좌파들이 이해하듯이, 교육은 기계적으로 생산되고, 형태 없이 전체에 흡수되고 가공되는 그런 게 아니라, 개별적이고 구체적이다. 그리고 때론 교실에서 배울 수 없다. 다수의 재벌들이 대학을 졸업하지 않았다.

좌파들의 교육을 당대 지식계층의 의견을 따르는 것으로 이해하고 있다. 하지만 현실 및 일상의 사람들과 격리된 현재의 환경에서 참다운 교육은 나타날 수 없다.

 

 

The Political Left’s Shmoo Theory of Education

 

 

Matt McCaffrey is assistant professor of enterprise at the University of Manchester.

 

 

“Uneducated” is the favorite insult and excuse of the political left. In the past year alone, for example, a lack of education among voters has been used to explain each of the left’s electoral failures, as well as to dismiss criticisms of its people, policies, and institutions. These defenses are dubious to say the least. Yet setting aside the strategic choices of left-wing political groups, the obsession with un-education reveals that there are serious problems with the way education is understood by the intellectual classes.

 

Most importantly, the popular use of the word “education” suffers from the same error as the mainstream economic use of the word “capital.” This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that education is often metaphorically described as “human capital.” The error is that both capital and education are thought of as a kind of “homogeneous blob,” or “shmoo.” A shmoo is elastic and can be molded by the user into any shape necessary, and it’s therefore equally serviceable in all possible uses. Anyone who wants to use it as a production input must simply decide how much to apply to a specific problem.

 

In reality, of course, capital and education are both highly heterogeneous. The structure of production is extremely delicate and difficult to organize, and so too is the structure of human knowledge.

 

Unfortunately, this fact escapes those intellectuals who concern themselves with other people’s lack of education: in current discourse, education is a homogeneous good acquired exclusively through obtaining formal degrees. To lack a college degree is to lack education, while the more degrees one acquires, the better educated one is. Importantly, all education is equally serviceable across all areas of expertise. English majors can talk about economics, and physicists can talk about politics. But anyone who isn’t a product of the university education system is barred from participating in these discussions.

 

It should be easy to spot the errors in this kind of thinking. First, no matter what kind of education we pursue, we don’t simply add new blobs of it to a big pile. Instead, we acquire specific, distinct types of knowledge which vary widely in their serviceability. Second, and more important, education is not equivalent to obtaining degrees. It means different things in different contexts, and the education that takes place in higher education institutions reflects only a specific and narrow type of learning. Depending on one’s area of study, this kind of learning can often lack relevance outside the classroom, and in this sense, it actually undermines the role of education as a practical tool for learning how to create value within society. This is part of the reason why university-educated people flock to the intellectual class to begin with.

 

In fact, sometimes obtaining the relevant kind of education is impossible within higher education. To take some obvious examples, many of the most successful and world-changing entrepreneurs of the past few decades have been college dropouts. Needless to say, they’ve given a bit more to the human race than the average Huffington Post writer. On a smaller scale, Mises was fond of pointing out that consumers are often better educated about the state of the economy than many economists.

 

“Education” is another example of a kind of rhetorical imperialism that has already captured words like “science” and “evidence.” The bias in favor of “education” is basically a bias in favor of the opinions of the contemporary intellectual classes, and a devotion to the status quo in higher education. The intellectuals treat education as a shmoo because often, that’s exactly what it is to them: simply another word for describing their own collection of homogeneous opinions and concepts, which they believe should form the sum of all discussion. Fortunately, more and more people are beginning to realize that true education does not and cannot thrive in this environment, which increasingly closes itself off from the real world and the people in it. This is the perfect time for organizations like the Mises Institute to take up the challenge of bringing genuine learning to the masses, both inside and outside the academy.

 

금리는 시간 선호에 어떻게 영향을 미치나

How Interest Rates Affect Time Preference — and Vice Versa

 

 

Frank Shostak

 

 

According to the writings of Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, the driving force of interest rate determination is individual’s time preferences. What is this all about?

 

As a rule, people assign a higher valuation to present goods versus future goods. This means that present goods are valued at a premium to future goods.

