Note 47

"Experience" is the framework through which the subjective experience of objectivity is reclassified and understood as the objective description of subjectivity. Hence "experience" is not a thing to be experienced - it is a manner of speaking.

Through "experience", experience itself is made into an object. The coincidence of thought and experience?

It is informative as it's use implies knowledge about what this relationship between the 2 categories consists. But it is information that only relates to the way in which it is used. Is it possible to understand why it is used in this way? What would that question consist in?

In being used this way, the object which is material is not the object being referred to in experience. It becomes the experienced object.

The application of that categorization to reality presupposes that it fits that description.

***

The oxymoron of relation being subjective - without anything to relate to.

And of objectivity being the relation of fact to itself, and the negation of a relation.

Self-Quotes 1

Cash is the best antidote to ignorance.

The possibility of meaningful negation marks the representation of a category, and hence the starting point of philosophy.

Reality is like water; it cannot be sliced. Theory is like ice, malleable but static.

Thoughts on Singapore

In Singapore, the core cultural and the operational principles are pragmatic, but the form of political organization is authoritarian. Therefore free market principles are embedded within a heavily centralized form of political organization, which is socialist in some respects and liberal in others.

The political economy is market and externally driven. The constellated organization of social and political institutions are centrally controlled, bound together by developmental imperatives and social compacts grounded in culturally-sourced perspectives - pragmatism over ideals, merit over participation, and the emphasis of the individual in private over public spheres. The social system has been particularly effective in establishing merit over social class in the determination of social mobility.

The moral authority of the state remains absolute and unquestioned, as the state remains the vanguard; it determines the identity of the nation; which is constitutively pluralist, syncretic and porous to external influence - a major virtue in an open port city with a large migrant population.

Social control is exercised through a variety of state mechanisms backed by legislature and force; including the education system, national service, the mainstream media and civil rules against public disorder. This is backed by social norms which are in alignment with democracy-negating principles, which exist in a mutually conditioning relationship with the state.

The success of subtler forms of control open the space for greater freedoms within the boundary conditions established by the functioning of the state. There is freedom of movement; economic freedom; freedom of religion; freedom for political debate within non-ideological parameters; and positive freedoms of access to services and excellent public goods delivered by a clean and competent state.

What is traded off, then, is the flourishing of the individual in public life, as well as the celebration of individual initiative and inventiveness in the broader social and cultural life of the country - the concept of a society in collaboration with the advancement of human frontiers through an expanding life.

Thoughts from Rumelt & Soros

Stay with the uncertainty.

Useful Work comes from embodying fundamental insights through a refactoring of perception. Specialize in work where the ability to produce re-combinations to develop new systems and frameworks is optimal; combinations create value, and re-combinations sustain it.

Imagine doing the work everyday. What would you thrive in?

Understanding of a business is in essence an understanding of the ways in which the product adds value to the value chain of the customer. Effective FCF businesses are about competitive strategies (built around competitive advantages) to optimise the business process and the product around the buyers criterion of value. Moats are created by low cost, differentiation, or focus (segmentation).

At the Industry level, axis of segmentation, axis of competition and innovative disruptions mutually condition each other to give rise to operating environments for businesses. Businesses with durable competitive advantages build chain links, relationships, hard to replicate products and processes that confer cost or value advantages.

4 axis of business positioning: cost, quality, time, ease of access. A business can be profiled in terms of its location within these 4 axis.

***

Reflexivity: a paradox

Market prices are determined by expectations.

Yet the expectations themselves are reflected in prices which creates a new set of expectations based on these prices.

This is due to two reasons:

1) uncertainty creates reliance on collective expectations as a reference point for the formation of expectations

2) price influence the fundamentals by changing real economic activity, and hence the conditions in which the expectations are played out

Hence a proper set of expectations would endogenize the effect of the change in expectations on the fundamentals and the expectations.
Through backward induction, a uniquely determined convergence point may be found.

Fundamentals > expectations > expectations > fundamentals > etc.

