns the means of production in socialism(which is its definition), then there is no exchange in capital goods, labor, and factors of production. If theres no exchange, then theres no prices. Therefore there are no prices whatsoever to be "managed".

>state action is intrinsically socialist

Yes but to what degree matters. A government organization in a fairly capitalist system can acquire capital from private markets based on their market prices and has some idea about the costs involved in providing public goods and services(although not as efficient as markets).

A socialist system has no frame of reference of market prices, and thus cannot rationally allocate resources, This is the framework of Mises' calculation problem.

>but you offer compelling arguments against Keynesianism being socialist. However, clearly, Keynesianism is not a free market ideology, but also not a #realsocialism ideology either, so I suppose it deserves its' own ideological catalog?

>Would you consider Keynesianism capitalist?

Keynesianism, at least as an economic theory(and not as a policy framework) can exist in a perfectly free market. The free banking school has similarities in both Keynesianism and Austrianism.

> the feeling I've been having lately of distinguishing free markets from capitalism.

This book can further show how capitalism can be distinguished from the free market:

https://www.amazon.com/Markets-Not-Capitalism-Individualist-Inequality/dp/1570272425/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1506656351&sr=8-1&keywords=markets+not+capitalism

If you are looking for books on the history of American Economics, check out American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism| A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America|An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power|or Crash!: How the Economic Boom and Bust of the 1920s Worked (How Things Worked).

Each of those are well researched and easy to understand.

Edit: I forgot to add: The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes Hard to have a strong understanding of economics without understanding Keynesian theory.

You may think it's common sense, but it's not all that accurate. When I get home i'lI edit in some books you should read.

EDIT:

Betrayal of the American Dream.

Winner Takes All.

The Price of Inequality This one in particular is great. It's written by Nodel Prize for Economics winner Joseph E. Stiglitz.

>Is there a book that justifies private property, preferably through the idea of self ownership

A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism

>try to get a step closer to "deciding" what ideology fits my thoughts.

There is more in common and more semantical differences than both sides like to admit. For you, I would highly recommend starting with this book

Markets Not Capitalism (amazon)

PDF

Free Audio Book

A couple of articles I recommend starting with

Advocates of Freed Markets Should Embrace “Anti-Capitalism"

Against Anarchist Apartheid

Here is a discussion I had with a mutualist. It might help give you a better idea where the differences are. HERE

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, does a great job explaining some of the causes of the financial meltdown. It's told from the perspective of investors who saw it coming, and put their money where their mouths were.

IMHO, the credit rating agencies, like Standard & Poor's and Moody's, are the primary source of the entire meltdown. They gave top ratings to mortgage investments regardless of the quality of the mortgages. This led investors to sink tons of money into mortgage investments, thinking they were perfectly safe. This drove demand for banks to get more people to sign up for mortgages, whether they were qualified or not. The whole system was based on the premise that housing prices always go up. As soon as they started going down, everything fell apart.

Hey man, I'm sure you're a nice guy in real life, but asking for help to fund a passion via crowd sourcing and pan handling shouldn't be confused. If you don't want to help, that is totally cool, you don't need to try and insult me as a person for it.
On a side note, maybe you'd find interest in "gift economy" which is an alternative economic ideology than that of capitalism.
http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transition/dp/1583943978

Here's some advice you didn't ask for.

I retired early at age 54 in 2006. Had a military pension, life-long medical care, nice retirement accounts, owned a home, and so on.

Two things upset my calculus.

First, I didn't realize how boring it could be. And I'm a guy who's lived by the adage, "An educated man never gets bored waiting for a train." That's me. I had lists of things to do, books to read, hobbies to start, etc. But fundamentally it was boring, and after a couple of years I resumed working as a consultant, and now I'm back in graduate school.

Second, along came the 2008 crash. It did not have much of an effect on us financially, but that was just because we were luckily completely out of the market. It did, however, have a significant psychological effect. It made me realize that in the 30 or so years I hope to continue on, there's no telling what can happen. I mean, who ever dreamed the housing market would collapse? (A few people actually did, apparently.)

So I just toss it out there: don't burn any bridges. And by that I mean, don't get so completely divorced from work that you'll have a hard time getting back in the work force should you decide to do so. I was very, very lucky in that the stars aligned just right for my consulting gig, which led to other good things. But again, that was not planned for.

Anyway, good luck in whatever you decide to do!

Andy Stern was the authors name.

He estimates it would cost between $1.75 trillion and $2.5 trillion to create an income floor of $12,000 per year for all 18-to-64-year-olds and for all seniors receiving less than $1,000 a month in Social Security.

He goes on to list a "menu" of viable funding options, including

• cashing out all or some number of the 126 welfare programs that currently cost $1 trillion a year
  
• raise revenue by eliminating all or some of the federal govt's $1.2 trillion in tax expenditures
  
• levying a value added tax of 5 to 10 percent
  
• implementing a financial transaction tax
  
• charging corporations a fee for using and/or abusing our "common wealth" (similar to Peter Barnes' proposal for raising revenue on the Alaska Permanent Fund)
  
• levying a wealth / net worth tax
  
• looking at other federal budget expenditures (military budget - $600b, oil and gas subsidies ($30b), etc.
  
  I highly recommend the book if you're interested in learning more about UBI
  https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251

There is an excellent book that goes into great detail about this Russian style disinformation that the Trump administration has adopted: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.

> Human Action, specifically the "Inequality of Wealth"

I take your six paragraph dismissal of the current out of control inquality of wealth and raise it by an entire (incredibly well referenced - half the book is devoted to references and footnotes) book devoted to the subject (and yes - I have read it): The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future.

The best book on the true nature of capitalism that I have encountered is Killing the Host by Michael Hudson.

Hudson and Steve Keen are the best economists I have found; they both understand the actual economy in a way that none of the Keynesians or Austrians do.

>at the heart of this, is that loans are merely promises. So any "supply" isn't based on material goods, but a reserve requirement.

Yes, but there is more to the story. The Reserve Requirement Ratio and the actual supply off funds from investors/savers has a direct effect on the loanable rate. I am not sure what you mean by a "promise". All currency is based on a "promise" by the government.

>More sway does not mean sufficient sway.
>
>it kinda does

I mean, if you'd like to contest that rich people have influence over the economy as a whole that is fine, but we are discussing the influence of hefty shareholders over loanable rates.

>If any bank makes a "health inquiry" on its assets' likelihood of default, they can raise rates or lower them based on that inquiry. Or sell them to a "poor sucker" bank if they're likely to go under.

I believe you have this backwards. The raising ad lowering of rates necessarily has effects on available capital and future available capital which can make them appear artificially strong or weak.

