“Unlike economics, accounting is actually an incredibly useful tool.”
"People got really comfortable taking risk this week"
Censors are dead men
set up to judge between life and death.
For no live, sunny man would be a censor,
he’d just laugh.
I discovered by posting this chart that there is an amazing number of ignorant people - mostly econ majors and kids living at home - who have been indoctrinated to believe that inflation is really good for anyone other than people like Janet Yellen and Larry Fink.
For fun, here’s the Fed’s “QT” (semi-log!):
Cantillon Effect: "Corporate equities and mutual fund shares by wealth percentile group"
“QE is no more than monetary policy for rich people.”
“Janet [Yellen] was the strongest advocate for unlimited” quantitative easing.
- Betsy Duke, Fed Governor from 2008 to 2013
"When the world is plunged into the abyss every so often by the giants of finance, it must be pulled out by these pygmies, whilst the Goliaths sit and weep over their own bruises."
- Freeman Tilden, 1935
“Unlike economics, accounting is actually an incredibly useful tool.”
Nassim Taleb describes the typical FOMC Member
The Intellectual Yet Idiot (IYI) is a product of modernity, hence has been proliferating since at least the mid-twentieth century, to reach a local supremum today, to the point that we have experienced a takeover by people without skin in the game. In most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of gross domestic product). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and university social science departments—most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI, which explains how they can be so influential in spite of their low numbers.
The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “rednecks” or from the English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to themselves, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated.” What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when plebeians dare to vote in a way that contradicts IYI preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs, as these are needed in the club.
They are what Nietzsche called Bildungsphilisters—educated philistines. Beware the slightly erudite who thinks he is an erudite, as well as the barber who decides to perform brain surgery…
The IYI subscribes to The New Yorker, a journal designed so philistines can learn to fake a conversation about evolution, neurosomething, cognitive biases, and quantum mechanics. He never curses on social media. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality,” but never goes out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game, as, I will repeat until I am hoarse, the concept is fundamentally foreign to the IYI). The modern IYI has attended more than one TED talk in person or watched more than two TED talks on YouTube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seemed electable or some such circular reasoning, but he holds that anyone who didn’t do so is mentally ill…
The IYI has been wrong, historically, about Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, trans-fats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, marathon running, selfish genes, election-forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup), and p-values. But he is still convinced that his current position is right.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Havenstein Moment. to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.