3) the paradox of uncertainty (random events which cannot be represented through a probability distribution): expectations depend on the future, but the future is uncertain

Note 46

Development is driven by the needs, aspirations and abilities of human capital; the producer is the vanguard of development.

We embody a society where the producer consumes as a function of the developments required to unleash the productive capacity, the development of a community of producers as consumers.

In a static society, that is, a society which consists of non producers, where the fundamental driving force is not the will to produce as a living creator, yield and interest rates would tend toward zero, as capital is accumulated and demographic and productivity growth stagnates.

The high savings rate, the manifestation of an actual example of social organisation, results in a high capital asset, low yield economy.

Macroeconomic imbalances are society's way of adjusting the conditions of supply and demand to each other, and therein a given form of social organization. The adjustment process is the macroeconomic system.

Global imbalances renders the domestic mechanism - the macroeconomy as a tool of social adjustment - impotent. It exacerbates domestic systems of social organization that creates global imbalances. These are not inherently unhealthy, but a fundamental tension is created, which is resolved one way or the other.

What is required are more opportunities for social and political change and arbitrage, a more diverse and flexible kind of domestic society and its institutions, in order to preserve the society as a unit.

Note 45

The problem with productivity.

The problem of productivity is the problem of value accounting.

Output is measured by total market value of output, adjusted by a GDP deflator.

However, the market is an arbitrary determiner of value. Eg, an Apple Ipod with less features and lower audio quality than a Sony Mp3 player.

The premise of market efficiency may not hold, such that a unit of spending on an equivalent product might produce different welfare benefits due to a) different product quality due to imperfect markets eg. watermelon juice in Vietnam vs watermelon juice in Singapore b) differing choice sets.

Producer value cannot be measured simply in monetary terms either. Eg, the ATM, which does not show up in GDP.

Social value in exchange cannot be commoditized either.

The presence of externalities, etc.

Note 44

Speech is an act. Political and psychological; and an idea is a process in it's development. An identification expresses a motivation to transcend the categories which have given rise to the identification.

The context in which words are embedded transcends the words themselves. Development is the unfolding of context, not of words. Words are the residuals, not the ideas. Identifications are steps in the trajectory of the transcendence of the categories which give rise to those identities.

For instance, at the mention of the concept of God, (as a representative for the politicization of the relation between subject and object) one has already laid the framework for the possibility of the transcendence of this category of relation, and for radical freedom, and so on. Hence it is a negation, and a temporary absence of another set of principles. But in doing so, one recognised the fundamental bottleneck - the schism between subject and object, or better, freedom and truth. The point is that these underlying dualities remain insofar as the conditions that give rise to the contradiction, or tradeoffs, of the prescriptions of the two remain. The advent of the reconciliation is the advent of a new set of problems with their own tradeoffs, and so on.

One understands the problem by understanding the context which gave rise to this problem. To say that something is true is to adopt a representational approach. It expresses the possibility not only of the truth being untrue, but of the epistemic conditions of truth telling being variable (but also the absence of an alternative). Freedom, then, is but the context which forms an assumption of the context in which the problem is expressed. In doing so, it is playing it's part in a language game. Freedom<>structure of representation<>truth.

The space of conceptual possibility is continually expanding, due to the development of mental and material possibilities, and a society and it's institutions and structures will attempt to incorporate effectively the ideas available for use according to it's internally defined mandates, ie, its values.

But note that this is an explanation of things as they are, not things as they could possibly be. That is, a thing which cannot be thought is, while a thing which can be thought, cannot be, for it lies within its possibilities (which is self-negating, and seeks self-transcendence), not within itself.

Note 43

"Capitalists earn what they spend; workers spend what they earn."
Kaldor

The value of money is the value of consumption through time. The nominal value of money is the rate of exchange of total money supply with that value. If the value of consumption through time decreases, the nominal value of money increases (inflation). This is because there is more money supply per value.

