- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmit.online
A Thai court has ordered the dissolution of the reformist party which won the most seats and votes in last yearās election - but was blocked from forming a government.
The ruling also banned Move Forwardās charismatic, young former leader Pita Limjaroenrat and 10 other senior figures from politics for 10 years.
The verdict from the Constitutional Court was expected, after its ruling in January that Move Forwardās campaign promise to change royal defamation laws was unconstitutional.
Itās fascinating to me that your example was South Korea. Thatās literally the place I had in mind when I talked about the working class organising to better their lives. They have deeply militant unions.
You know they had an honest to goodness general strike in 1997, right? And that they were specifically striking over laws that would legalise strikebreaking? Thatās going to have a tectonic effect on the quality of life of workers in general. They fought hard for their pay increases and got them. Thatās not attributable to market forces. Striking is literally a breakdown in market behaviour, where the bosses have squeezed so hard and so unfairly that the workers have to withdraw their labour in order to get what they need.
And every single workerās benefit we enjoy today was a function of labour activism. 8 hour days, the weekend, child labour laws, OSHA, I could go on. And all of those benefits are actively fought against by the ruling class because they erode their power over us and raise our wages.
Also, orthodox economics is basically the managerial class being funded by the owning class to come up with post-hoc justifications for why they should keep their wealth. Itās not scientific in the slightest. The Economist is basically neoliberal propaganda.
Chomskyās Manufacturing Consent goes into this in some detail, about the forces that act to ensure that the dominant media narrative caters to the ruling class on all levels, and he has talked extensively on how this process works in academia as well. I forget if the academic discussion is a large part of the documentary, but itās well worth watching anyway. Itās free on youtube: https://youtu.be/BQXsPU25B60
Alsoā¦ if you really think the Epstein network was just two or three peopleā¦ I mean wow. You know authorities seized a bunch of blackmail from his island, video of rich people with kids, and it has never surfaced since? Those same authorities ruled his death a suicide, because theyāre doing their best, honest, but they just canāt seem to find that missing collective brain cell that would let them figure out the blindingly obvious. Was that the one guy arranging that too?
Iām not saying the ultra wealthy run the network themselves, thatās what Iāve literally been saying they donāt do. The difference is if they got caught actually doing the deed, if would be a very different matter, because you physically cannot do that via proxy. Thatās how the blackmail can exist, and why it was covered up.
Oh and to answer your question about who their drug dealers are, they have middlemen for that as well. Personal assistants who are on call for anything the client needs, who will readily break the law rather than disappoint a client, and whose instructions are generally vague enough that any legal risk falls on the assistant. Again: diffusion of responsibllity.
Donāt kid yourself, the society of the wealthy and powerful is rotten to the core, just as it was in the days of monarchy. They just have better cover for it nowadays. Itās no longer the divine right of kings, but the invisible hand of the market.
It was a right-wing dictatorship up until that date, with the main union loyal to them. There was a reason so many sided with the North. Struggle against it later on took that shape of labour activism, which is interesting and new to me, but to say that industrialisation, which happened starting in the 60s, is due to labour organisation canāt be and isnāt correct. South Korean work hours are still famously insanely long, too.
As someone who actually understands a good chunk of it, no. Itās a strong theory with strong predictions. Maybe you should try it before you knock it. That magazine is just magazine, not a journal or anything related to the field.
Iām not familiar with the law of the area, but donāt they have to be able to prove it in order to rule it a homicide? I donāt believe in conspiracy theories in general, and doubt Iāll believe the one youāre proposing in specific until that changes.
Which dictator do you mean? The democracy movement and the June struggle was in 1987, 10 years before the general strike.
Also, neoliberal capitalism is very, very happy with right wing dictators because they love oppressing workers and lowering wages. Just look at Pinochet in Chile.
And again the June struggle was won by popular struggle, not market forces. The idea that the unions supported the dictator is a weird one too. Like, where are you getting that, and is there any evidence they werenāt just yellow unions approved by the dictator?
Even then I donāt know why you brought those things up. You just added a bunch of details and I guess assumed those details - some of which were very wrong - were somehow in support of some point, but you didnāt say what that point is.
And I donāt know why you think Iām talking about industrialisation when I talk about workers improving their lives. That is not at all what Iām talking about. And industrialisation isnāt a capitalist thing, they just happen to coincide in human history. We donāt have alternative Earths to test the idea, so crediting the gains of industrialisation to the market and capitalism is weird. You just put that out there completely unsupported.
Thatās another thing neoliberal economists love to do, just blame all the problems of capitalism on unions and regulations, and credit every good thing that happens on the glorious invisible hand.