>The scandal arose when it was discovered that banks were falsely inflating or deflating their rates so as to profit from trades, or to give the impression that they were more creditworthy than they were

You are right and I missed a key aspect of the scandal regarding the alteration of the Libor metric itself to improve creditworthiness. But regardless, the Libor scandal seems to include rates only "altered" not drastically increased. Thus, the profit comes from the facade given by rates, not by the rates themselves.

...or you could just start where everyone else starts. I really liked The Armchair Economist. I followed it with Cowen/Tabbarok and it was a great read, I can't recommend it enough. Very clear and intuitive writing, cool exercises and interesting, modern topics.

The answer you are looking for is either:

Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams by David Graeber

or

Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein

but

The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss is the cornerstone of the field and very enjoyable, though shorter than the other two. It may be helpful to have read Mauss in order to understand the previous two mentioned.

Take a break from accounting and finance books. I have a few recommendations from my recent reading:

The Intelligence Paradox

The Evolution of Everything

Delusions of Power

Equal is Unfair

The Feminine Mystique

How an Economy Grows - And Why It Crashes

Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York's Underground Economy

Buddha's Brain

The Red Queen

Obviously there's a political bend in some of those choices, but I can suggest others (it's always important to challenge your beliefs).

I love to read, can provide some other recommendations, but those were just some recent books I just pulled off my Nook. There's some fiction as well.

I'll be wrapping up a B.S. in Economics with a minor in statistics this December.

Books:

• One of the best books that I've found is The Armchair Economist by Stephen Landsburg. It's very low tech. which makes it very accessible with respect to the rest of the subject.
  
• I've heard good things about both Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science and New Ideas from Dead Economists
  
• http://www.amazon.com/The-Armchair-Economist-Economics-Everyday/dp/1451651732/ref=pd_sim_b_2
  
• http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Economics-Undressing-Science-Revised/dp/0393337642/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
  
• http://www.amazon.com/New-Ideas-Dead-Economists-Introduction/dp/0452288444/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b
  
• You can get all three of these in a "bundle deal", and this is a great starting point written in laymen's terms.
  
  
  I also highly recommend the Open Course series to develop the fundamental skillset. You can generally get these texts cheap:
  
  
• Intro Micro/Macro: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/
  
• Money and Banking: http://www.virtualprofessors.com/financial-markets-yale-shiller (Shiller is a very famous financial economist)
  
• As always, the Khan Academy is a great intro resource http://www.khanacademy.org/#microeconomics
  
  
  Blogs are also okay, but be wary of partisan biases. These are what I check daily:
  
  
• Krugman (Left wing biased) - http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
  
• Cowen/Tabarrok (Libertarian biased) - http://marginalrevolution.com/
  
• Scott Sumner (NGDP Targeting biased) - http://www.themoneyillusion.com/ (possibly my favorite)
  
• Greg Mankiw (GOP biased) - http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/
  
• Karl Smith/Ozimeck (Interesting) - http://blogs.forbes.com/modeledbehavior/
  
• Jodie Beggs (Interesting) - http://www.economistsdoitwithmodels.com/
  
• Becker/Posner (Law and Econ) - http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
  
• Brad Delong runs a famous blog, and there is never a shortage of highly qualified economists willing to tell you what they think you should believe.
  
  
  
  Ultimately when it comes to econ, there's no perfect substitute for a set of intro micro/macro texts and a university framework. This is contrary to what most pundits/americans seem to believe (seemingly everyone has strong opinions on issues best-explored in an economic framework, no matter how little they've studied it). Also, it's important to note that 98% of what's posted on this subreddit is NOT what economists are talking about. This subreddit is full of news links to stories that promote partisan agendas.
  
  
  
  I'll also warn you that any legitimate study of economics requires a decent handle on math. Through at least half the calc sequence. "Good economists are reborn as physicists, mediocre economists are reborn as psychologists, and bad economists are reborn as sociologists."

Hi, I've read this book twice. After reading it you probably feel like you have a good understanding of the crisis and the key players, as the book does a good job of introducing you to a lot of them.

You're still trying to wrap your head around the whole thing because you haven't got the entire complete story yet.

If you're looking for more information, the absolute best book on the topic (even better than The Big Short) is Matt Taibbi's Griftopia. I can't even put into words how incredible this book truly is.

Other pieces of info you should look into if you haven't:

This American Life - Inside Job

Inside Job The Movie

PBS Frontline - The Warning

PBS Frontline - Inside the Meltdown

If anything, you should read Griftopia. It will literally blow your mind even after everything you've already read. If I had a choice of only picking one book that I could convince someone else to read, it would be this one.

I read this guys recent book. It displays the problem with the American economy well. His book has a lot of rhetoric you have to shift through, and is a little repetitive, but all in all it's a good read.

People may also find this interesting. The reason inequality is an issue isn't because of some arbitrary moral reason, but because reducing it increases the length of long-term economic growth moreso than trade liberty does (see p. 12).

At the height of the subprime boom Fannie and Freddie's business was actually shrinking, while the large private lenders (Countrywide most notably) were expanding. It wasn't uncommon for them to push borrowers who could qualify for conforming 30s into the exotic types of mortgages. The selling, packaging, slicing, insuring and purchasing of loans was an enormously profitable engagement for everyone every step of the way.

Mortgage lenders won every time they handed out a nonconforming loan, which was a lot more valuable than a vanilla 30 year fixed. They did't care about quality because the banks were all but telling them straight out 'we'll buy anything'.

Banks profited on creation and sale of the collateral debt obligations and because the CDOs allowed them to hold less money in reserve to guard against borrower default. They didn't care about quality because they'd turn right around and package the loan into a CDO.

The insurance company AIG was winning on collecting premiums on AAA-rated securities that they thought had no chance in failing. Oh, and they got to be rated AAA because the agencies handing out the grades were paid by the banks. So if Moody's won't give Countrywide the needed grade, then Standard and Poor's across the street surely will.

Hell, even the man on the street profited by using the house's rising value as a piggy bank. Or they just speculated by buying investment property, waiting not too long of a time, and flipping it for a good profit.


If anyone wants to really understand the full extent of the crisis, pick up All the Devils are Here or Michael Lewis's The Big Short. For the tl;dr version you can read this

Oh man! I'm in my element! I just finished reading Empire of Wealth! I'm gonna feel really smart now.

We actually did not go off of the Gold Standard until 71. It was proposed as one of several solutions to crazy inflation partly due to social programs implemented by progressive legislation. The economy was booming but LBJ was a child of the New Deal and thought the same solutions would work in a different climate.

The Federal Reserve was established in 1913, not 1929. It is the third iteration of a central bank in our country. The Fed did not limit the lending power of banks until during the Great Depression. Alexander Hamilton was a huge proponent of central banking and his central bank helped stop 2 runs on gold. Both eliminations of regulated banking in our country have been followed with recessions.

