Ronald Coase
On X
2009
There's plenty of beauty in Economics Paul, but that works okay: Coase's Thm, Arrow's Impossibility Thm, Fixed Pt Thms, etc...
VaR -> Kayfabe | Coase -> Economics | Stable Tastes -> Kayfabe | Arrow's Theorem -> Economics | Rep. Consumer -> Kayfabe | B. Scholes-> Econ
"Economists could not understand how so fine an economist as Coase could make so obvious a mistake." -UChicago peer reviews Coase [Stigler]
"[After] 2 hours of argument, the vote went from 20 against and 1 for Coase to 21 for Coase." -Chicago Econ. reviews itself. [Stigler]
@ubfid Hi Fergus. The Stigler quotes come from the 'Eureka!' chapter in his autobiography: http://bit.ly/CoaseStigler
2010
I guessed wrong when I first heard Coase's theorem phrased as an economics puzzle. No shame in that: it's as deep as it is elegant.
To me, Coase's result is simultaneously radical in opposite political directions by decoupling efficiency & distribution via securitization.
Via revealed preference, Coase seems to me a modern Solomon asking "Do you really love efficiency, or do you plead before us to seek rent?"
2017
1/ I was in multiple closed rooms where experts told me over and over "Well of course we can never say that to the public/donors/students/patients/voters." Cambridge MA, Washington D.C., New York. And now, San Francisco too where it hit quite a few years later.
2/ Let me tell you what we've been lying about (in elite terminology) on MAJOR issues one by one: immigration, trade, STEM, mortgage backed securities and self-regulation, terror, fake news and conspiracy. [I will need to run a few errands now, but will return here later today.]
@MiriamMakEnergy Sorry Miriam: The laypeople don't speak the academy's language so the academy resists the laity and disparages them. Renegade experts who are tired of the expert cartels' embargo against sharing more deep expertise with the laity can translate the laity to the cartels. Helpful?
3/ IMMIGRATION: EXPERT LIES Experts lie about work based immigration as needed for free markets to remove a tiny 'Harberger Triangle' of inefficiency. It is the reverse: an uncompensated taking of citizen's rights without securitization to transfer a massive 'Borjas Rectangle'.
4/ IMMIGRATION (CONTINUED). In free markets, citizens TRADE their rights of preferential labor market access a la Coase's theorem. The giant Borjas Rectangle would stay w/ labor. Inequality could reverse. Women/minorities would enter. Income might again rise. Foreigners welcomed.
5/ IMMIGRATION (CONTINUED). Here is an expert article I wrote on the subject (peer reviewed, UN sponsored Journal): https://t.co/RpUWq1vj4Z
Of course the expert community pretends it isn't there as they support a wealth transfer through forced takings of workers' livelihoods.
6/ TRADE: EXPERT LIES. In the theory of trade, lies are deeply layered. First there is a nonsensical emphasis on Pareto improvement (as if that was a meaningful social welfare function) & a denial of cardinal utility to stop diminishing returns arguments being applied to wealth.
7/ TRADE (continued): [ for @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg ] Then we substitute a Kaldor-Hicks standard for Pareto welfare as if we were going to tax winners to pay losers. Which trade economists laugh about. Because what factory worker ever heard of “unimplemeted Kaldor-Hicks”.
8/ As the grandson of a seamstress, a door2door used clothing salesman, a self educated chemist thrown out of work for his politics and a female college grad who couldn’t work in a man’s world, it feels great to stand as a STEM PhD speaking the language of the academy for them.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom 9/TRADE (CONT.): Then there‘s the appearance of “Comparative Advantage” which was recently revealed as an iron clad Exoteric explanation trade experts give to all but each other because the real Esoteric is “too complex” for the rest of us & has holes.
@LibertyRBlack The seamstress and the Shmata salesman.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Nah. It’s about institutional betrayal. Nobody resents Elon Musk or Tony Stark for wealth. The poor want experts.
And I’m just looking to you & Sam as my fellow experts to help me try to stop those betrayed from sending a wrecking-ball through the infrastructure of our world.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Oh cool. “Institutional Betrayal” is an academic theory for trauma differentiation of @jjforegon. You in particular should find it interesting I think. People betrayed by institutions with mandates to care for them behave differently re trauma.
