Author: VD

And still they doubt me

I find it fascinating that every single step along the way, SF-SJWs are always convinced that this time, surely this one more time, they will be able to stop me from pursuing my objectives. The Reverend 3.0 considers the growing movement to permaban the Puppies from participation in the Hugo Awards.

In a way, the Puppy Revolt could end up making things easier on the Controllers, because it gives them an excuse to seize control under the cover of protecting everyone from the Puppies. Not that this will stop the slow death of traditional publishing, but whatever.

Now, Vox wants us to believe he can use the proposed PermaBan rule against the Kickers. That remains to be seen, but the man has an excellent track record on these things.

I’m torn on whether or not Vox can pull that off. My gut tells me that this is at least partially a bluff, but I have no evidence and it runs counter to Vox’s pattern of saying what he will do and then doing it. But the gut will say what it says, regardless of reason.

Predictions Time:

-The Powers That Be will move forward with PermaBanning, and will implement it if they think they can get away with it.

-If PermaBanning is implemented, the Hugo base will go along with it.

-If Vox can flip PermaBanning on the PTB, I will give my gut a very stern talking-to.

These people must spend all their time posing, posturing, and bluffing, because every time I do what I tell them I am going to do, they’re astonished. Although it is amusing that they’re already abandoning hope in EPH, which they were certain was the answer last year.

Of course, I told them as much, in fact, I made it clear that I welcome the passage of EPH, as its implementation will mark the start of the second stage of the Pink SF-Blue SF cultural war. But an open ban would take us to the third stage even faster.

That being said, one has to credit Rev 3.0 for being correct in the essentials:

First, we can all appreciate how much of a brilliant predictor I am. Second, we can examine that perennial question: is Vox Day a legitimate threat or a paper tiger? I have said (over and over again) that he is a legitimate threat. The Establishment has said (over and over again) that he is a “toddler.” You be the judge.

Betting against the SJW Narrative is usually the safe bet. And then, of course, there is this:

If the 2016 Hugos are the Year of the Gay Space Raptor (ie, the
biggest talking point and what people remember it for), Vox knows what
he’s doing.

Decline of household debt

The Federal Reserve is up to its customary statistical obfuscations. It no longer releases the L.1 Credit Market Debt Outstanding report; Q1 2015 was the last one available. Instead, it’s releasing something called D.3 Debt Outstanding by Sector, however, under this new accounting, Federal debt somehow dropped to $2,959.2 billion from $13,086.7 under the old report for the very same quarter.

That’s a neat trick. Hey, presto! And $10 trillion in debt vanishes. I’ll have to figure out how the two definitions differ. At first glance, it looks like they simply redefined it as State & Local debt, as that is nearly $10 trillion higher than before.

What is interesting, though, is that D.3 now provides a Household Home Mortgage line. As Steve Keen suggested, this actually peaked BEFORE the crisis began, sometime in 2007, at $10,613.0 billion. It’s now at $9,490.6, and has been flat for the last three years, bottoming in Q3 2014.

Household Consumer Credit, on the other hand, is doing better. It peaked in 2007 as well, at 2,615 but has risen to 3,533.1 since. So overall, Household debt has been flat for nine years, but $1 trillion in debt that was previously backed by real estate is now sans collateral. Corporates have $1.5 trillion in additional debt since 2008, but Financials have $2.8 trillion less. The end result is debt disinflation.

This is the problem Steve Keen was describing, which is an insufficient amount of credit money being created to permit any economic growth. We can certainly argue about whether to take the concept of GDP seriously or not, and about whether the government can, or should, create more credit money, but regardless, the available evidence does appear to fit his Minsky model.

The case for separation

Fred Reed asks Black Lives Matter if they prefer integration and being subject to the white man’s laws or separation and freedom to live as they see fit?

In reading the endless complaints by blacks about shootings by the police, I usually find it hard to know what really happened. As far as I am aware, the media never allow an unedited interview, or any interview, with the police charged with the shootings but allow endless commentary by people who weren’t there.

I am also often puzzled by the motivation of the cops. Do they confer in the morning and say, “Hey, let’s shoot some totally innocent black guy in front of witnesses who probably have cell phones?” And why are cops not brutalizing Latinos, only blacks, especially in LA, which provides a target-rich environment?

If I could, I would speak to BLM as follows:

I cannot determine what you want. There seems to be a great deal of anger but little clarity. Discussion usually wanders off into demands for justice, but without specifics.