Now the nominal value of money in the asset markets have been increasing. This is an inflation valve. By increasing asset consumption, the fed can keep interest rates low without risking baseline inflation, at the cost of increased financial volatility. Doing so also increases baseline nominal growth as a function of asset transaction volumes. The economy essentially profits from churning. Asset churning prevents deflation in a low growth economy.

Scarcity-adjusted marginal utility of consumption goods converge to unity, while prices and marginal utility adjusts, according to relative scarcity and hence elasticities (given elasticity of substitutions from consumption patterns).

***

The problem is to take the human out of the equation.

Asset values are claims to future consumption.

If a person saves more than he consumes now, he must consume more than he saves later. The economy must balance. Asset Ownership is trade of future consumption.

Hoarding occurs when the claims to future consumption increase. But the rate of future consumption, or the rate of consumption, remains constant. Total real value of future consumption increases, relative to present, and the real interest rate falls. When the real rate falls below zero, a depression sets in.

A depression is unavoidable when the real yield on assets fall below zero; when all the possibilities of filling up future consumption for the purpose of maximising present income has been exhausted, for a given rate of demographic growth. In such a case, present and future consumption is satiated, and Japanese style deflation sets in.

There are two ways to correct the imbalance: war or tax. War is destruction of assets and productive capacity. It solves the deflationary tendency caused by tendency to excess savings in a growing economy.(think china) It also solves the problem of excess labour and capital, when the habits of labour would be to create excess savings in an economy.

Tax forces asset prices down, allowing consumption to be forwarded to the present. It offsets the tendency of the economy to produce more than it can consume, thereby smoothing the business cycle. A tax on asset values also forces a consumption to income ratio that sustains healthy and correct growth rates.

***

An excess of savings causes a similar fall in prices and a fall in interest rates. The price of money rises in relation to the price of goods.

So the correct adjustment only happens if the combination of falling prices and falling rates offsets the tendency to hoard, and to save. If the natural rate is below zero, the adverse money effects kick in, so the natural rate falls even further.

Marginal efficiency of investment = Marginal efficiency of consumption => Natural rate of interest (given by this equilibrium relation)

What about money? Dynamic, income effects and price effects

Note 42

The root of all psychological dysfunction is the mistaking of models with reality.

That is, the inability to retain the level of judgement required to distinguish models from the case remains the crucial blind spot of applied decision making. It also creates openings for collective fantasies, herd behaviors etc. so the problem is not necessarily bad information, or bad models, but bad information processing at a subjective level. Society as a whole will attempt to circumvent this subjective problem with more accurate models, especially through data processing, moving forward. Therefore the act of judgement is increasingly outsourced towards common knowledge use of better models. This will create the conformist trend towards specific data processing solutions. While creating greater opportunities for profit for people who retain the ability to spot the differences between models and reality.

But that is the paradox of the realist: the real is a principle - of which the case is an instantiation - which itself cannot be parsed or verified and which is set against other instantiations of the principle.

That is, at the same time as one posits the real as the foundation of applicable truth to non self evident statements one denies the possibility of going beyond the real to epistemologize it's application, or to ontologize it's properties.

So, as Lao Tzu might have said, once thinking occurs, the possibility of real thinking ends, ergo, one thinks by not thinking, and ceases to think as one thinks.

Note 41

To identify an object in a graph, we define the dimensions of the object, then we define the coordinate system used, then we identify the object along the coordinates of the system.

Similarly, in the use of language, we have to define the sources of all possible meaningful utterances, then to define the language game used, and then to identify the contextual application through referring to a specific situation.

There is no given that these steps can be explained by a single theory.

These steps may or may not be sequential, or one of narrowing, and may feed into each other. The same act might require the use of several steps.

But they are philosophically separable, in that they have to be explained differently, because they refer to different things.

***

Meaning-making is refracted contextually, and the understanding of the steps are necessarily refracted; but the concepts which are investigated must be defined in terms of its possibility (in relation to its negation), not its representation (in relation to conditions of its application). While the latter is necessary for the former to be meaningful, true philosophy is the former in the context of the latter.

Note 40 (Thoughts on Hegel Intro)

The concept of an "I" is the failure of self-referentiality; it is the (non)-thing that cannot be identified.