Hoover / Roosevelt increased our currency supply to pay for Public Projects. However it was a combination of import tax, deficit increase, and increased cash to pay tor these projects. They didn't just distribute printed cash to the wealthy.

I take it that you do not support the Federal Reserve and would like to reestablish the Gold Standard? Do you know of any existing models / specific time periods where this has worked out?

EDIT:

I read a bit more about the gold standard from some of the questions on the http://www.igmchicago.org economists panel.

What it comes down to for me is that commodities in a global economy, are volatile in value. New gold reserves and extraction methods could be discovered by a competing world power tomorrow. For a smaller, more isolated economy, you could base the value of your currency off of a limited commodity. That is how the system could function in a time when our economy was a) more isolated and b) lending non liquid assets without regulation.

You are right ubi is not a panacea, it is a floor to build upon with other policies.

This is why yang has 130+ on his website that DO actually attack inequalities and inefficiencies in our system one by one. Yang focuses on the FD because it is the easiest thing to do in a single term as president -- It doesn't require a supermajority in the house and has bipartisan appeal, making it incredibly easy to implement quickly.


And ubi does help in certain things like unionizing which DO help with inequalities, collective bargaining is one of the greatest tools available to the precariat and is something that is much easier to accomplish when you don't have to ever worry about starving to death.

You can read the book Raising The Floor by Andy Stern to learn more about it, he is the former president of one of the largest unions in the entire country the SEIU.

Dude, read [this one] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393338827?keywords=the%20big%20short&qid=1450542815&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1) and [this one.] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393351599?keywords=the%20big%20short&qid=1450542815&ref_=sr_1_3&sr=8-3) [The first one they already made a movie.] (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1596363/?ref_=nv_sr_1) The second one I'm only starting but people say it's brilliant.

Edit: forgot to say that I really liked the first one, The Big Short.

Take a harmless hobby done for passion and joy, add guilt, shaming, and profit motive. Subtract joy and passion. == "Parenting" in capitalist hell.

https://www.amazon.com/Kids-These-Days-Capital-Millennials/dp/0316510866

Actually scratch the macro/micro difference. The best layperson Econ books are:

-Freakonomics (Revised Edition) https://www.amazon.ca/dp/0061234001/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_p6WfAbTQ50ZGZ (it has a follow up, SuperFreakonomics)

And

-The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1451651732/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_Q5WfAbR3TEZTP (or anything by Steven Landsburg really)

If you like podcasts, check out Planet Money, Freakonomics Radio, and EconTalk.

Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics are both available as audiobooks and done really well if that’s a thing you like.

I started to make one a while back but didn't get too far. There are just too many great books to choose from.

Classics 1950-1970

What is Conservatism?

The Conservative Mind

The Road to Serfdom

The Constitution of Liberty

Ideas Have Consequences

The Quest for Community

Economics in One Lesson

Capitalism and Freedom

In Defense of Freedom


Age of Reagan 1970-1990

The Conservative Intellectual Movement Since 1945

Modern Times

Knowledge and Decisions

A Conflict of Visions

Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Roots Of American Order


Modern Must Reads 1990-Today

The Clash of Civilizations

A History of the American People

The Vision of the Annointed

Intellectuals and Society

Illiberal Reformers

Restoring the Lost Constitution

How To Be A Conservative

Lightfiend answered your questions wonderfully but I might just throw in that the Mises book Human Action is the Austrian Economics equivalent to Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest,
and Money. Definitely not a beginners book though.

Book suggestion: The Armchair Economist by Steven Landsburg. It basically explains the first semester of Economics 101 in layman's terms. The later chapters are a bit biased, but the first 100 pages or so definitely changed the way I look at the world and human behavior.

Lecture suggestion: Yale's Introduction to Psychology with Paul Bloom. Literally the 20 lectures for an Intro Psych course at Yale. Good to listen to in the background(would recommend at double speed) while doing something else/driving to work/what have you. Helpful for understanding the other people in the world.

>Its fine to have an american political "left" slant to libertarianism, just as long as you believe in individual/property rights and free markets. Dont let their name confuse you, left libertarians are not classical liberals. left-libertarian = anarcho-communist.

Maybe I can point you to the preeminent modern collection of essays regarding left-libertarian perspectives on economics?

Markets Not Capitalism is just that, and it helps to give some insight regarding anti-capitalist individualism. It is also available on Amazon.

I recommend reading "Free Market Reforms and the Reduction of Statism," by Kevin A. Carson. It is on page 285/442.

Ultimately, Left-libertarianism picks up where right-libertarianism leaves off: that is a skepticism towards centralized power coming from the private sector rather than solely the public sector, and acknowledging that corruption and oppression exists outside of government institutions.

non-Austrian economics is not a 'type' of economics - rather, the normal economics sub-reddit became swamped with adherents of this basically completely fringe quasi-philosophical, very political, and anti-scientific Austrian 'economics'. The wiki article for it is quite charitable. Basically you can discount about half of all comments in the main subreddit right off the bat.

Trying to think of non-text-books, not-too-mathematical books that are general in scope, fun to read, and minimise politicking...difficult

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar - explanation of the limits and power of markets with many examples

Todd Buchholz, New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought - a sort of history of economists with a heavy emphasis on their thoughts and contributions using real world examples to illustrate

William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates - essays by many of the most highly-acclaimed recent economists mostly sort of mixed idea and personal life stories.

Hope these help. Have fun.

Stiglitz wrote a book about inequality with suggestions. The book itself He rank #4 on Repec's most influential economists of all time.

Kruger made a speech about inequality and touched somewhat on the end with suggestions. He is also responsible for studying the effects of minimum wage increases.

I know Krugman has touched on inequality several times on his NY Times column.

ETA:

>Otherwise yes, they are for inequality.

TIL Stiglitz, one of the leading economist who focuses on the problems of inequality is for it. lmao

Well anyways, here's a NRx reading list I'm slowly making my way through...