Since I am looking for practical recommendations, let us begin by acknowledging the circumstances we face. You say that white cops mistreat blacks, sometimes brutally. This is true. I have seen some of it, and know of more. White cops seldom like blacks, nor blacks, white cops. The cultures are irreconcilably different. On the other hand, beatings of whites, Latinos, and Asians by gangs of blacks are far outnumber beatings of blacks by white cops. In sum, no love is lost and I do not see a lot of moral high ground. So:

Do you want white policemen excluded from black neighborhoods?

The available answers are “yes,” and “no.” I do not mean to be abrupt about this, but vague considerations of abstract justice, alleged discrimination, and racism do not provide usable answers. So, do you want white cops pulled from black neighborhoods, or not? It’s one or the other.

Personally I think it wiser not to have whites policing blacks. I don’t want to see white cops raped in media circuses. Nor do I want blacks to be mistreated by white cops. It seems to me that BLM should support segregation of police as it would eliminate any possibility of racist behavior.

Speaking as a historically aware Red Segregationist, the eventual and ultimate solution will be segregation, war, and ethnic cleansing. The homogenous nations have always come out of heterogeneous nations, they are not the result of geography. The great sin of apartheid was not that it separated South Africa’s blacks and whites, but rather, that it kept them together in an immoral manner that permitted South Africa’s whites to economically prey upon South Africa’s blacks.

And if you say that you oppose segregation, then I ask you this: do you seriously support stealing more American Indian land by eliminating our reservations? Or is it merely a matter of moral posturing rather than principle?

DNA is destiny. Even those of us who are of mixed race are ultimately forced by everyone else into one tribe or another; look at those who deny science, heritage, and family alike by declaring that I am, regardless of my self-identification, a “white” – whatever that might be; precisely what nation is that? – by virtue of nothing more than my physical appearance.

They should have listened to Bill

Bill Murray knew the feminist parody of Ghostbusters was going to be a disaster and tried to stay out of it, but Sony persuaded him to do it:

RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]
Email-ID     104704
Date     2013-11-01 00:30:57 UTC
From     mailer-daemon
To     steinberg, david, venger, leonardyankelevits, daniel

RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]
I think you are fine to stay out.  Am sure len has it on his list for us to discuss at his 1-1 tomorrow

From: Steinberg, David
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 5:29 PM
To: Venger, Leonard; Weil, Leah
Cc: Yankelevits, Daniel
Subject: RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]

FYI, apparently AG has some ideas (Harrison, of course).  I’m trying to stay out of the middle of this one but let me know if there’s anything you need me to do.

From: Venger, Leonard
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:18 PM
To: Steinberg, David; Weil, Leah
Cc: Yankelevits, Daniel
Subject: RE: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]

 I have some names in mind but will wait until we speak with Leah.
 
From: Steinberg, David
Sent: Tuesday, October 29, 2013 3:06 PM
To: Venger, Leonard; Weil, Leah
Cc: Yankelevits, Daniel
Subject: Ghostbusters/Murray – Litigation Counsel [CONFIDENTIAL]

In order to more fully evaluate our position if Bill Murray again declines to engage on “Ghostbusters”, AG requested that we identify “aggressive” litigation counsel with whom we can consult to evaluate our alternatives and strategize.  [Harkening back to his prior employer, of course, raised the name of David Boies.]

Personally, while I’m fine with aggressive, I think we are in much worse shape if this goes public so seems to me we should look for someone who isn’t seeking the spotlight.

Can we discuss at some point soon to provide a suggestion or two?

Thanks.

Oh, it sounds as if they’re in pretty bad shape across the board at this point. I won’t issue any spoiler warnings, because it appears it would be impossible to spoil this movie.

Brainstorm with Dr. Steve Keen

Just a reminder that the open event will start in just over half an hour. It will begin at 7:00 PM  Eastern, and you can register for it here.

UPDATE: Dr. Keen was excellent. Apparently everyone thought it went rather well.  PA, for his part, sent an enthusiastic review:

This was… fucking amazing. I don’t even have high school economics, but I was utterly fascinated. I probably learned more in the last hour or so than in my entire previous existence. I don’t remotely pretend to have understood 90% of it, but I learned a ton. And having you there, as someone I trust, to make sense of it, was thoroughly awesome. This was worth most of the year’s subscription, and I am delighted at the added value. Thanks again.

Working as intended

Apple will decide what files you are permitted to have on your computer.

“The software is functioning as intended,” said Amber.
“Wait,” I asked, “so it’s supposed to delete my personal files from my internal hard drive without asking my permission?”
“Yes,” she replied.