Helps to explain a lot in 2008-17.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg Also, the public that is HIGH agency is looking for alternate non-institutional experts: @nntaleb @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @SamHarrisOrg @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker etc....
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg
These are from trade theorist @paulkrugman in his “Protectionist Moment” piece. I’m not trying to win here. I’m worried that you aren’t watching how this neo-liberal edifice is being abandoned because the expert’s public stance was a lie. https://t.co/335ziGS6Sj
@GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman That doesn’t solve it. Are the Harvard and UChicago Econ departments elite or expert? National Academy complex? Same question. NPR? CFR?
Where are the non-elite experts? They are off the institutional grid. They were disappeared. They don’t exist. Yet they are my Shabbat guests.
@GodDoesnt @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Same here. All I’m saying is the institutional elites compromise their institutional experts. Every day, institutional experts are free to speak against their institution’s bias. It’s the next day when survivor bias kicks in. Now repeat across non-financially independent experts.
@fazinga They are typically educated at top universities. They are typically in non-standard employment. I frequently don’t like what they are saying as it is often disturbing.
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom 10/TRADE (CONT.) Look at the slide & listen to this talk from a former Clinton administration economist. Notice the words 'Esoteric' vs. 'Exoteric'. Claiming the real arguments are too complex to math guys like me is laughable: https://t.co/Tbf9GTl343 https://t.co/YGM8KdXmdf
11/ TRADE (CONT.) Now what happened when @PiaMalaney, a Harvard PhD Economist finally got to explain to the 'experts' why the world is rejecting experts, and in their own professional language? She's *totally* ignored by the panel.
As if nothing happened. https://t.co/r9jNDgk3Ei https://t.co/oXko1AShoG
@SamHarrisOrg @RadioFreeTom
12/ End.
I'll pause here. But there's an entire world of Ivy-Level experts who the public suspects exist. People who have paid for their integrity with their careers. Either undisappear these good folks ... or prepare for 7 more years of Trump.
@GodDoesnt @disitinerant @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman Nah. Just more systems of selective pressures ...
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman What are your thoughts here @RadioFreeTom? I can go into detail on a number of these. We could do the fake STEM shortage backed by the @NSF and @theNASciences if you don’t believe in such things.
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman @NSF @theNASciences Do we disagree on fundamentals over this: https://t.co/VLf1pZwjhP
@RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @paulkrugman @NSF @theNASciences And, no I don’t call something a conspiracy because I disagree w/ experts. I usually agree w/ them! What I disageee with is using expertise to transfer wealth & agency from the supposedly childlike voters who intuit something is rigged but can’t name it in political 3 card Monty.
@nntaleb @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker Hi Nassim, With 66 dyadic relationships between 12 individuals there was zero implied pairwise mutual endorsement or respect implied. I’m certainly happy to make that explicit here for the record if that wasn’t clear.
@nntaleb @RadioFreeTom @SamHarrisOrg @BretWeinstein @jordanbpeterson @CHSommers @HeatherEHeying @PiaMalaney @peterthiel @DouglasKMurray @Raheelraza @tristanharris @sparker Will read. Thanks!
@Noahpinion So if we push out supply curves there is no first order depressing effect on price...except that maybe it rises? Man this is big. Like Nobel Big!
I mean...I did use supply and demand curves of Borjas. So...What did I get wrong? Do I need to retract:
@Noahpinion Hence my use of the term '1st-order' (partial equilibrium). A full model would go well beyond what you write including social services, chain migration, dependency ratios, negative externalities, concentrated impact, vote dilution, patent production, sending country impact, etc..
@Noahpinion A big game in economics is often who gets to use simple models & who gets forced into adding a million baroque complexities. I agree that immigrants add to demand. Also tax social services. Also pay taxes. Also send remittances. Also found businesses. Also crowd out natives. etc.
@Noahpinion Perhaps you were so busy reacting to the name Borjas that you missed the point of introducing Coase. Coase allows those many nth order effects to be subsumed in the choices of those impacted both positively & negatively. Hence the ability to have unlimited migration. Re-read it.
@Noahpinion Let's not play games. The unpopular transfer from L to K by a forced taking of the rectangle without the securitization of labor's valuable asymmetric rights and workers rights to trade them stands as an issue having nothing to do with your attack on Borjas.
