A thoughtful conversation that touches on many a substantive topic with the Substackian powerhouse known as
, whose colorful blog goes by the same name found here. This conversation happened in December 2024.We discuss how we’re always voting our temperament, politically (morally) motivated reasoning, the functional role of the Supreme Court, Biofoundationalism (political biology), and class struggles and conflict. He was also interested in my series on The Fed, a rare treat!
Immediately below are essays referenced in our conversation, and beneath that are some excerpts and links to my Fed series that provide a better lens into the psychological points I was making (I ranted a bit at the beginning of this segment, and I think the passages help illustrate what I was trying to convey).
Linked at the very bottom is another podcast I did that gets into more technical territory on the topic if you’re interested.
Game-theoretic flaws of democracy and swimming left in prosperity:
On Biofoundationalism (political biology and the genetic basis for morality):
This series was originally published late 2023 on Twitter, and I’m incrementally bringing each part over to Substack. The above is what’s been published so far.
On globalism and spreadsheet-brain thinking:
Fed references and some brief passages:
“End the Fed” is the rightwing equivalent of “end white men”. Both chants act as scapegoats for deeper structural issues and are superficial boogeyman that distract from recognizing distal-cause problems.
Here are essays from my Fed series and some relevant quotes from them as well. More essays forthcoming.
From The Fed, Part 5: Forward Guidance, Complex Adaptive Systems, and Interest Rates
“Interest rates are an output of a complex adaptive system, not an input.
There is no more critical, indispensable financial indicator than the cost of resource information; this dictates resource allocation, which informs economic activity.
This is what interest rates are.
Money flows (information) are directed by them. Vast amounts of economic data are embedded within them. Economies are complex adaptive systems; their most vital outputs are interest rates.
Interest rates are biomarkers of an economic organism. They are outputs, like blood pressure or a heartbeat, not inputs from a doctor or government bureaucracy.
Like biomarkers, they can be massaged, but you are never in actual control of them, and you suppress the signal they provide when you attempt to manipulate them.
When it's internalized that the most critical output of a vastly complex adaptive system is not something a panel of 12 guys controls with buttons.... then this series and evidence I've compiled will begin to make intuitive sense.
You don't need to "end the Fed", you can simply stop believing, subscribing, and regurgitating its lies.”
Essays on the Fed as it relates to interest rates (I suggest starting with Part 4):
From The Fed Part 1: QE, A Mechanical Deconstruction of an Impotent Illusion
“Understanding information is one thing; internalizing it is another. The right mentality is critical for absorbing the information in this series. For the same reason if you grew up in the USSR and I was trying to inform you that The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (a real thing) had propaganda in it that wasn’t exactly true, you’d be in no state of mind to receive that message.
Almost everything the Fed does is some combination of propaganda and chart crime. All central banks are simply big asset-swapping machines; never creating new assets, just shifting compositions around in the hopes it excites you. Monetary policy is roughly 90% shuffling compositions of bank balance sheets and then holding a press conference telling you something big just happened.
"I think monetary policy is 98% talk and 2% action.” - Ben Bernanke
No one ever thinks propaganda works on them. Yet we all know that it does indeed work.
The Fed is a government institution making absolutely insane claims about what it’s able to do, and you accept this at face value? Why?? It’s not a law of physics we’re inquiring about, it’s one of the most non-scientific fields around (economics) making incredibly squishy claims that basically no one verifies. You can question this, it’s okay.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Another podcast where I speak more about concrete mechanics regarding the Fed, among other topics:
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