The subject is an object which does not exist.

This is the starting point of freedom, which is the non-identification of a (non)-thing, as well as of desire, which is the process of identification.

The pathway of self-identification, as well as the philosophy of history, relates to the interaction of four key groups of parameters, that which can and cannot be known, and that which can and cannot be made conscious.

Social acts are essentially the interplay of values; values are the modality of identification of the self and the collective. Social forms, such as discourse, norms, and institutions, are channels for this interplay, which may be dialectical, evolutionary or otherwise.

Note 39

All relationships among elements of different language games are metaphorical. Hence the application of truths to a contextualized model of reality, composing of elements of different dimensions, each governed through its own language games, is metaphorical, although the logic of the categories underlying the language games, and the ways they are applied (though not understood) are not, if such a description is to be possible.

Quotes 10

The game played between the state and the market economy takes place on a field on which two systems for organizing power to allocate resources and to distribute the costs and benefits of their production and consumption coexist and coevolve. A rough historical rhythm is discernible as the losers from one dispensation appeal to - or invent - the other in search of redress [See also M Ramesh on pragmatic evolution, or problem solving of issues raised by overdominance of one pole, for another driver of the process]...deepening globalization of markets intensifies the conflict to the point of calling into question the simultaneous maintenance of both democracy and the autonomous nation-state [given global markets].

- William Janaway

Quote 9

"Nietzsche’s work relentlessly undermines the elevation of ‘literal’ over ‘metaphorical’ truth. He argues that we cannot privilege literal or ‘pure’ truth over metaphor because truth is itself a metaphor that has been invented to lend authority to particular forms of thought and styles of living. He argues repeatedly, for example, that the ‘truths’ of religious teaching are really dominant perspectives upon the meaning of human experience employed to establish the prestige of a community’s way of life (Spinks, 2003)." - Ruwan Jayatunge on The Nation

Context is truth in relation to itself, that is, meaning.

Truth is the duality of category and context, in which each can be defined through the other, ie. ontological duality as per Lao Tzu.

Existence

Existence is that which closes off possibilities. It exists because existence is itself.

But the existence of an existence cannot be given within existence itself: it must be given through a set of criteria which defines the terms of existence, and the conditions of existence.

The terms of existence define that which may be said to exist, while the conditions of existence defines that which exists.

Existence is the concretization of the conditions of existence in relation to the terms of existence.

In being that concretization, it identifies (or gives content to) the conditions of existence.

But in order to do so, existence is necessarily in the state of existing to which the concretization refers.

But, in being both the concretized condition of existence, as well as the state of existing, existence relates itself to itself.

Therefore existence is paradox and duality: condition and existence. It is infinite duality.

In other words, when we speak of existence, we refer to the possibility of the conceptualization of the actuality, as well as the actuality through which the possibility of the conceptualization is made meaningful. We have no other examples. But even if we had, we would not call it existence.

So an applied conception of existence creates dualities, depending on the role which the concept performs.

Hence we get absurdities: idealism and materialism are both sides of the same coin, so to speak.

This is the problem engendered in Hegel's quote: All identification is self-identity.

More: all manifested ideas are identified, hence all manifested ideas are self-identifying.

In this sense, duality comes about through the identification process of a concept.

***

We could have many universes. Each universe would be a fact referring itself to itself, as a minimum condition.

The world is fundamentally unity, as a necessary condition of its existence, its referring of itself to itself.

Existence is relative when applied, but absolute in conception.

A possible solution to the brain in a vat.

Facts are referred to other facts. A universe of facts is the world of inter-referring facts.

Existence is the act of something referring itself to itself.

It refers the terms of its own existence to the state of its being.

The state of its being is constitutively self-referring.

downward elasticity of prices on consumption > downward elasticity of interest rates on investment => deflation + zero lower bound

Assuming a cointegrating relationship in interest rates and prices

Repeat

To repeat oneself:

Existence is self-definition. Hence, to exist, one must define oneself in relation to oneself.