Your move.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Look again at my paper and you will see something very odd from a mathematician: there are no equations. That came from reviewing this style of argument you are engaging in now. The point isn't this or that effect. It is forced transfers by capital vs voluntary trade with labor.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik No one is arguing that in a full model. The issue isn't about immigrants either. It is about forcible non-Coasian taking of rights through law by employers without trade or consent of labor aided by economics 'experts' portrayed falsely under the banner of free markets.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Noah, I'm just really not sure what game you're playing. Economists add (e.g. "your model forgot this externality!") and subtract effects (e.g. "for simplicity we neglect"). None of this matters to my paper or point. None of it. My point is expert aided non-consensual transfers.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik You're not even close. In econ 101, agents are rational. Remember? If workers benefit from immigration they will support it in droves. Right?
Let me guess, we have to add baroque adjustments to rationality to explain this self-defeating rejection of mass immigration? Something?
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Oh wow! That's what I *love* about economists: a total reliance on ad hoc selective application of standards to reach desired conclusions.
This is fun. Please apply that selective standard evenly to all of Econ 101 and let's watch your *entire* field disintegrate.
I'll wait.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Ha! I'm trying Noah. But it's hard to Teleman something when his econ job depends on his not understanding it, no?
Now engage with the point. Why are the rational worker agents from Econ 101 not favoring this mass immigration that enriches them? Is this Econ 101 or Room 101?
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Wait, don't those swings *undermine* your Econ 101 point? The power of the Purcell getcha every time. See attached from:
Noah, I answered all your points substantively. Nothing depended on Partial v General or demand curve modeling. It's about capture. https://t.co/poJztJTjOz
@Noahpinion @TimBartik It's not about polls. It's not about Partial vs General equlibrium models. Not about Econ 101. It's about taking something valuable almost no one would give by choice by having experts defend the interests of employers with selective modeling.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik Noah, I answered every point. You are both for & against Econ 101 while I have no investment in it. If you want to forcibly transfer rights instead of letting workers trade them, ask yourself who you are really trying to benefit.
I'm trying to open borders too, but not as theft.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik If you want to write a paper detailing my failures, it will be an honor to review it fairly. But it had ZERO dependence on any of the points you made. Including demand curves. Be well.
@Noahpinion @TimBartik If you're honest, then stop w/ the red herrings on Demand Curve modeling as my point is TOTALLY agnostic to that. You write that my paper "Is a good idea that deserves much more thought!" Okay. Don't tell me. Show me a lack of capture. Put in demand curve shocks. NOTHING changes. https://t.co/n8s40niyuf
2018
2020
2023
2024
You're getting it. May I throw in a few details?
Migrant worker programs already exist. They are loved by businesses for their ability to lower wage outlays by destroying the bargaining positions of natives. That has been true from long before I entered the scene.
The problem has been that Business has been able to advertise three false things:
A) Taking away the rights of native workers is pro-free-market.
B) Business is xenophilic.
C) All opposition to business immigration is bigotted and racist nativism.
This work stepped into that business framework to show that ALL THREE are false.
I'm quite proud of this work. It's free market. It's pro worker. It's pro natives. It's pro business. It's pro xenophile. So it's a nightmare for those lying about immigration. No one implements it because business doesn't care about natives, immigrants or free markets. It cares about money. And workers and natives don't understand coasian analysis is their best friend. It can be used to prove that business hates free markets. As I did here. Rather successfully I might add. The threatening and misguided Mr. JV to the contrary.
Thanks for taking the time to look at the work. I can't engage with these people for the obvious reasons. But at some point I would love to get back to this Coasian approach to fighting corporatism posing as capitalism.
Yes. All that was made perfectly clear in the paper. I can’t help but suspect @JohnnyVedmore didn’t actually read the paper or didn’t fully understand what he read. Because his basic assertions are all blatantly contradicted by the substance of the paper. …
Which is a relief to me because I admire you and would feel betrayed to find out you’re actually Evil Eric, globalist controlled opposition.
Hope you have a good day. 😊🙏
Appreciate that! It’s all in the paper.
To be a bit fair to this JV I don’t think he knows that we were fighting *for* workers and natives against the open border *conservatives* at the Wall Street Journal. Or Coase. I have been prominent as a restrictionist for 35 years. Never heard of the guy before this. So I think he is confused.
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