A libertarian socialist engineer solves the financial crisis

http://sepwww.stanford.edu/sep/jon/financialcrisis.html

by TriinT • 17 years ago

12 24 17 years ago

sepwww.stanford.edu

That would be fantastic, you know, if the banks didn't already rule the world. Do you think that banks are going to let software replace them? I have a hard time believing that this would come to fruition with anything less thank a full on revolution.

That said, I would wholeheartedly support such a revolution.

TriinT2• 17 years ago

In a way, computers are already replacing a lot of people at investment banks. Mostly brokers and traders, for sure. Even David E. Shaw himself once wrote that a lot of stuff in finance that is currently done by humans should be done by computers.

However, if you take a look at actual banking, like commercial banking and corporate finance, the sector remains rather low-tech. And there's a reason for it: there are no new ideas in banking. It's all about packaging and selling old ideas. That will never be replaced by computers, unfortunately.

socratees• 17 years ago

I agree. Esp running the country with Engineers rather than politicians or bankers.

joshu2• 17 years ago

So, lawyers and economists are corruptable but engineers aren't?

The only difference between this and a crackpot is that the domain is stanford.edu and not geocities.com.

There's so much wrong here that I can't even figure out where to begin. Most points are based on distorted facts, contains fallacies, ignores realities, and so on.

There are some reasonable ideas (standardized mortgages) that I've heard elsewhere, but a lot of it is crap.

#1 fixes what, exactly?

#2 is reasonable.

#3 is just ranting about credit cards. the fees may be egregious but someone does need to get paid to run the machinery. of course, it should be a fixed cost per transaction and the machinery should be less complicated. but it's not related to the actual crisis.

#4 just moves the problem.

#5 is just painful.

#7 are you kidding?

#8 is just silly. and I work there.

#9 is more pain.

#10 is not the problem either. It's that there's multiple processes. It was leverage and VAR that hurt, not the raw gaussian mis-approximation (although it didn't help.) The markets are gaussian (well, GARCH) short-term, but the regime shifts and changes are the output of another process.

A more reasonable solution going forward is going to be a) transparency in financial instruments for consumers, b) strict guidelines about new kinds of financial instruments, and c) leverage restrictions on financial organizations.

I think that simultaneous failures of other industries due to lack or loss of flexibility will have to be dealt with in different ways.

olefoo2• 17 years ago

I disagree, at least a few of his proposals struck me as eminently sensible. Politically impossible at this time, but that can change.

Of course, I've been exposed to some of the primary sources for some of the more syndicalist ideas he espouses.

joshu2• 17 years ago

Such as? Note, by the way, that I am not against significant reform here. These are reactionary and shallow, is all.

sengan• 17 years ago

It's harder to be corrupt if you have to argue technically why your decisions will improve the economy.

Engineers and Scientists value the truth, whereas Lawyers value a convincing argument whether it is true or not. Think about their jobs: you can't convince reality you're right, but you can convince a jury.

I think you'd find it much harder to create feedback models of the economy which just happen to predict the best thing to do is to "Give Goldman Sachs a bonus to fix the economy", than it is to come up with some unprovable scare-mongering which terrifies the politicians into doing just that.

So yes, engineers or scientists would probably be more trustworthy running the economy as long as they stay true to the discipline.

gaius• 17 years ago

"Scientific" government is what produced the USSR and is currently operating in China. There is even a word for it: technocracy.

People who think they know best for everyone else need to be kept far away from real power, whatever their political flavour.

locopati• 17 years ago

'Engineers and Scientists value the truth.'

Do you live in NYC or a similarly large city? I think you'd see that engineers (specifically, in the building & construction trades) can be just as corrupt as the next guy (and we're talking people's safety here, not the kind of corruption that doesn't harm others so much, like fake parking permits).

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Agree,

The only thing the "everyone else's ideas are crap, let me start from my gut" approach has going for it is that it appeals to ... other people's guts.

A lot of economics is junk but a lot of it also involves some subtle thinking about problems where common sense often fails.

Indeed, one might even argue that the crisis came because there was already too much "technological" thinking and not enough thinking about the history of ... bubbles. LTCM was pretty close to the "engineering mindset" (at least the bad part) even if it was physicists running it and many actors (Alan Greenspan esp) viewed the market as a technology that would take care of everything.

-- Also, #7, right or wrong, "retroactive" law enforcement involves ... abandoning the rule of law. Again, if you study the history of places where that happens, you know that's a bad thing. So, no let's not let engineers or software engineers or mathematicians run the country, even though I'm in the last two groups...

donaldc• 17 years ago

New tax bracket, 90% tax bracket for anyone making more than the president of the USA -- retroactive two years. Rates were higher than that in 1963 (historical rates).

Bad idea. Besides being in very poor form (changing the rules after the fact), retroactive taxes will snare people who made perfectly reasonable financial decisions given the rules at the time, but would now find that they don't even have the money to pay their (retroactive) taxes.

As for 90% taxes on high income, I'd prefer that they simplified the tax code and got rid of loopholes.

lupin_sansei3• 17 years ago

They tried that in the UK in the 70s. Paul Graham mentions it in one of his articles. It just serves to drive wealthy and ambitious people overseas or to spend a lot of time and money looking for loopholes. The net result is that the size of your "economic pie" gets smaller and smaller.

rwolf• 17 years ago

I agree. Any suggestion for a 90% tax bracket for anyone making more than the (above board) income of a civil servant cannot be taken seriously.

I wish he had written this naked insanity at the top of the page so I didn't waste my time reading everything up to it.

rms• 17 years ago

The 90% tax bracket is too much, that actually does make people not want to work. 65-70% would be better, or just actually closing all of the tax loopholes.

ncarlson2• 17 years ago

I think the sensible option is to eliminate income tax completely.

ajuc• 17 years ago

Law system contains natural numbers, so it has by definition some expressions that can't be evaluated :)

ncarlson2• 17 years ago

I really hate to be "that guy", but his incomplete sentences are killing me.

snewe• 17 years ago

"Institute a 10% tax on landlords that flows into a federal savings account in the name of the renter. The renter can draw from his account only for a home mortgage, or at his retirement."

So landlords raise rents 10% (or more) and the effect is simply forced savings. Why not just make the SS tax rate 10 percentage points higher? Ridiculous.

jwb119• 17 years ago

am i the only one that read (at least a few of the suggestions) as tongue in cheek?

lupin_sansei3• 17 years ago

You can't be a libertarian and a socialist at the same time. Libertarianism is against coercion whereas socialism (excepting voluntary socialism - eg hippy communes) is a forced system of banning voluntary trade.

jibiki• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism

lupin_sansei3• 17 years ago

Doesn't seem to answer the paradox of who will enforce the socialism in a libertarian society. What if in this society you want to share my wealth but I don't?

A libertarian socialist engineer solves the financial crisis

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