​



Introduction

The Dark Enlightenment Defined*
The Dark Enlightenment Explained*
The Path to the Dark Enlightenment*
The Essence of the Dark Enlightenment*
An Introduction to Neoreaction*
Neoreaction for Dummies*

Reactionary Philosophy in a Nutshell*
The Dark Enlightenment – Nick Land*

The Neoreactionary Canon

The Cathedral Explained*

When Wish Replaces Thought Steven Goldberg *

Three Years of Hate – In Mala Fide***

****

The Decline

We are Doomed – John Derbyshire*
America Alone – Mark Steyn*
After America – Mark Steyn*
Death of the West – Pat Buchanan***
The Abolition of Britain – Peter Hitchens

****

Civil Society and Culture

Coming Apart – Charles Murray
Disuniting of America – Arthur Schlesinger
The Quest for Community – Robert Nisbet
Bowling Alone – Robert Putnam
Life at the Bottom – Theodore Dalrymple
Intellectuals and society – Thomas Sowell

****

Western Civilization

Civilization: The West and the Rest – Niall Ferguson
Culture Matters – Samuel Huntington
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization – Ricardo Duchesne

****

Moldbuggery

Mencius Moldbug is one of the more influential neoreactionaries. His blog, Unqualified Reservations, is required reading; if you have not read Moldbug, you do not understand modern politics or modern history. Start here for an overview of major concepts: Moldbuggery Condensed. Introduction to Moldbuggery has the Moldbug reading list. Start with Open Letter series, then simply go from the beginning.*

****

​

Griftopia by Matt Taibbi. It should be pretty accessible even to people not interested in economics.

EDIT: Here's an article by him that is also part of the book. It gives you a pretty good idea of his style of writing.

Depends on what you're looking for. For Economics, I always recommend "New Ideas from Dead Economists". It's a solid laymans introduction to economic theory.

For finance, I like Michael Lewis as an intro...He's been writing the ins and outs of Wall Street for 30 years. Liars Poker is his first book. He also wrote a couple of solid pieces on the crash of '07-'08 (The Big Short and Boomerang). Finally he also has written a good book about high frequency trading (Flash Boys). They're all non-fiction, but easily accessible, and serve as a jumping off point to other topics of interest.

OP, if this article interests you, I might suggest Peter Pomerantsev's Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

It discusses the marriage between authoritarianism and reality television. Peter Pomerantsev is a television producer who worked for a number of different Russian television stations.

Per capita income (list). The difference between Norway and the US is not nearly large enough to serve as an explanation. There is, of course, Nobel Prize winning economist Stiglitz (yeah, I hate that particular fake Nobel Price and quite a few of those who got it but pointing to someone more famous is a sure way to get a point across) who points to inequality as a better explanation than GDP. Not that he's the only one, but in an Internet forum one tends to want to point the most famous person in support and neglect the others.

There’s a fantastic book on this exact topic I recommend: “American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper”.

There’s been a concerted effort for generations by business interest groups to promote propaganda denigrating public goods, services, and investments. America’s global leadership in public goods and services in the mid-century is what made America ever have an enviable middle class in the first place.

Turns out funding infrastructure and schools is actually good for the economy!

This is a great place to ask. Fortunately a recent book on this topic has been written by a pair of Objectivists. https://www.amazon.com/Equal-Unfair-Americas-Misguided-Inequality/dp/125008444X

You could also pose the opposite question to yourself. What is the downside of some people becoming richer at a faster rate than others? Why would this be a problem? And for whom?

If you liked this story, you'll love Griftopia

Thanks for posting this. If you'd like to learn more today, please purchase and immediately read this book

Griftopia

Lot of anecdotes, not many statistics (if any?), and no clear actual impact to anything the article talks about aside from a very tenuous connection between helicopter parenting and "safe spaces" in colleges. Not a very good article.

-edit- If you want to read a legit good article about the sociology of millennials check out this review essay of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, which actually talks about the political-economic context of millennial social dynamics.

This is a great book on the Russian media complex:

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible

Perhaps the title is a reference to The Origins of Totalitarianism

New Ideas From Dead Economists
amazon link

It was required for an Econ 101 class I had, and does a great job of covering the bases for each school of thought. It isn't very in depth, but can get you started pretty well.

The free market is only free if government regulation keeps it a level playing field for all comers. Teddy Roosevelt and FDR both saved capitalism when inequality and rigged monopolist markets risked everything. Bernie will do the same.

See Robert Reich's Saving Capitalism - http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Capitalism-For-Many-Not/dp/0385350570

Socialism/Communism

A People's History of the World

Main Currents of Marxism

The Socialist System

The Age of... (1, 2, 3, 4)

Marx for our Times

Essential Works of Socialism

Soviet Century

Self-Governing Socialism (Vols 1-2)

The Meaning of Marxism

The "S" Word (not that good in my opinion)

Of the People, by the People

Why Not Socialism

Socialism Betrayed

Democracy at Work

Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (again didn't like it very much)

The Socialist Party of America (absolute must read)

The American Socialist Movement

Socialism: Past and Future (very good book)

It Didn't Happen Here

Eugene V. Debs

The Enigma of Capital

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

A Companion to Marx's Capital (great book)

After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action

Capitalism

The Conservative Nanny State

The United States Since 1980

The End of Loser Liberalism

Capitalism and it's Economics (must read)

Economics: A New Introduction (must read)

U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776 (must read)

Kicking Away the Ladder

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism

Traders, Guns and Money

Corporation Nation

Debunking Economics

How Rich Countries Got Rich

Super Imperialism

The Bubble and Beyond

Finance Capitalism and it's Discontents

Trade, Development and Foreign Debt

America's Protectionist Takeoff

How the Economy was Lost

Labor and Monopoly Capital

We Are Better Than This

Ancap/Libertarian

Spontaneous Order (disagree with it but found it interesting)

Man, State and Economy

The Machinery of Freedom

Currently Reading

This is the Zodiac Speaking (highly recommend)

If you want something a lot more recent I would look at No More Work by James Livingston. Also I would go with Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris if you want something about how the disposability of workers has impacted millennials. Here's a pretty good review of it.

Talk to any Nobel prize winning economist. Read a book instead of Breitbart and InfoWars.

https://www.amazon.com/Price-Inequality-Divided-Society-Endangers-ebook/dp/B007MKCQ30/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1526398644&sr=1-2&keywords=stiglitz

That would be awesome. I loved The Big Short and Liar's Poker audiobooks but couldn't finish Flash Boys.

I don't have a Twitter. You should Tweet Joe/Michael and set it up! ;)

> programs can't run while they're in transit

You'd have a signal delay that was no higher than the actual signal propagation delay to get halfway around the world, which is about 100ms, 150-200ms roundtrip. Higher than that, you can just forward the signal to the copy still running on the source node and get the answer from there. Practically, at some point we'd probably understand the brain well enough that it wouldn't feel like an interruption, more like having to think a bit longer before certain things came to mind.

The way that this could actually become an issue is if emulated brains can run a lot faster than biological brains. A factor of 1000 does not seem implausible, and that would also multiply any transmission delay.

On the other hand, travelling around the world in 20 minutes is still a significant improvement on the status quo, which people are fine with.

For more on this, I would recommend Robin Hanson's Age of Em, which goes into this scenario in a lot of detail.