I had just explained to Amber that 122 GB of music files were missing from my laptop. I’d already visited the online forum, I said, and they were no help. Although several people had described problems similar to mine, they were all dismissed by condescending “gurus” who simply said that we had mislocated our files (I had the free drive space to prove that wasn’t the case) or that we must have accidentally deleted the files ourselves (we hadn’t). Amber explained that I should blow off these dismissive “solutions” offered online because Apple employees don’t officially use the forums—evidently, that honor is reserved for lost, frustrated people like me, and (at least in this case) know-it-alls who would rather believe we were incompetent, or lying, than face the ugly truth that Apple has vastly overstepped its boundaries.

What Amber explained was exactly what I’d feared: through the Apple Music subscription, which I had, Apple now deletes files from its users’ computers.

This is hardly a surprise. If you want to live inside a walled garden, your life is subject to the will of the gardener.

VFM hunt

Here we go again. This isn’t the SJW’s first attack review either. You know the drill. Let’s see if anyone can track down this “Nome D. Gerr”. If we do, we will contact his employer, as we have done before when we’ve caught an attack reviewer in action. How many scalps will this guy make, is it four or five now?

Nome D. Gerr
May 5, 2016
God, Robot
sad puppies find g-d

this is deja vu all over again, an offense to enjoyable fiction. reading this will contract your mind. should history repeat, the sad dawgs, with contempt for fans and bitter worship of hard core ballot rigging, will manipulate this opus died onto the slates of multiple nebula awards. as before, the mad puppies will finish 6 out of 5 on all ballots, losing to all other nominees and finishing behind write in votes for “not again”. this injection of organized religion and tea bagger nuttery into SF&F is a perversion and a waste of bytes.

Nome D. Gerr
October 29, 2015
SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police
KINDLE: CLEAN YOUR SEARCH ALGORITHMS

this is a scree of vindictiveness and self promotion. Somehow, probably in a manner akin to the almost success in awarding himself a people’s s/f trophy, this time waster appears in too many (and too many completely unrelated) categories of kindle recommendations. for example, just today, this book was pimped to me three times: in Moro history, in adaptionics and in economics. Motivated by apparent personal animosity, this book is gaming kindle.

Having gamed the 2014 Hugo Awards, now I’m gaming Kindle. Seriously?

Anyhow, just to make it perfectly clear, if you leave an attack review on any Castalia House book, I will unleash the Vile Faceless Minions and send them after you. If you have been insufficiently careful, if you have slipped up even once somewhere, we will doxx you, we will contact your employer, and we may even send a log of your activities to your family members. In extreme cases where your local law has observably been violated, I will personally contact the police; you will not be the first, the second, or even the third individual to be subjected to a police interrogation as a result of attacking us.

VFM, check your emails this weekend. It’s operation time. This will only require 20 of you, so if you don’t get one, don’t be surprised.

Don’t think that the SJWs are not organizing against us as well. They are doing their level best to identify all of those against whom they intend to run their usual game of discredit, disemploy, and destroy. From Mediated Feminisms: Activism and Resistance to Gender and Sexual Violence in the Digital Age at UCL Institute of Education.

Notice who they have right in the center sweet spot. Twice. Translaton: I’m not a PUA, an MGTOW, an MRA, or a TradCon, so she has no idea where to put me. And their total inability to make any sense of us, judging by their interpretive babble, suggests that the more open this culture warfare becomes, the more people are forced to choose sides, the more it will be to our advantage. And this is good, because Western civilization cannot survive social justice convergence.

Kukuruyo attacked, pedofilers feign innocence

Even as they chortle over Chuck Tingle, who they’re going to No Award despite their frantic insistence that they totally get his act and think he is so very funny, the pedofilers are pretending that the timing of the SJW attacks on Kukuruyo are pure coincidence.

“No one is targeting artists because of their politics”. That’s a line that i’ve heard a lot from the social justice circles every time an artist is censored, or is attacked so much that they self-censor. It’s a line i’ve read several times in the last week directed at me, when i have commented in social media about some new attack upon myself. I think my experiences over this last week are a clear example on how, yes, artists are being targeted because of their politics, everytime those politics diverge from the progressive ideology.

I’ve always been an artist who does adult content. My hentai creations have been placed on the internet for more than a decade, and i’ve never had any problems because of it. Yeah, sometimes i got a drawing banned from deviantart, but they were very sporadic things, and usualy deserved; one every 2-3 years at most. No one ever wrote anything about what a horrible person i was for doing erotic fanarts and such.