And since you understand a good amount of economics, perhaps you can tell me what is the scientific basis of supply & demand for instance? Iāve looked for this information and had people try to show me, but theyāve never actually shown it. Itās a fundamental part of economics so Iām told. What is the science behind it? The perfectly straight, perpendicular bisecting lines on an unscaled graph do not suggest any scientific basis to me, they suggest the aesthetics of science devoid of its substance. If you could disabuse me of this notion then perhaps I could move on from my current woeful ignorance on the matter.
And finally, you donāt think thereās any conspiracy around Epstein, fine. I bet itās easy to maintain that idea when you just ignore all the evidence I gave you.
My SK history is fuzzy, Iāll admit. I knew it was authoritarian up until recently (which is why the North had support), and started developing earlier. I searched the rest. If I misunderstood the exact dates my apologies.
Yup, no argument. Iām still team eat the rich.
Iām sure thatās exactly what they were. No argument.
The point I was defending there is just that tiger economies work based on trade. The early USSR achieved the same thing by importing a bunch of ready-made US factories, and working from there. The West obviously did it very slowly and painfully over a couple centuries, with no outside competition. Japan sounds like it might have been a mix of the former three. That covers every successful example of development I know of.
I have trouble imagining a pre-industrial society that would beat the one we have for standard of living, so I think itās pretty synonymous with development, which is what this tangent was about.
Youāre right, thereās no alternative Earth to test. I suspect markets, ācapitalistā or not, are the only practical way to do it, but thatās just my guess.
Yeah, itās not supposed to be real, itās the simplified āno friction in a vacuumā case. The theory still roughly works (and seems to hold empirically) as long as the system is convex. If itās not, funny, bad things happen and you get Google, and market failure which roughly corresponds to enshittification. We had a whole historical period about breaking up monopolies, but unfortunately weāve backtracked, especially when computers are involved. Politicians are mostly old and afraid of computers.
Have I linked the yardsale model yet? Hmm, yes, but not to you. Behold, the economics reason for mass inequality. To go back to my recurring theme, itās dumb. The rich would much rather be called evil geniuses - a lot of them think of themselves that way - but theyāre not even.
Okay, so I think weāre largely in agreement except for a little misunderstanding. Iām glad because that means you might be a little more receptive to some of the stuff I might share. I have more links but Iām writing this novella on my phone if you can believe it. Iāll share them later.
My criticism about the professional class being paid by the owning class to justify their wealth was specifically about orthodox economics, like the Chicago School who would literally construct studies to justify whatever you wanted if you paid for it. The yardsale model - thatās a great link by the way, the graph that emerges perfectly mirrors our actual economy - is an example of heterodox economics, which largely stands in opposition to orthodox economics. The opener to that page is very well written. Itāll do a better job than me.
Now, for an example of how completely divorced from reality orthodox economics is, the market convexity concept is perfect. The exceptions you mentioned about veblen and giffen goods arenāt the main problem with convexity. The simple problem of inelastic demand is a much bigger problem. This is all couched in extremely obfuscating language, those articles are impenetrable to anyone who isnāt steeped in economics language.
I assume you know what inelasticity is, itās something for which demand doesnāt change with price, for instance things like shelter or food. So, to demystify the language, another term for āinelastic demandā is āneedā. Basically, if you read between the lines even slightly, the founding, econ 101, highschool level principle of orthodox economics has been forced to admit that it doesnāt work for anything anybody actually needs. And then they go on insisting that this principle should govern our entire society. Got to keep that yardsale going.
Market convexity is an amalgamation of post-hoc justifications for why supply & demand is so hard to find in the real world. When I mentioned the perfectly straight, bisecting, perpendicular lines graph, you admitted that was just an illustration, and I agree, it is a doodle. I know itās now in vogue to use slightly curved lines, but thatās just because economists are aware of how ridiculous the first illustration was and they put in just the slightest amount of extra effort to hide it.
When Iām asking for the science, let me ask you this: what data constructs the graph? Where did it originate? This is the question Iāve never had answered. Just literally the graph appearing in real world data, just one time.
See, when actual sciences want to āillustrateā a concept, sometimes they idealise, but they almost always have real data and real graphs to show. Their idealised lines pass through data points with error bars. Scientists work hard for their data, and they always, always show it off. Stress-strain curves, electron microscope images, star life-cycle data, red-shifting, animal population surveys, and on and on. Real data is complex and interesting and beautiful and scientists will show you their cool slide and say āyou can see such-and-such feature here and this indicatesā¦ā, itās great.
I have looked for the supply & demand version of this and can find nothing but hand-waving excuses.
Also, the convexity article talks about the Nobel Prize in Economics, which is wrongly named. It is the Nobel Memorial Prize. It was named after Nobel, because itās not a Nobel prize, because the Nobel prize committee rejected the economics category because it isnāt a real science. Some Swiss bank then financed the wish.com version Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
I suspect this isnāt so hard for you to accept since youāve already come so far in your understanding of heterodox economics. You still seem to have some respect for the orthodox schools, which is strange when you understand so much of where they have led us.