 

This stems from the fact that a lender or an investor gives up some benefits at present. Hence, the essence of the phenomenon of interest is the cost that a lender or an investor endures.

 

On this Mises wrote,

 

 

That which is abandoned is called the price paid for the attainment of the end sought. The value of the price paid is called cost. Costs are equal to the value attached to the satisfaction which one must forego in order to attain the end aimed at.

 

According to Carl Menger:

 

 

To the extent that the maintenance of our lives depends on the satisfaction of our needs, guaranteeing the satisfaction of earlier needs must necessarily precede attention to later ones. And even where not our lives but merely our continuing well-being (above all our health) is dependent on command of a quantity of goods, the attainment of well-being in a nearer period is, as a rule, a prerequisite of well-being in a later period. ... All experience teaches that a present enjoyment or one in the near future usually appears more important to men than one of equal intensity at a more remote time in the future.

 

Likewise, according to Mises,

 

 

Satisfaction of a want in the nearer future is, other things being equal, preferred to that in the farther distant future. Present goods are more valuable than future goods.

 

An individual who has just enough resources to keep him alive is unlikely to lend or invest his paltry means.

 

The cost of lending, or investing, to him is likely to be very high — it might even cost him his life if he were to consider lending part of his means. Therefore, under this condition he is unlikely to lend, or invest even if offered a very high interest rate.

 

Once his wealth starts to expand the cost of lending, or investing, starts to diminish. Allocating some of his wealth towards lending or investment is going to undermine to a lesser extent our individual’s life and wellbeing at present.

 

From this we can infer, all other things being equal, that anything that leads to an expansion in the real wealth of individuals gives rise to a decline in the interest rate, i.e., the lowering of the premium of present goods versus future goods.

 

Conversely, factors that undermine real wealth expansion lead to a higher interest rate.

 

Time Preference and Supply Demand for Money

 

In the money economy, individuals’ time preferences are realized through the supply and the demand for money.

 

The lowering of time preferences (i.e., lowering the premium of present goods versus future goods on account of real wealth expansion) will become manifest in a greater eagerness to lend and invest money and thus lowering of the demand for money.

 

This means that for a given stock of money there will be an increase in the excess supply of money.

 

To get rid of the excess, people start buying various assets, in the process raising asset prices, and lowering their yields, all other things being equal. Hence, the increase in the pool of real wealth will be associated with a lowering in the interest rate structure.

 

The converse will take place with a fall in real wealth. People will be less eager to lend and invest, thus raising their demand for money relative to the previous situation.

 

This for a given money supply reduces the excess money. Consequently, all other things being equal this lowers the demand for assets and thus lowers their prices and raises their yields.

 

What Central Banks Intervene

 

What will happen to interest rates because of an increase in money supply? An increase in the supply of money, all other things being equal, means that those individuals whose money stock has increased are now much wealthier. Hence, this sets in motion a greater willingness to invest and lend money.

 

The increase in lending and investment means the lowering of the demand for money by the lender and by the investor. Consequently, an increase in the supply of money coupled with a fall in the demand for money raises the excess supply of money, which in turn bids the prices of assets higher and lowers their yields.

 

As time goes by the rise in price inflation starts to undermine the well-being of individuals and this leads to a general rise in time preferences. This lowers individuals’ tendency for investments and lending (i.e., raises the demand for money and works to lower the excess money supply growth rate), and this puts an upward pressure on interest rates.

 

In a market economy, within the framework of a central bank, the key factor that undermines the pace of real wealth expansion is the monetary policy of the central bank. It is loose monetary policy that undermines the stock of real wealth and the purchasing power of money.

 

We can thus conclude that a general increase in price inflation, because of an increase in money supply and a fall in real wealth, are factors that set in motion a general rise in interest rates. A general fall in price inflation in response to a fall in money supply and a rise in real wealth are factors that set in motion a general fall in interest rates.

 

Furthermore, an increase in the growth momentum of money supply sets in motion a temporary fall in interest rates. Meanwhile, a fall in the growth momentum of money supply sets in motion a temporary increase in interest rates.

 

Note again that changes in excess money supply mirror the interaction between changes in supply – demand for money.