Well no, the problems with capitalism are intrinsic to the system and can't be simply regulated away, and we've had a pretty solid theory of capitalism and its cyclical nature for quite some time now. We've even more or less known how best to mitigate these issues for a very long time.

The hard part isn't identifying the problems with capitalism, it's fighting the entrenched power structures that support it and finding a viable alternative.

The only connection I can immediately see is Epstein's relationship with benefactor "Les Wexner". (Wexner was Epstein's biggest client when he acted as a money manager.) Wexner gave Epstein a mansion in New York. It's only hearsay, but there's an alleged Pentagon whistleblower who said, "Epstein's death was a message to a group of Jewish billionaires, including Ron Lauder, Edgar Bronfman, Les Wexner and Maurice Greenberg".

It was interesting that they grouped both Wexner and Greenberg together.

• Footnote: An interesting book is "Giants," by Peter Phillips. He writes about the global power elite and shows you how they're all related and "all know each other". He says that their numbers are so small and that they all attend the same clubs and sit on the same boards. As a result, they hobnob and have surprisingly close relationships. So it wouldn't be at all surprising that Wexner and Greenberg were connected: https://www.amazon.com/Giants-Global-Power-Peter-Phillips/dp/1609808711

Second the recommendation, as well as Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev, which was written in 2014 and gives the most comprehensive and in-depth view that I've seen of what's happened with the Russian media environment since Putin came to power.

It's very obvious that they're now deploying the same tactics that have been so successful domestically on an international level.

This is the sort of thing covered in the book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

Nowadays, middle class and up parents try to prepare their kids to succeed in capitalism while they're still in the womb and throughout their childhoods and teenage years. Literally every activity, including friendships, is assessed and selected according to its possible future payoff.

Of course this is not healthy for kids and leads to stuff like hyper-competitive spelling bees. And it leaves less well off kids, kids of average intelligence and talent and resources, in the dust. This is how you get a lost generation.

By definition, not everyone can be a ninja rockstar, but average people need to eat and make rent too.

https://www.amazon.com/Giants-Global-Power-Peter-Phillips/dp/1609808711/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

​

Here's a recent book titled "Giants: The Global Power Elite." by a prominent Sociology Professor which really runs down the major financial elites, their various organizations, how they fund their agendas, etc etc.

​

One of things it hipped me to was the 180 on Russia coinciding with Putin being too insular for global financial interests, Crimea tipped the scales then the Trilateral Commission published "Engaging Russia; A Return To Containment" circa 2013.

http://www.trilateral.org/download/doc/TF_Russia_for_WEBSITE_final_15_May_2014.pdf

Not only that, their salaries are structured and referred to as "bonuses". It's just easier for people to repeat what they heard on TV.

I think almost everyone in this thread would benefit from reading The Big Short by Michael Lewis. I'm a former FA and Senate staffer, my dad was a banker now FA and we both learned a lot from that book.

The idea of democracy dollars by Yang is really compelling:

By giving US voting age citizens $100 a year to give towards a political candidate (if its not given, then it disappears) we can wash out corporate money in politics.

It would be interesting if a candidate has to pick between eligible in receiving democracy dollars versus corporate dollars too, really shows transparency in the candidates allegiance.

Plus I'm sure most politicians hate sucking up to rich people for money.

Re: Unions
Andy Stern who was the former head of SEIU (the largest union) said the future of labor is no labor and we should move towards an UBI. As a side effect, unions will have more bargaining power with an UBI (i.e. they can strike for longer).

His book is Raising the Floor goes into this in more detail: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251

The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

Lewis has a gift for explaining complicated concepts. And before he became an author, Lewis actually started his career working on Wall Street (which he chronicled in the book Liar's Poker). In The Big Short, Lewis explains what caused the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

If you're looking for something a little shorter to give you an idea of how Lewis writes, here's Wall Street on the Tundra, which is an article about how Iceland apparently became one of the richest nations on earth . . . on paper. And how that led to its own financial meltdown.

Not so much an advocate of my ideology, but was one of the books a read on my Journey towards my current one: Saving Capitalism: For the many, not the few


it does a great job of explaining some parts of our economic history for the past 40 years, but has a hastily reached conclusion without giving an exact reason why it solves these problems.

The Age of Em by Robin Hanson is pretty good. It's basically the worldbuilding for a science fiction world so hard (as in "hard scifi") that it has regular citations.

Nothing is True and Everything is Possible goes into Surkov a good bit.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis was an easy and interesting read

>I stole the idea from someone much smarter about these things than me:
>
>https://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Capital-Crises-Capitalism/dp/0199836841/

Well I completely disagree with this marxist geography professor's idea. Once again, to me the problem is central banking, government intervention, and Keynesian economics.

>Posner, a strong supporter of free markets, identified the financial crisis as a failure of capitalism, not government intervention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Failure_of_Capitalism#Criticism_of_capitalism_and_mainstream_economists

While we'd need to read the book or youtube him to get his full argument, that section of the Wikpedia is actually supporting my stance!

Posner says that what Bernanke and Greenspan (ex-chairmen of the Federal Reserve, Americas central bank) "can be blamed for is overconfidence in their understanding of how to prevent a depression and, as a result, a failure to attend to warning signs and a lack of preparedness ". This is exactly my point, these people are central bankers who follow Keynesian economics, their view of economics and economies make them BLIND to such events and their solutions. They believe that in their wisdom and in their control of monetary policy they can create growth and stop recessions.... they can't! They think they are the solution, but they are the what caused the problem!

"A few people had warned of problems but they were ignored". Anyone who isn't a Keynesian could see the real estate bubble. These people got laughed at, infored and made a mockery of. It's just that these people are a minority compared to the gigantic culture of Keynesian economics which has overtaken our universities, the media, and our governments. Keynesian economics tells a government they can spend big (this will keep them and their voters happy), in turn governments fund research that supports this view. This is a mutually beneficial relationship.

​

My conclusion:

It isn't capitalism that is the problem. Capitalism is great.

The problem is the institution of central banking, and the economic ideology of Keynesian economics.
The solution is to abolish central banking, embrace Austrian economics, and return to sound money.

If you'd like to read more about Austrian economics can read/youtube/google anything from: The Mises Institute, Michael Pento, Peter Schiff, Saifedean Ammous, James 'Jim' Rickards

​

​

Ahh yeah that reminds me of this book. I have it on kindle but have meaning to get around to it: Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition https://www.amazon.com/dp/1583943978/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_BCOEzbH2N63XF

One book I'd recommend if you want a more accesible but less textbook-like style introduction is New Ideas from Dead Economists.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Ideas-Dead-Economists-Introduction/dp/0452288444/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1331074410&sr=8-1

Its really an interesting book that looks at the ideas of Smith, Ricardo, Keynes, Marx, and others and puts them into context without having really a left or right slant. Its listed as a classic by the American Economics Association according to wikipedia and the author used to be a Harvard professor and has advised the White House as well as given talks to some fortune 500's. It goes into all of these old ideas and places them nicely into a modern context without getting preachy or bogged-down.