As for the Epstein thing, I donāt have any reason to believe that anything has changed. We know Epstein was part of the trafficking of minors, and absent any evidence about the state of that practice, the idea that removing two people from the network actually fundamentally altered anything seems hopelessly naive. I think the burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to claim the practice has been abolished.
Heterodox economics includes crazy stuff like the modern Austrian school, too, so itās not like itās one thing. I believe and hope the mainstream will come around to the yardsale model eventually.
Yes, this is a great explainer. Iāve linked it far more than anything else on any subject. People need to know.
Thereās degrees of need, though. You need food, but, like, prison rations are technically medically sufficient, and people often waste food when they arenāt worried about starving. Most things that are bought and sold in the West are definitively beyond the bare minimum for survival. The only thing I can think of that actually has a measured price elasticity of zero is higher education.
However, because we have massive inequality, effective demand doesnāt reflect actual demand very well. Thatās the source of evil here if you ask me.
What do you mean by that, exactly? Iāve seen supply and demand play out plenty just in my personal life. Houses are in massive shortage here, and as a result theyāre getting really expensive. On the other hand, itās cheap to get scrap metal, despite there having been times when a big chunk of steel costed more than a house. When a crop fails it gets expensive and I buy less tomatoes or whatever. Conversely, I visit the clearance section all the time and buy stuff nobody wanted for cheap.
Relatedly, part of why I buy orthodox economics is that every time I have to budget out a project or fundraiser or something, I pretty much see it in action. Thereās no free lunch; if thereās a productive human activity of some kind in demand, somebody else is doing it full time for a pretty normal salary. Already, in the current economic framework.
Econometrics, itās called econometrics.
Youāre not going to get quite the quality of data that you can with a cylinder of C-103 in a press, because humans are complicated, but what Iāve seen looks clearer than what youād get in, say, medicine.
Well, itās cost acceptable per unit on one axis (for each party), and the total units on the market on the other. Itās hard to collect data far away from the middle because in practice, because in practice amount of goods on the market doesnāt stray too far from equilibrium in the first place. If you just want the measured slopes at the middle, here you go, you can go to the citations for support.
Okay, thank you for the information about econometrics, but the economics that goes from data to model tends to be heterodox, not orthodox. Occasionally orthodox economists will accidentally do real science and they usually donāt like what they see.
My question was about why you donāt see the data being presented when being taught about supply and demand, and you basically answered it by saying that the data isnāt there. Now, I see your point that the prices tend to be relatively stable and so the data doesnāt extend beyond these short line slopes, but then why are we told that supply & demand āsets pricesā when there is no evidence of, for instance, a shock to the system upsetting prices which then follow a standard supply & demand curve to restabilise?
Well, because such a situation would not be āconvexā, so economics has written an escape clause for this phenomenon whereby it can avoid ever making any real predictions about what the market will do in a situation that isnāt already āstabilisedā.
And also, if itās just short line segments, why is it fashionable to use a curve that implies more data than exists? Again, I would say that it is to ape the aesthetics of science without actually doing it.
And itās very strange that you turn to your personal anecdotal experience to say that youāve āseen supply & demand play outā. If that were true, then you should be able to gather the data and present it. The fact that data doesnāt exist should tell you that you are probably using confirmation bias to evaluate your personal experiences.
For instance, the housing market is something where ideally there would be very inflexible demand, because people donāt need more than one bed, typically. The reason the demand is flexible is because there are in reality two markets in the same space. The first market is the people who want housing to actually live in, and the second are landlords that hoard housing, speculate and leverage assets against loans and so on. The landlord market is responsible for both the short housing supply and high price, because they would often rather keep housing scarce and drive up rents, and speculate against one another than put their property back out on the market to go to a competitor. Selling a property you canāt rent out is a pretty bad financial decision, youāre better off waiting until the housing market flips and it becomes a sellerās market again. If a financialised housing market didnāt exist, housing would be much cheaper and homelessness would be much, much less.
The reality of all markets is that they are subject to boom & bust cycles which supply & demand cannot account for. Housing in particular is notorious for huge bubbles that burst spectacularly.
Hereās an example from a government consumer watchdog in Australia: https://www.accc.gov.au/consumers/petrol-and-fuel/petrol-price-cycles-in-major-cities
Hereās the really damning sentence:
They straight up say that it is not about supply & demand.
Hereās the heterodox explanation of this phenomenon: the Supply Chain Theory of Inflation
EDIT: Actually this is a separate phenomenon, but it does emphasise how prices are set by sellers, and not by supply and demand. Wherever a seller can get away with changing their prices, like for instance in petrol sales, they will, but then it follows boom-bust, not supply-demand.