 

정부 규제는 어떻게 우리를 가난하게 만드나

 

How Government Regulation Makes Us Poorer

자유주의 학자인 퍼 비런드(Per Bylund)가 출판한 책 <The Seen, the Unseen, and The Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives>에 대해, 미제스 기자와 퍼 비런드가 나눈 대화

 

2016년 12월 26일

 

This year, Mises Institute Associated Scholar Per Bylund released The Seen, the Unseen, and The Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives. We recently spoke with Professor Bylund about his book and how the effects of government regulation are more far-reaching and more damaging than many people realize.

 

 

MISES INSTITUTE: Why is the concept of the “unseen” so important to understanding the effects of regulation?

 

PER BYLUND: It is essential for understanding regulation, but the “unseen” is actually fundamental for economic understanding and analysis in general. What’s “unseen” is the proper benchmark. We need to consider both what didn’t happen but would have happened.

 

Oftentimes people, including so-called experts, compare apples and oranges by looking at data “before” and “after” an event, for instance, when discussing the effects of raising the minimum wage. So they might say that employment before was similar to after the hike, and then conclude that the change had no effect. But this is wrong, because there are plenty of changes in the economy that took place between the before and after — not only the minimum wage. So in order to figure out the effect of the minimum wage specifically, we must compare the “after” situation with what would have been had there been no minimum wage hike — the unseen.

 

This of course applies to any change in the economy, and not only regulation. Bastiat, in his classic essay on the broken window fallacy, discusses the effects as a boy smashes a window. But in modern state-planned economies, regulation is by far the most common and most destructive change, so that’s where we also find most analysis. As economic analysis is used to assess the effects of regulations before they’re implemented, it’s important to use the proper comparisons — the seen and the unseen, not the seen at different times (before and after).

 

MI: You also employ the concept of “the unrealized.”

 

PB: The unrealized is really my own extension to Bastiat’s famous analysis, and it is intended to redirect our attention from the macro level of the economy to how changes affect individuals — and especially what options they’re presented with. The point of the book is to show that regulating one part of the economy will have effects throughout the economic system, and that this type of artificial restriction will lead to some people being stripped of the choices they otherwise would have.

 

I exemplify this with the sweatshop, which is often argued against using only “the seen.” The working conditions are terrible in a sweatshop, especially compared to our cushy jobs in the West. Ben Powell and others have done great work pointing out that there’s also the unseen in the sense that without the sweatshop those workers would be in even worse shape. In fact, they are very eager to get jobs in the sweatshop because they’re so much better than all other options they have.

 

With the “unrealized,” however, I think we get a more nuanced picture. I argue that the reason the sweatshop workers make a choice between the hard work in a sweatshop, and something that is much worse, is regulation. Had this been a free market, then there would likely have been many businesses offering jobs in sweatshops, and they would probably compete with each other by offering higher pay, better work conditions, and so on. There’s obviously money to be made from running sweatshops, so why don’t more businesses do this?

 

The existence of a sweatshop shows that the market is sufficiently developed to support it: the technology and capital structure, including transportation and supply chains, are obviously there. The economic conditions also speak in favor of sweatshops over toiling in the fields and the other much worse options sweatshop workers are presented with. The workers are more productive in sweatshops. So there’s really no reason why there wouldn’t be competition for their labor by several sweatshops. But, the many options that should be there aren’t.

 

So it’s likely that something is restricting the creation of these other options. Those other businesses that never came to be are the unrealized alternatives, and the argument in the book is that these options would have been available had it not been for regulation.

 

Moreover, those regulations can really be very distant from these workers, since a restriction redirects economic actors to other, and comparatively less valuable, actions. In turn, the regulations have ripple effects — a type of Cantillon effect, you might say — throughout the economy as seen actions replace the unseen, or what should have been.

 

These other things happen instead of what should have happened, if actors had not been arbitrarily restricted by regulations. But, these “other things” are suboptimal and harm people since they’re not what people would have chosen to do in the absence of the regulations. In this sense, a regulation anywhere in the economy causes harm, and this harm primarily affects those with little or no influence over policy or the means to avoid it. So the major harm is on poor people in poor countries, even where regulations appear to be limited to relatively rich people in rich countries.