Since i publicy became a gamergate supporter, the ammount of reports i’ve gotten on art sites have increased, many times in very underserved cases (i got a drawing pulled because the characters had sweat. Yes, sweat…) as well as the amount of people lying about me on blogs and such. And i don’t mean making critiques of me, i mean outright lies (one guy even wrote about how i voted for some candidate in the past US elections, which is interesting considering i’m a spaniard living in Spain). Not only that, but my website began to have attemps to break in. At some point i was receiving more than 50 attempts to break in each day, until i upgraded my security.

But this broke into a new level when i was announced as a finalist for best Fan artist at the Hugo awards. Then people in the social justice circles discovered that i support gamergate, and since then, interesting things have been happening one after the other (aside from the wave of verbal attacks, of course).

First one of my gamergate related works got reported and banned from deviantart. Then someone picked a cheap fanart that i was commissioned to do, about a half nude Ms.marvel, and tried to frame me as a pedophile, because aparently the character has 16 in the original canon (something i even didn’t know), ignoring the fact that the character body was adult. This story was writen about in (as far as i know) a blog and then in a comic news article, expanding the idea that i’m a pedophile for an anime style fanart thats no different than the millions upon millions of anime character fanarts out there, and that i was somehow a terrible threat for teenagers out there who have their heroes destroyed by evil me. I was reported in devianart for “pedophilia” and the drawing was taken down. I got reported on twitter. The attemps to break into my website have come arround again. Then they contacted my advertising affiliates, telling them i was hosting child pornography, so they would cease to advertise with me. They acepted a middle ground solution at first, but then they changed their policies, and now i can no longer receive their service. Yes, and advertising website changed their policies just because of me… and just yesteday some guys where trying to get MARVEL to SUE ME because of a fanart!

But hey, i’m sure all of this is just a coincidence! this has nothing to do with the Hugo awards or gamergate. I’m sure it’s just that a whole lot of people randomly decided the same week to try to fuck me up in every way they could, right? this can’t possibly be related with people from a particular ideology, pissed off because someone with the wrong opinions got a Hugo nomination.

As one pedofiler noted, both Kukuruyo and Chuck Tingle were nominated to further the Supreme Dark Lord’s evil agenda, but the two resulting stories are unfolding very differently indeed. Which, she fails to note, is exactly as anyone who has read the 2016 finalist for Best Related Work, SJWs Always Lie, would have been able to predict.

The fact is that in addition to always lying, SJWs always try to spin the narrative even as they always try to discredit, disemploy, and destroy those who refuse to submit to their social justice narrative. Kukuruyo is #GamerGate, so SJWs are doing the same thing they did from the very first day Castalia House endorsed #GamerGate; we have been under non-stop script kiddy attacks ever since. Fortunately, the SJW hackers are as incompetent as one would expect them to be; keeping them out has been a simple matter of practicing basic security.

Of course, being SJWs, the pedofilers have to do what SJWs always do.

  • Hard to believe that getting his shitty, sleazy fanart suddenly thrust into the spotlight courtesy of a complete asshat could possibly have any negative consequences for the poor little troll. Actions something something consequences.
  • You lie down with assholes, you get up with shit on you, sonny. Also, like all Perritos, he conflates “wrong ideology” with “no talent” and “slating”. Actions have consequences.
  • Always amusing to see a GGer suddenly discover that “Holy Crap, I can be
    held responsible for my actions?! I thought that only happened to
    women!”
  • ’My friend nominated my house for the best garden award and now the cops
    are all over the meth lab in my garage. I blame literally anyone but my
    friend.’
  • I remember at least one, possibly two, of the Meedium Geenyuses complaining that someone was trying to hack their Facebook accounts — and claiming that clearly puppykicker SJWs were behind this…. That people are egotistical enough to assume that they are always
    deliberately targeted because of who or what they are, rather than
    considering that they may just have been the noticed flavor of the day
    by trolls and hackers… this is a thing that happens.

So, if the SJWs are to be believed, the attacks on Kukuruyo are just a random thing that happens, but are also an obvious and well-merited consequence of his actions due to his being on the wrong side. Right.

Anyhow, Kukuruyo is  #GamerGate, he’s been active in the cultural war longer than the SF-SJWs were aware that anyone was shooting back, and he knows very well how it goes. Like Milo, like Cernovich, like Hulk Hogan, and like me, I have no doubt that he’ll come out of this latest SJW assault considerably better off than he was when they first went after him.