The Law by Frederic Bastiat (super short, free)

https://www.amazon.com/Law-Frederic-Bastiat/dp/1940177014/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487742542&sr=1-3&keywords=The+law


Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
https://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Expanded-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465025226

Here's a good slogan: "Do what you want, pay for yourself."

There is a nice book called "age of em" that explains how a capitalist world with mind upload could look like:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198754620/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0198754620&linkCode=as2&tag=transhumanism-20&linkId=7b799c47657f5de5c73b71098c70db38

Here's the amazon link, though I would also encourage you to check in with a local bookseller to see it if they have it in stock as well.

Also here's a nice song about being a sad weary millenial

edit: ironically, the fact that the author was speaking on book panels at 23 makes me feel shitty lol

I don't think you understand how UBI works. So tell ya what, you can read-up on the idea here: https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251.

When you're ready and have read it, we can discuss the merits of it. Let's have the conversation.

I've heard really good things about Heinrich's Introduction to the First Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital. I just picked it up the other day, but I haven't read it quite yet.

Otherwise, you should check out the link to David Harvey's video series (found in the sidebar). Or, for a contemporary application of Marx's theories, Harvey's Enigma of Capital is a worthwhile read.

So I found this post from a guy on Eat Cheap and Healthy from a young guy who's trying to get by on a food budget of $16 a month (because that's how much money he gets in food stamps). He also has a job, but he's using the bulk of the money from that to pay down his debt. Reading around the thread showed he has a buttload of debt: student loans, credit card debt and medical debts. Lucky him!

He's an extreme case, I think, of the way the way the financial industry is hobbling the American economy. I'm guessing this guy isn't doing a lot of purchasing of consumer goods other than the bare necessities needed for survival. (Of note: the guys on the "Eat Cheap and Healthy" subreddit say his food budget is not in fact adequate for survival -- it's missing some key nutrients. And these are guys who know how to hang on to a dollar.)

I don't think he's alone, either. And you know, people have noticed that despite the great numbers on unemployment, the economy continues to wheeze and gasp along. Economic growth still is mired at around 2 percent. It's not a dead economy, but it's not a healthy one.

The problem is that the financial industry and real estate industries (aka the FIRE sector) have taken over the economy and are cannibalizing it. All the money that should be going to buy new consumer goods and services and driving the economy are being used to service debt, and our $16/month food budget guy is a prime example. But it's happening all over, everywhere, and not just in the US, as Michael Hudson documents in Killing the Host.

This indicates to me that there is a natural wedge between Main Street and Wall Street and that we should be exploiting it. Walmart, General Electric, the entire restaurant industry, etc., all need consumers with dollars in their pockets to spend on their goods and services. And thanks to the finance industry, they aren't getting them.

It's already started in a small way. The Walton family (owners of Walmart) are billionaires who are ordinarily no friend of average folks. But they are BIG supporters of programs like SNAP and TANF because they don't pay their workers enough to live on, so much so that they give new hires the paperwork to get set up on Snap and other government subsidies when they take them on.

All these big corporations are suffering, and some or many will go out of business because the finance sector is eating their lunch. They should be supporting government policies that relieve American consumers of their debt burden.

But Main Street has long been very tight with Wall Street because in the 80s Wall Street kept the economy booming by making easy credit available to EVERYONE. Credit cards, you know? And very attractive rates on house loans, easy credit, you bet!

But that string is fast running out. Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs, and new debt isn't going to solve the problem, especially when you think of the extremes Americans are going to in order to pay off the old debts.

It's time to for us to do everything we can to break the relationship between Main Street and Wall Street, and it shouldn't be at all difficult, because big corporations from both sectors are basically sociopaths and will gladly do each other in if there are dollars for them at the end of the struggle.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Inequality-Divided-Endangers-ebook/dp/B007MKCQ30
Its not a question of them making their own money, its how much they should earn for doing so and whether they should get so many favorable tax benefits for being wealthy

I would recommend a couple pieces of media to you. One is a movie and one is a book. The movie is 'Inequality for All'. I think you can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/84192322

I also recommend the book 'Saving Capitalism' by Robert Reich. You can get that here: http://amzn.com/0385350570

Hard question.

I haven't thought about the root cause much. Maybe inequality? Competitive society? Or education itself? The thought itself might be the root cause. As I stated 1st reply, many Koreans think that university is a must step of a life. (More than half? I guess)

I think we need to learn from other nations that students are happy and achieving. Obama's fondness of Korean education system is so ridiculous. Yeah, we achieves high education points from students who studies 10 or more hours every day. Very inefficient compare to other high achieving countries.

Parents need education for parenting. Many Koreans thinks they can do it very well naturally. Some parents do it well without learning or thinking much. But not many.

And I think the problem can not be solved in education system only.
It's much more deep problem. The thought "university must" have some foundations. Difference between life of "have a degree" and "haven't" are too big, or considered too big.

I think The Price of Inequality can explain something about it.
The book is about US, but Korea has many similar phenomena.

Also for /u/goinupthegranby


Markets Not Capitalism is I feel like the most well known modern Market Anarchist (LibSoc) book. Also you can look into Mutualism and Proudhon's thoughts on how society should be set up.

Hard engineering is ee, bio, Chem, and so on. Easy is mech, civ.
While I know of one guy who is a CS phd, generally I normally see the more applied math guys.
As for things to read. I think you should start at the beginning and not worry about job titles ... Everything will change a few times before now and when it will be your time...
Some fun reads:
The black swan
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/081297381X/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1348162692&sr=8-2


The big short:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393338827/ref=mp_s_a_1?qid=1348163015&sr=8-1

Where's your source for what BI's proponents believe? Seems like a huge assumption given the fact that many of its proponents see it as a transformative economic model to cope with change which is now at a pace too far beyond what is possible for most people to deal with.

For example:
https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Floor-Universal-Economy-American/dp/1610396251

When you're done, order The Big Short. Absolutely fascinating read. It goes into plenty of detail re: CDOs and the rest of the alphabet soup surrounding the meltdown.

Empire of wealth http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Wealth-History-American-Economic/dp/0060505125/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373551972&sr=8-1&keywords=empire+of+wealth

50 years in wall street
http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Wall-Street-Part/dp/054813443X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373552186&sr=1-4&keywords=50+years+in+wall+street


http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Wall-Street-Part/dp/0548134448/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373552186&sr=1-5&keywords=50+years+in+wall+street

Yup. It wasn't a class for me as much an excellent book that surveys the history of economic thought: http://www.amazon.com/New-Ideas-Dead-Economists-Introduction/dp/0452288444

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L4FSVZ6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Highly recommend his books.