 

MI: In the case of a business being regulated, how much of that burden falls directly on that business? Are other groups — such as the customers — affected by the regulations also?

 

PB: It really depends on the business. Regulations make it costlier to act — and therefore some actions are no longer profitable when they would have been otherwise. So, for those businesses that lack political influence and aren’t the most effective, a regulation may decide whether there is a business or not. At the same time, businesses that survive the regulation might benefit from a protected situation because the regulation raises barriers to entry. This is why, for instance, it is rational for Walmart to support a high minimum wage — it will hurt Walmart’s competitors more than it hurts Walmart.

 

The real losers are common people who, as consumers, do not get the valuable goods and services they otherwise would have, and, as producers, cannot find the jobs they otherwise would. The winners are the incumbents, at least short-term, and — as always — the political class.

 

MI: You refer to markets using terms like “messy,” “approximate,” and “imperfect.” Isn’t this an argument against markets? Can’t government regulation give us more rational results?

 

PB: On the contrary, the messiness is an argument for markets. Rational government planning might be doable in an economy with fixed boundaries. That is, where there is no growth, no new value creation, and thus the “extent” of the market stays the same. But there are no such economies in the real world, and I’m not sure it is even possible long-term. An economy is really the combined uses of resources devoted to satisfying wants. So, it is inconceivable to have an economy that doesn’t get better over time — or which malfunctions and declines. In an entrepreneurially driven and creative market process, there is no basis for planning an economy through a governmental central plan. I elaborate on how this process of market expansion happens in my previous 2016 book, The Problem of Production: A New Theory of the Firm (Routledge).

 

Growth and entrepreneurship in a market is not so much about allocating existing resources within the market as it is about speculating about how resources can be created and used in more valuable ways. The market is a creative enterprise always aiming for the future and satisfying more wants and newly discovered wants. Thus, a governmental regulator or central planner has no data to use in making a “rational” plan because the data doesn’t exist yet. That’s the problem with central planning — you cannot plan with only unknowns and unknowables. That’s also why markets are messy, but decentralized decision-making within a profit-and-loss system generates the very structure needed for such decision-making.

 

MI: But in a purely unregulated economy, won’t businesses exploit workers?

 

PB: I conclude exactly the opposite in the book. There’s a case to be made for Marxist-type exploitation of workers in factories, perhaps more so in countries where there are sweatshop-style factories than elsewhere. But, the reason for this exploitation is regulation. Had the workers not been stripped of their choices — the unrealized — they wouldn’t be satisfied with the sweatshop jobs they’re relatively content with as things are today. Exploitation is not so much a result of capitalists paying workers less than they otherwise could have been paid. It is a result of the workers’ options having been taken away. The business with a sweatshop in a poor country isn’t the party taking away workers’ options. The business is the one giving workers an option. It’s not as good as it otherwise would’ve been, but that’s not necessarily the fault of the business. What hurts the workers — and keeps them poor by not putting sufficient competitive pressure on the business — is regulation, which restricts competition, and thus empowers business at workers’ expense.

 

So the issue of exploitation, and especially how to get rid of it, is a matter of finding the real and ultimate cause of the situation. It’s usually not a matter of employers having “power” over the worker. Such power does not occur naturally, but is caused by something, and my argument suggests that the employers’ economic power is a symptom, but not the cause. The real cause is government regulation.

 

진정한 평등은 확률의 평등이다. 시스템이 참가자에게 위험을 부담하게 하면 부패하지 않는다.

 

탈레브는 불평등이 문제가 아니라, 가난한 사람이 부자가 되고, 부자가 가난해지는 그런 시스템의 부재가 진정한 문제의 본질이라고 말한다. 기회가 있으면 가난한 사람도 부자가 될 수 있어야 하고, 부자 역시 사업하다 망하면 가난뱅이가 되어야 한다. 하지만 관료들이 각종 규제와 부패의 사슬로 가난한사람들은 영원히 가난뱅이로 머물러 있게 하고, 부자는 내내 부자로 살게 하고 있다.

 

<Inequality and Skin in the Game>

탈레브의 글 발췌

 

 

In this chapter I will propose that effectively what people resent –or should resent –is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting the income or wealth bracket, and getting to the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractors of Donald Trump, when he was a candidate, failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, they removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) one may have towards him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.