And as a result of witnessing it, dozens, perhaps hundreds more people who had previously been neutral will come to understand that no one, however liberal they might be, is ever safe from SJW mobbing.

Even Hollywood can be further converged

Who knew that SJWs could make it even worse than it was? Milo observes that the feminist Ghostbusters is going to be an SJW-inspired disaster:

At this point, everyone who isn’t a Women’s Studies major realises that Ghostbusters is probably going to be a terrible movie. But who’s responsible? To anyone familiar with incompetence in Hollywood, the answer should be obvious. It’s Amy Pascal, of course.

Pascal is the former chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment. She oversaw production of dozens of blockbuster titles over the years, until she was hoist on her own progressivism. A series of  embarrassing emails in which she cracked some not-funny racial jokes about President Obama clashed with her public image as a good feminist progressive, and Pascal promptly exited the company.

“Should I ask him if he liked DJANGO?” asked Pascal in a leaked email to a colleague on the topic of meeting President Barack Obama at a then-upcoming fundraising event. Her colleague, producer Scott Rudin, replied simply with “12 YEARS”, referencing ’12 Years a Slave’: another slavery film.

The two then proceeded to jokingly list numerous films concerning African-Americans. It wasn’t funny, and, considering Pascal’s public image as a Hollywood feminist, it wasn’t clever either. It was this series of emails among others that resulted in Pascal’s forced resignation from Sony.

But cinema still isn’t safe: Pascal is taking a producer role in a handful of upcoming films, including Ghostbusters. Pascal, SJW-watchers will note, is the producer behind the mooted Zoe Quinn biopic Crash Override: How to Save the Internet from Itself, which I’m sure will be at least as successful as the all-female Ghostbusters. (By which I mean: an utter disaster.)

It’s obvious Pascal is trying to recover her progressive credentials. But her movies are visibly suffering as a result.

Despite her self-proclaimed feminist values, Pascal has proven hilariously bad at pandering to her own tribe. After allegations of a pay gap at Sony, Pascal was quick to offer a tone-deaf rebuttal.

“I run a business. People want to work for less money, I’ll pay them less money. I don’t call them up and go, can I give you some more?” said Pascal in an interview at the Women of the World event in San Francisco. Pascal said actresses should learn to “walk away” if they weren’t satisfied with their jobs. “People shouldn’t be so grateful for jobs,” she said.

In a final, desperate attempt to make herself likeable again, Pascal is now producing rancid films dressed up in social justice-friendly narratives. And it’s working! Progressives are rallying to her defence, crying “MISOGYNY” whenever moviegoers object to the garbage Pascal is trying to feed them….

I suspect the film’s defenders are also aware that the movie is an
impending disaster, which is why they’ve rushed to the web to brand its
critics misogynists. There’s a lot on the line for them. If Ghostbusters
flops, it will be yet further proof that feminism and social justice
don’t sell.

Addendum to Veblen. We’re going to need a new theory to account for this new form of virtue-signaling conspicuous consumption.

Book of the Week + Brainstorm

As I mentioned previously, tomorrow night will be the much-anticipated Brainstorm with Dr. Steve Keen, one of, if not the most, significant economists working today. The event is open, it will take place on May 06, 2016 at 7:00 PM  Eastern, and you can register for it here.

As I was going over the second edition of his book, Debunking Economics, (which is also this week’s Book of the Week) in order to prepare a few questions, I was struck by the way in which his key observation, that demand is not stackable, completely demolishes the foundation of modern economics. I’m not entirely sure even Dr. Keen fully grasps the consequences of his revolutionary mathematical – and logical – observations. From the section entitled Don’t tell the children:

For many years, the leading text for Honors, Master’s and PhD programs was Hal Varian’s Microeconomic Analysis (Varian 1992). Varian ‘summarized’ this research so opaquely that it’s no surprise that most PhD students – including those who later went on to write the next generation of undergraduate textbooks – didn’t grasp how profoundly it challenged the foundations of neoclassical theory.

Varian started with the vaguest possible statement of the result: ‘Unfortunately […] The aggregate demand function will in general possess no interesting properties […] Hence, the theory of the consumer places no restrictions on aggregate behavior in general.’