And this is where the authors of that article talk about how orthodox economics institutions will launder heterodox theories. The point of doing this would be to maintain their prestigious position as the arbiter of all economics knowledge, as a result of which any damage such information might do to existing insitutions can be dampened by orthodox economists putting their own spin on the information. If they never acknowledge where the theory comes from, they get to rewrite it however they want. Thatās distinctly unscientific.
I feel like Iāve seen that in person. When the pandemic hit here, petrol prices hit the floor, like less than half of what they usually are. After a while they went back up as the production end was slowed down to match. So thereās evidence, albeit not evidence you can really fit a whole curve to.
It could be convex. Thatās not even an economics term, itās math. In terms of gradient decent - like a market adjusting - it just means that the curves are āroundā as opposed to having weird little pockets that it can get stuck in. A counterexample would be something where decreasing the price actually decreases sales, with Veblen goods being an obvious example - nobody would buy Gucci if it was just slightly more expensive than a normal bag. Graphed out, that looks like a hump in a curve (supplier profit, I think), until Gucci bags come out the other side where theyāre cheap enough to compete as normal bags, as opposed to status items.
It creates a ālocal minimumā where the market can stabilise (it usually is -ise in British spelling) in a way thatās counterproductive. You can talk about it in terms of second derivatives, too, but unless youāre actually crunching numbers the marginal change of marginal price is unintuitive and unhelpful.
As you add more dimensions things get more complicated. Giffen goods happen when each good individually follows convex logic, but not when you rotate the resulting (hyper-)surfaces into a coordinate basis where cross elasticities become important. The math stays the same, though.
I mean, nobodyās ever observed a part of the Sombrero potential other than the very bottom, but Higgs theory doesnāt make sense without the rest. That on itās own isnāt a point against economics, or QFT. In fact, the physics example is arguably more of a stretch, because itās supposed to be precise, as opposed to just a model.
You could critcise economics for only offering models, but thatās all of social sciences, and will be so for the foreseeable future.
I expect someone has been recording it, actually. I suppose Iāll actually go looking out of respect for you.
I know many people with a guest bedroom.
Hah, no. Nearly as often the market will keep going the way you donāt want, and the whole time youāre not earning on your principle. Eventually, it has always gone up again, but thereās no time limit on that - look at Detroit - and if the population stops growing in your country real estate becomes deflationary for good. Meanwhile, if you had just put it in an index fund youāre going to earn 10% interest per year, on average. If you go bonds it might only be 4%, but itās almost guaranteed.
If you have literally any money saved, ādonāt try to time the marketā is the first thing that every advisor will tell you. Itās a dirty open secret that the big investors on wallstreet donāt actually beat the market, either.
At the small scale, yes. The economy is noisy. There are also cases where it does bad stuff at the big scale, but they tend to correspond to nonconvexities.
Iāll look into Australia when I have the time. I have to go pretty quick, though.
That sounds right.
Cynical and unfair? Definitely. Unscientific? No, academics is pretty much always like that; hard sciences too. You think you get tenure just by being the most honest?
Science itself is fine if worthy ideas make it to the top. Making the process fair is still a pipe dream. Gregori Perelman straight up refused the Abel Medal over this kind of shit.
My point about convexity being a handily-written escape clause was not to say that economists invented it out of whole-cloth, itās to point out that itās tautological. Itās basically saying, āPrices follow our law in all of the cases where they follow our law.ā So itās not a law then, is it? Itās an observation of extremely limited utility that just so happens to provide a justifying narrative: āour law says the market will be stable,ā when we see the absolute opposite in many places.
And if you feel like youāve seen it in person, then again the data should exist. Again Iād say if youāre saying this is an example of the effect, without seeing the data, then youāre admitting out loud that you are just confirming your own preconcieved ideas rather than seeing any real evidence. These are statements of faith, not science. Orthodox economists would be proud.
Iām not sure what you mean about the sombrero potential only being partially observed. It is a principle only, and you could observe it fully by simply making a sombrero shape and putting a ball in the middle and observing how it falls multiple times. Thatās literally what the concept entails. Itās analogous to supply & demand in that the graphs are merely illustrative and it is only applicable in very specific situations. The difference is that supply & demand is presented as a foundational and ubiquitous law to high-school students, whereas the sombrero potential is presented honestly.
As for the ādonāt try to time the marketā advice, if youāre right about that then someone should tell all the real estate speculators that are leaving extremely expensive real estate empty because they canāt rent it out and donāt want to sell at a low price. It would help our housing shortage immensely. Either they donāt exist, or your story about that isnāt complete.
I donāt need you to look into Australia - price cycles and boom-bust cycles are well-documented economic phenomena. I linked an Australian case because Iām familiar with it.
And to the extent that other sciences engage in politics over actual science, they are also being unscientific. However Iāve never heard of a scientific discipline where there is an āorthodoxā school, except in economics. Itās the orthodox school that I have a problem with. Supply & demand is just emblematic of that issue.