 

Take also the two following remarks:

 

True equality is equality in probability

 

and

 

Skin in the game prevents systems from rotting

 

 

The Static and the Dynamic

 

Visibly, a problem with economists (particularly those who never really worked in the real world) is that they have mental difficulties with things that move and are unable to consider that things that move have different attributes from things that don’t –it may be trivial but reread Chapter [3] on IYIs if you are not convinced. That’s the reason complexity theory and fat tails are foreign to most of them; they also have (severe) difficulties with the mathematical and conceptual intuitions required for deeper probability theory. Blindness to ergodicity which we will define a few paragraphs down, is indeed in my opinion the best marker separating a genuine scholar who understands something about the world, from an academic hack who partakes of a ritualistic paper writing.

 

Dynamic (ergodic) inequality takes into account the entire future and past life

 

 

You do not create dynamic equality just by raising the level of those at the bottom, but rather by making the rich rotate –or by forcing people to incur the possibility of creating an opening.

 

The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent

 

 

Our condition here is stronger than mere income mobility. Mobility means that someone can become rich. The no absorbing barrier condition means that someone who is rich should never be certain to stay rich.

 

Let me explain ergodicity –something that we said is foreign to the intelligentsia; we will devote an entire section as we will see it cancels most crucial psychological experiments related to probability and rationality. Take a cross sectional picture of the U.S. population. You have, say, a minority of millionaires in the one percent, some overweight, some tall, some humorous. You also have a high majority of people in the lower middle class, school yoga instructors, baking experts, gardening consultants, spreadsheet theoreticians, dancing advisors, and piano repairpersons. Take the percentages of each income or wealth bracket (note that income inequality is flatter than that of wealth). Perfect ergodicity means that each one of us, should he live forever, would spend the proportion of time in the economic conditions of segments of that entire cross-section: out of, say, a century, an average of sixty years in the lower middle class, ten years in the upper middle class, twenty years in the blue collar class, and perhaps one single year in the one percent.

 

 

An absorbing barrier is like a trap, once in, you can’t get out, good or bad. A person gets rich by some process, then having arrived, as they say, he stays rich. And if someone enters the lower middle class (from above); he will never have the chance to exit from it and become rich should he want to, of course –hence will be justified to resent the rich. You will notice that where the state is large, people at the top tend to have little downward mobility –in such places as France, the state is chummy with large corporations and protects their executives and shareholders from experiencing such descent; it even encourages their ascent.

 

 

Pikketism and the Revolt of the Mandarin Class

 

Any form of control of the wealth process –typically instigated by bureaucrats –tended to lock people with privileges in their state of entitlement. So the solution was to allow the system to destroy the strong, something that worked best in the United States.

 

Simply, it looks like it is the university professors (who have arrived) and people who have permanent stability of income, in the form of tenure, governmental or academic, who bought heavily in the argument. From the conversations, I became convinced that these people who counterfactual upwards (i.e. compare themselves to those richer) wanted to actively dispossess the rich. As will all communist movements, it is often the bourgeois or clerical classes that buy first into the argument.

 

 

세계화의 불만이 아니라, 주류 경제학의 붕괴이다.

 

며칠 전 정치학자 아이언 브레머는 그의 트위터에서, 지난 몇 년 동안 상위 1%의 소득은 늘어난 반면, 나머지 99%의 소득은 줄었든 도표를 보여주고, 그 제목을 <세계화와 그 불만>이라고 붙였다.

 

 

 

 

또 영국 출신 사학자 닐 퍼거슨은 트럼프 현상을 표퓰리즘으로 이해하고 있다. 즉 세계화로 인한 소득 양극화로 인해, 가진 자와 가지지 못한 자들의 차이가 너무 벌어졌고, 트럼프가 가지지 못한 자들의 불만과 분노를 이용해 당선되었다는 것이다.

 

세계화가 선진국들의 소득을 일정 부분 감소시킨 것은 사실이다. 하지만 나는 그보다 근본적인 원인은 복잡계를 관리할 수 있다는 오만에서 출발한 주류 경제학과 케인즈 경제학의 실패이고, 또 선진국들이 취해온 복지정책과 관료주의의 실패라고 생각한다.