The statement ‘no interesting properties’ could imply to the average student that the market demand curve didn’t differ in any substantive way from the individual demand curve – the exact opposite of the theoretical result. The next sentence was more honest, but rather than admitting outright that this meant that the ‘Law of Demand’ didn’t apply at the market level, he immediately reassured students that there was a way to get around this problem, which was to: ‘Suppose that all individual consumers’ indirect utility functions take the Gorman form [… where] the marginal propensity to consume good j is independent of the level of income of any consumer and also constant across consumers […] This demand function can in fact be generated by a representative consumer’ (ibid.: 153–4; emphases added. Curiously the innocuous word ‘generated’ in this edition replaced the more loaded word ‘rationalized’ in the 1984 edition.)

Finally, when discussing aggregate demand, he made a vague and reassuring reference to more technical work: ‘it is sometimes convenient to think of the aggregate demand as the demand of some “representative consumer” […] The conditions under which this can be done are rather stringent, but a discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this book […]’ (Varian 1984: 268).

It’s little wonder that PhD students didn’t realize that these conditions, rather than merely being ‘rather stringent,’ undermined the very foundations of neoclassical economics. They then went on to build ‘representative agent’ models of the macroeconomy in which the entire economy is modeled as a single consumer, believing that these models have been shown to be valid. In fact, the exact opposite is the case.
The modern replacement for Varian is Andreu Mas-Colell’s hyper-mathematical – but utterly non-empirical – Microeconomic Theory (Mas-Colell, Whinston et al. 1995). At one level, this text is much more honest about the impact of the SMD conditions than was Varian’s. In a section accurately described as ‘Anything goes: the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem,’ Mas-Colell concludes that a market demand curve can have any shape at all, even when derived from consumers whose individual demand curves are downward-sloping:

Can [… an arbitrary function] coincide with the excess demand function of an economy for every p [price …] Of course [… the arbitrary function] must be continuous, it must be homogeneous of degree zero, and it must satisfy Walras’ law. But for any [arbitrary function] satisfying these three conditions, it turns out that the answer is, again, ‘yes.’ (Ibid.: 602)

But still, the import of this result is buried in what appear to the student to be difficult problems in mathematics, rather than a fundamental reason to abandon supply and demand analysis. Earlier, when considering whether a market demand curve can be derived, Mas-Colell begins with the question: ‘When can we compute meaningful measures of aggregate welfare using […] the welfare measurement techniques […] for individual consumers? (ibid.: 116).

He then proves that this can be done when there is ‘a fictional individual whose utility maximization problem when facing society’s budget set would generate the economy’s aggregate demand function’ (ibid.: 116). However, for this to be possible, there must also exist a ‘social welfare function’ which: ‘accurately expresses society’s judgments on how individual utilities have to be compared to produce an ordering of possible social outcomes. We also assume that social welfare functions are increasing, concave, and whenever convenient, differentiable’ (ibid.: 117).

This is already a case of assuming what you wish to prove – any form of social conflict is assumed away – but it’s still not sufficient to generate the result Mas-Colell wants to arrive at. The problem is that the actual distribution of wealth and income in society will determine ‘how individual utilities are compared’ in the economy, and there is no guarantee that this will correspond to this ‘social welfare function.’

The next step in his ‘logic’ should make the truly logical – and the true believers in economic freedom – recoil in horror, but it is in fact typical of the sorts of assumptions that neoclassical economists routinely make to try to keep their vision of a perfectly functioning market economy together. To ensure that the actual distribution of wealth and income matches the social welfare function, Mas-Colell assumes the existence of a benevolent dictator who redistributes wealth and income prior to commerce taking place: ‘Let us now hypothesize that there is a process, a benevolent central authority perhaps, that, for any given prices p and aggregate wealth function w, redistributes wealth in order to maximize social welfare’ (ibid.: 117; emphases added).

So free market capitalism will maximize social welfare if, and only if, there is a benevolent dictator who redistributes wealth prior to trade??? Why don’t students in courses on advanced microeconomics simply walk out at this point?

I surmise that there are three main reasons, the first of which is banal. Mas-Colell’s book is huge – just short of 1,000 pages – and lecturers would cherry-pick the sections they teach. I doubt that most students are exposed to this statement by their instructors, and few are likely to read parts that aren’t required reading for pleasure alone.

Secondly, the entire text is presented as difficult exercises in applied mathematics. Students are probably so consumed with deriving the required answers that they gloss over English-language statements of these assumptions which make it blatantly obvious how insane they are.

Thirdly, by the time students get to this level – normally in PhD programs – they are so locked into the neoclassical ‘assumptions don’t matter’ mindset that I discuss in Chapter 8 that they don’t even worry if an assumption is insane.

If you followed that, then you can understand why this is critically fascinating material that is almost shockingly ignored by nearly everyone who should know better.