Satisfying as ever - Sowell exposing 'liberal intellectuals': https://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Expanded-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465025226

Depends what you're looking for. There are a lot of different ideological groups that oppose socialism for various reasons.

As a liberal capitalist I'd start you off with some mainstream stuff such as The Armchair Economist. It's well-written and entertaining, and explains a lot of stuff that I had always been wondering about economics before I read it.

If it doesn't change your mind, at least you'll understand how typical capitalist economists think about problems involving resources and markets, and you'll be better at debating against capitalists. Or maybe it will change your mind and you'll know what was wrong with your previous socialist opinions. Either way, it's definitely worth reading.

No, I refuse to share it with you. Based on the fact that you questioned specific phrases in my statements without addressing the overall points, I was under the impression that your purpose was to derail discussion into pedantry.

As you can tell from my responses to others, and from my comment history, I don't assume everyone is a troll. You were displaying signs of being one, so I treated you as such.

If you actually are honest about your ignorance of the situation, read Griftopia. It provides you a picture of the systemic problems and includes citations. Certainly more effective than asking questions about issues too specific to be able to give you a clear picture. You could also read other comments in this thread.

I like Markets Not Capitalism: http://www.amazon.com/Markets-Not-Capitalism-Individualist-Inequality/dp/1570272425

Edit: down-voted but no reply? Why? Markets not Capitalism is a very good book.

>Capitalism doesn't need to "grow" at all.

Since I can't take your argument seriously after this point, I'm just going to suggest that you read something like David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital to expand your conception of how capitalism functions.

> "appeared to show"

Appeared? What a horrible nightmare we are living through. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.

Books

Babylon's Banksters: The Alchemy of Deep Physics, High Finance and Ancient Religion


Financial Vipers of Venice: Alchemical Money, Magical Physics, and Banking in the Middle Ages and Renaissance


The Money Mafia: A World in Crisis


Giants: The Global Power Elite

Videos

Century of Enslavement: The History of The Federal Reserve



9/11 Trillions: Follow The Money


How & Why Big Oil Conquered The World


The Money Masters

Links

Missing Money Solari


The Money Masters Links

Quotes

"It doesn’t take an economist to understand the importance of money. Deep down we all know that the wars, the poverty, the violence we see around us hinges on this question of money. It seems like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle just waiting to be solved." - James Corbett


"The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough." -Andrew Jackson


“No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time." ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, U.S. Constitution


"The Bible is the rock on which this Republic rests." - Andrew Jackson


"In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables." - The Bible - John 2 - 14-15

Alright,



Educate yourself

Educate yourself

Educate yourself

Educate yourself

lmao, this is literally how you argued.

It's a very dense read that I wouldn't recommend to anybody that's not an economist or studying the field.

These are some easier economic reads:

https://www.amazon.com/Price-Inequality-Divided-Society-Endangers/dp/0393345068/ref=pd_sim_14_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E0FCHYAXFXG28V0C15Q0

https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=pd_sim_14_5?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=E0FCHYAXFXG28V0C15Q0

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510621923&sr=1-1&keywords=big+short+michael+lewis

https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0465060730/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1510621964&sr=1-1&keywords=basic+economics+thomas+sowell

OP and everyone else, should read this. It outlines the history of how private institutions outsourced their training to universities at the expense of indebted students and how universities then outsourced that labor back out into the private sector in the form of free labor internships.

https://www.amazon.com/Kids-These-Days-Capital-Millennials/dp/0316510866/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1518582359&sr=8-1&keywords=kids+these+days

LOL - I see your elitist wapo link and raise you a "intellectualism" has been a generally pernicious force in the past 200 years

However, I would agree that people today are dumber than they were 40 or 50 years ago, though I think that stems from the rise of post-modern nihilism and reletavism and that the dumbing down is seen actually in our "intellectual" class. Mother is a straight up awful movie that tries too hard to be Polanski and relies on schlock designed to shock a 1960's audience.

Edit: And yes 100% that is a major trend in almost all art forms, and has been now for like 100 plus years

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Landsburg


Also, this isn't really 'mainstream' economics, but Rothschild's Bionomics will blow your mind, I promise you.

A good book on the same subject is Griftopia - http://www.amazon.com/Griftopia-Machines-Vampire-Breaking-America/dp/0385529953

• http://www.mediafire.com/?8bz3y2orybgqle5

Matt Taibbi is awesome. I'm reading his book "Griftopia" right now, it's about the con artists who caused the 2008 financial crisis. Funny and well-written, check it out

What economics? Like this?

• https://www.amazon.com/Small-Beautiful-Economics-Mattered-Perennial/dp/0061997765
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Capitalism-Industrial-Revolution-CAPITALISM-Paperback/dp/B00QPR7PC8
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Going-Local-Creating-Self-Reliant-Communities/dp/0684830124/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transition/dp/1583943978/
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Buddhist-Economics-Enlightened-Approach-Science/dp/1632863669
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Economy-Wealth-Communities-Durable/dp/0805087222
  
• https://www.amazon.com/End-Laissez-Faire-Economic-Consequences-Peace/dp/1607960869
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Das-Kapital-Critque-Political-Economy/dp/145388632X/

The situations you mention were all fairly different. No short explanation will give a good sense of what happened. I don't know that much about Amarath, but there are good books written about the other two.

There's an excellent book about the rise and fall of LTCM.

I don't think the definitive book on the mortgage crisis has been written yet, but Michael Lewis wrote one I thought was pretty informative.

Krugman seems to have buried the hatchet. He wrote a very nice review of Reich's latest book, Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few.

He's referencing, I believe, a Michael Lewis book, my guess being The Big Short. It's a narrative-style journalistic piece. Personally, I'd recommend looking to more sources than this if you want to really get into a Glass-Steagall (or other financial reform) debate, this one is very much told as a story.

This is a film adaption of the novel, which is excellent (amazon link) and worth a read. You'll learn more than you ever thought you'd know about the subprime mortgage crisis.

Yeah you got me there. It's not like an economics professor wrote a book about how debt grows faster than the growth of the economy and how debts have to be periodically forgiven with a jubilee or else civilization will collapse exactly like how the Roman empire did. Oh wait.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014IAV9MK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Towards the end of this interview
Michael Greenburger says billions of dollars that the Fed gave to AIG for a bailout was simply turned around and sent straight to Goldman Sachs to pay off the same type credit default swap as Michael Burry "The Big Short" constructed (and probably with a LOT more money).