 

주류경제학과 케인즈 경제학은 중앙에서 몇몇 관료가 경제를 통제할 수 있다는 오만과 무지에 기반을 두고 있다. 하지만 그들이 이용하는 통계 숫자는 이미 지나간 과거의 자료들일 뿐이다. 그것은 미래를 예측할 수 있는 자료들이 아니다. 케인즈 정책은 흥청망청 소비하면 번영이 올 수 있다는 잘못된 생각에 바탕해 시장에 꾸준히 돈을 풀어왔다. 그 결과 캉티용 효과로 인해 빈부의 차이는 더욱더 벌어졌다.

 

또 역시 중앙 관료의 통제를 기본 바탕으로 한 복지정책과 관료주의로 인해, 시민들의 자유는 축소되었고, 그들은 관료들의 지배와 관리를 받는 얌전한 양으로, 또 국가에 기생하는 기생충같은 존재로 전락했다.

 

그런데 이 모든 게 점점 와해되고 붕괴하고 있는 것이다. 그것은 공산주의 유토피아가 70여 년의 실험 끝에 붕괴한 것과 같은 현상이다. 경제의 원칙을 어겼기 때문이다. 자연의 법칙을 어기고 사람이 허공을 날아다닐 수 없듯이, 경제의 기본 원칙을 어기고, 허공에서 계속 돈을 찍어 번영을 지속할 수는 없는 것이다.

 

하지만 주유 경제학의 몰락 뒤에 자유주의 경제학이 나타나야 하지만, 한국 같은 경우는 역으로 다시 사회주의를 실험해보고 싶은 일단의 정치인들이 있다. 소위 진보라 불리는 이들 정치인들이 지금 한국 사회의 가장 위험한 폭발물이다.

 

  <대한민국, 이렇게 망한다>  위퍼블에서 독립 출판, 판매 중.

  대한민국이 왜 망해가는지 알고 싶은 분은 이 책을 읽어보시길 바랍니다.

 

 

  

 

살라피즘은 종교가 아닌 정치 조직이다. 소수자의 법칙에서 보듯이, 비타협적인 소수가 타협적인 다수를 압도하게 된다. 살라피스트들이 정권을 잡게 되면, 당신의 아내는 부르키니를 입게 된다.

 

아래 글은 나심 탈레브의 글 <We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We talk about Religion>의 일부이다.

 

No, for Baal’s sake, stop calling Salafism a “Religion”

 

The problem with the European Union is that the naive I.Y.I. (intellectuals yet idiots) bureaucrats and representatives of the talking “elites” (these fools who can’t find a coconut on Coconut island) are fooled by the label. They treat Salafism as just a religion –with its houses of “worship” — when in fact it is just an intolerant political system, which promotes (or allows) violence and refuses the institutions of the West –those that allow them to operate. Unlike Shiite Islam and Ottoman Sunnis, Salafis refuse to accept the very notion of minorities: infidels pollute their landscape. As we saw with the minority rule, the intolerant will run over the tolerant; cancer requires being stopped before it becomes metastatic.

 

IYIs, being naive and label driven, would have a different attitude towards Salafis if theirs was labelled as a political movement, similar to Nazism, with their dress code an expression of such beliefs. Banning burkinis may become palatable for them if it were made similar to banning swastikas: these people you are defending, young IYI, will deprive you of all the rights you are giving them, should they ascend to power and would force your spouse to wear a burkini.

 

 

    Some beliefs are largely decorative, some are functional (they help in survival); others are literal. And to revert to our metastatic Salafi problem: when one of these fundamentalists talks to a Christian, he is convinced that the Christian is literal, while the Christian is convinced that the Salafi has the same oft-metaphorical concepts to be taken seriously but not literally –and, often, not very seriously. Religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Shiite Islam, evolved (or let their members evolve in developing a sophisticated society) precisely by moving away from the literal –for, in addition to the functional aspect of the metaphorical, the literal doesn’t leave any room for adaptation .

 

So not only Salafism is not a religion, but it is not even a workable political system; just something someone came up with to imprison people in the seventh century Arabian Peninsula.