pogfan1996 posted:

If you're a CPGB-ML member, keep criticism internal and talk to the right people about the radically different approaches the party paper took on Brexit vs Trump. Brexit had far stronger condemnations of the xenophobia and racism while the Trump article was trolling liberals and could damage the international work the party does.

The party seems rightly concerned about the damage a xenophobic and racist campaign can play in the UK, maybe there is a bit of myopia when it comes to other countries.

thank you.

Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

i like when people say shit like "this EPIC takedown of le drumpf on twitter got 30000 RTs" like its news. congrats you got 5% the exposure of a youtube vlog where an 8 talks about her makeup. he's resigning as we speak

Loved how the consultant/"futurist" dude opened with "ITS TIME FOR SOME GAME THEORY" followed by a rambling screed having nothing to do with game theory. Reminded me of a psychopathic management consultant I briefly worked for.

Anwar Shaikh told me game theory is based on the same insane anthropological assumptions as neoclassical theory so now i think it's dumb and a waste of time. Before i had no opinion except that movie about john nash isn't very good.

Is there anything useful there or is it just what Marx already described as the working class saving capitalism from itself in the struggle over the working day but dumber and coming from nonsensical bourgeois assumptions (like post-keynesianism for example)? Basically a poorer version of marxism which attempts to describe reality but is hobbled by a starting nonsensical ideology.

babyhueypnewton posted:

Anwar Shaikh told me game theory is based on the same insane anthropological assumptions as neoclassical theory so now i think it's dumb and a waste of time. Before i had no opinion except that movie about john nash isn't very good.

Is there anything useful there or is it just what Marx already described as the working class saving capitalism from itself in the struggle over the working day but dumber and coming from nonsensical bourgeois assumptions (like post-keynesianism for example)? Basically a poorer version of marxism which attempts to describe reality but is hobbled by a starting nonsensical ideology.

Game theory is an extremely broad field so I can't give you a simple answer. All modern orthodox macro models are game theoretic, but there are many other applications; game theory is also used in computer science, for example, and in evolutionary biology. Fundamentally, game theory is a mathematical framework for looking at strategic interactions between individuals and determining what sort of interactions are likely to happen, or are desirable, depending on the application.

I think the simplest way to put it is this: in many economic applications game theory can provide an accurate analysis. However, in most of those cases it's largely redundant--credible results that come out of a model can usually be arrived at without the mathematical formalism, and results that aren't obvious without the math are typically very dependent on implausible modeling assumptions. This speaks to your point about game theory being superfluous.

However, I'd argue that there's one area of (economic) game theory that is useful: mechanism design. This field focuses on the following type of question: given that individuals interact strategically (your choices affect others), how should we design a mechanism (or game) to mediate that interaction? Most game theory takes a real world phenomenon, models it as a simple game, and studies its properties. Because the game is premised on unrealistic assumptions, any implication of the model beyond the obvious is non-credible. However, if you start with the properties you want the game to have, then create that mechanism (mechanism design is also known as reverse game theory for this reason), you avoid this problem, since the mechanism by construction has the properties you've assumed.

A more recent offshoot of this literature focuses on applying the above logic to developing centralized mechanisms to replace free markets. In the rhetoric of economics, where everything is a market or a market-like object, this is ironically called market design, with the implication that practitioners design better markets, but it's better described as a framework for mathematical central planning that accounts for individual incentives. Another irony: after bourgeois economists concluded that the Austrians won the socialist calculation debate of the mid 20th century (they argued that prices reveal information about the economy that a planner could never otherwise know) and that effective central planning was impossible, economics immediately began developing tools to implement it while overcoming the putatively insurmountable difficulties with gathering accurate information. They simply used different terminology.

In fact, I'd argue that the only unequivocal successes in mainstream economics are within these fields. Ask an economist to name the contributions of modern (1940's and later, say) economics and push back on topics where there is still controversy within the field (literally everything in macro), and you'll almost certainly get one of two answers: auction theory or matching theory.

Auction theorists have been extremely successful at predicting auction behavior and designing auctions that maximize auctioneer revenue; huge amounts of economic exchange are now mediated through these theoretically designed auctions. Obv. auctioneer revenues aren't of any value to leftists, but it illustrates the power of the tool.

Matching theorists design centralized mechanisms to solve a variety of assignment problems where markets are illegal, such as kidney transplant assignments; or where markets face complications that make a decentralized (free) market ineffectual, such as assigning workers to jobs. In particular, in many cases both sides of a "market" have preferences over the assignment and simple rationales for free markets don't apply. For example, many countries now use stable matching algorithms to assign medical residents to hospitals based on doctor and hospital preferences because free markets for new doctors inevitably fail.

All of this presupposes that some notion of allocative efficiency is important, and these sorts of centrally planned mechanisms might be alienating, so I don't want to frame these tools as a panacea. However, I think it's interesting how, building on the simple beginnings with linear programming in the USSR (and the US military), economists accidentally developed a very rich framework for central planning.

Edited by Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ (Dec. 14, 2016 22:14:37)

Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ posted:

A more recent offshoot of this literature focuses on applying the above logic to developing centralized mechanisms to replace free markets. In the rhetoric of economics, where everything is a market or a market-like object, this is ironically called market design, with the implication that practitioners design better markets, but it's better described as a framework for mathematical central planning that accounts for individual incentives.

https://medium.com/consensys-media/introduction-to-ethereum-the-internets-government-35bdd25f572a#.y3431oqzc sorry for trolling

[In 1990s Germany t]he (radical) Left was preoccupied with the struggle against fascism and racism. They no longer analysed racism as a governmental policy, but as a “popular passion.” Anyone who tries to fight against ethnic racism in all its shades but omits the dimension of social racism remains toothless at best: in the worst case s/he becomes an agent of state racism.8 Jacques Rancière described it this way: “The racism we have today is a cold racism, an intellectual construction. It is primarily a creation of the state… [It is] a logic of the state and not a popular passion. And this state logic is primarily supported not by, who knows what, backward social groups, but by a substantial part of the intellectual elite.” Rancière concludes that the “‘Leftist’ critique” has adopted the “same conceit” as the right wing (“racism is a popular passion” which the state has to fight with increasingly tougher laws). They “build the legitimacy of a new form of racism: state racism and ‘Leftist’ intellectual racism.”9

8 By social racism we mean racism against people from lower social strata, people who don’t integrate well in society, people living from benefits, etc. Étienne Balibar uses a similar concept in Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).

9 All quotes from a lecture by Jacques Rancière in 2010, printed in German translation in ak 555, November 19, 2010. The English translation is available at: http://wrongarithmetic.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/ranciere-racism/

...and this error is likely most of what we are going to see from the next 4 years of the radical left in the united states.

tpaine posted:

RIP REP