Markets not Capitalsim by Gary Chartier. It's what got me interested in Mutualism.

The Age of Em, no real plot in this one but its more of a thought experiment about a future with high level AI's and what it would be like.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/0198754620/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474400774&sr=8-1&keywords=the+age+of+em

Is there a nomenclature for these two non-fiction writing styles used in these example books?

• Basic Income - It's dense, with lots of references, and very little that could be cut without removing meaning
  
• Raising the Floor - It's casual with lots of personal stories and lots of fluff and it feels like it should have been written as a 15 page magazine article instead of a book
  
  Maybe the first one is "academic"? The second one, I don't know how to call it.

Or Intellectuals & Society by Sowell

​

Edit: I realize that this comment is likely to get downvoted. But I really think that we on the left should start engaging more with the ideas of Hayek and Sowell, and I'm not the only one

this book (Griftopia Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America) by Matt Taibbi explains it quite well

The filibuster book is kind of a ramble, obviously.

Reich's Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few is pretty devastating and echoes many of Bernie's themes. The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph Stiglitz is good too. And Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land.

> understanding mortgage backed securities

The Big Short

If you get a chance, read The Big Short by Michael Lewis. Fascinating book about the people who saw the fiasco coming.

Very succinct and efficient post!

I also suggest reading The Big Short (the movie helps as well, but comes across as very anti-wall street while the book helps you understand wall street decision making), as the 2007-8 housing market crisis really is still relevant and directly effective Fed Rev policy.

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

The government is not innocent in this as well, as bond institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both equally culpable, hence why they no longer exist.

Thomas Sowell discusses something related to this in several of his books, particularly A Conflict of Visions and Intellectuals and Society.

He can explain it in his words better than I can, so here's a short interview with him about the first book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyG1zmdh1pA

And a Cato review of A Conflict of Visions:
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/cato-journal/1987/11/cj7n2-17.pdf

> As Sowell conjectures, the commonly observable correlation and clustering in political opinions cannot be understood as simply reflecting some underlying structure of interests. A more appropriate account, he argues, must be given in terms of certain fundamental ideas or premises—referred to as “visions”—which, largely unarticulated, are behind and give coherence to people’s particular political opinions.

And an FEE review of Intellectuals and Society:
https://fee.org/articles/intellectuals-and-society/

Roughly, the distinction between the two "visions" is that one views the world through individuals operating in a way that is constrained by their circumstances and by how the world functions (the "constrained" vision). The other views the world in a purely "intellectual" way as though society as a whole can not only be understood, but manipulated, simply by defining how society ought to function (the "unconstrained" vision).

People with the unconstrained vision, in Sowell's view, simply don't need to understand ideas like Socialism or Fascism in terms of the mundane facts of how the words have been used in the past or how people behave under those systems, because they already understand these terms from their "intellectual" definitions. (That the people you're complaining about, unlike the academics Sowell is, don't know the academic definitions of the terms and instead go with their own definitions, is not particularly relevant; it's all about their "vision".)

Maybe read the book if you want to learn more about the story? Maybe the plot synopsis even?

Actually He's right. The Bank has the right to lend It to other people, Invest It and pretty much do whatever they want. What you have is the promise they'll give you back If you ask for It.

What regular people don't know is that the Bank has the right to take a USD100,00 deposit and basically lend those USD100,00 to about eight (E-I-G-H-T) different people. The law only makes them actually hold like, 20% of the money they put around.

That's why Bank runs are so frightening. If everybody wants to take their deposits out of the bank, the whole house of card.... err.. Bank collapses.

That's the world banking for you, normal folk. They are too big to fail.

Lesson 1 - The world financial system is designed to fuck with people's money and let them pay if something goes wrong.
Lesson 2 - That's why they don't teach financial education to the people, they only teach spending and debt.

Recommended reading: Griftopia and of course The Big Short. Please don't be a lazy man and just watch the movie (also awesome btw).

You're not wrong, read The Age of Em by Robin Hanson for more info on the topic.

Wow. Did you read what you posted?
"The only thing that ought to matter on a loan application is whether or not you can pay it back, not where you live."
Hard to disagree with that. This reg did not instruct anyone to give a lone to anyone who could not pay it back. I understand you would like to blame the government for all problems, but you really should read a bit more. Here is some suggestions:

https://www.amazon.com/Big-Short-Inside-Doomsday-Machine/dp/0393338827/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1521419400&sr=8-2&keywords=the+big+shorthttps://www.publicintegrity.org/2009/05/06/5449/roots-financial-crisis-who-blame
https://www.amazon.com/All-Devils-Are-Here-Financial-ebook/dp/B005DIAUN6/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521419495&sr=1-2&keywords=2008+financial+crisis

Really, lots of real info out there if you really want to know what happened and not just some political opinion.

I'm currently reading Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia" and I have the same feeling after almost every page. I actually have to put it down every now and then so my head doesn't explode.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. Fantastic book. Edited to add Amazon link.

The Spirit Level was the big book on the effects of inequality, but now it's the economist Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality, a monster of a researched book, with the biggest portion of a book with endnotes I've ever seen.

>No - you cannot dismiss my opinion in a political discussion forum by equating it to someone you do not like.

I mean, I think I can dismiss trite talking points that offer no substance. You offer no study, no statistics. You seem to feel so confident dismissing "opinion pieces" that cite IMF studies, and yet seem to be so taken aback that I may dismiss a rebuttal to statistical analysis that offers no more substance than a Rush Limbaugh-esque talking point. Perhaps even funnier is the way you essentially did exactly what you're railing against here,

>The IMF are simply economists paid by politicians.

As if you can simply invalidate the work of Nobel laureates and statistical analysis through a pithy remark.

>These statistics are no more than saying, "He's rich and that is not fair."

You are clearly woefully unfamiliar with the papers you're casually dismissing if that is what you think the analysis is.

You're trying to get into some weird pissing match with, it seems to me, someone you presume to think believes "hurr durr inequality=bad". If you would actually read these studies/articles you feel comfortable casually dismissing without giving more than a passing glance, you would realize the argument is that vast inequality ends up hurting everyone, including those who benefit from it in the short term, because it hampers overall economic growth and strangles the wallets of consumers.

It's not about what's "fair", it's about what makes the most economic sense. Read the IMF papers or the works of Joseph Stiglitz, to better understand why you just made a strawman.

read this book please, it will make your arguments better http://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Employment-Interest-Money/dp/1467934925/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1335802493&sr=8-1

I think you need to read up on what Bernie is proposing and where his ideas come from. So as long as we're throwing around links to books.

Barbarians at the Gate

The Box

And obviously The Big Short

Michael Lewis The Big Short