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Each of us starts with dying

Suppose you want to remove Christianism from Platonic and Aristotelian foundations. You do away with Plato's participation of particular human beings to an Idea of Humanity as well as with Aristotle's idea that humans share an essence. Each individual is radically different.

In that case, a fusion between God and one particular man, in the person of Jesus Christ, does not leverage either of these two metaphysics to impart divine properties to all men. One man may resurrect (Jesus Christ), but we are still in search of an explanation why this act is a means for other people's resurrection.

If there are no special metaphysical levers for God to use, God might need to die and resurrect in every human, on a separate basis. Christ may be in each of us, die with us, so we can resurrect with him. God would save each individual in need of saving at a particular point in history. He would save all individuals who are fallen at the time, each in a separate process.

But then, why are there new individuals continuously being born in this world in need to be saved? Why are there new individuals born to suffering and ? Why couldn't God fuse with all individuals then existing at a time and before that time, so all those individuals would resurrect at once with him?

Perhaps God considers that all those newly born unto suffering are worth of going through the “the U movement”, the downward movement of living-unto-dying continued in the upward movement of dying-to-resurrect.

From today's Gospel reading in the Orthodox calendar (John 12:19-36): "Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies, it remains alone." Each of us starts with dying.

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security for presidents and for commedians

Jokes are artifacts closed to the outside world by an easily intelligible frame. When we ignore that frame, by pretending the joke oozes out, the outside world floods into the joke's enclosure. When you expect reality to flood in, you can't safely joke. When you can't safely joke, you aren't safe. 

No frame is perfect. But instead of mending it, we overflow with excitement at our safety's expense.

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commemorating the suicide of jan curtis and the death of gabriel negru mafa

I am commemorating the suicide of Jan Curtis, Joy Division, a member of the post punk vanguard in the late 70s. Jan Curtis took his life on May 18, 1980, after finishing their album Closer. The problem is whether to say anything about it.

Whenever someone purports to perform some final act, like Curtis did, someone else feels tempted to say something final about it. And regardless of the side you are taking, regardless of its content, your verbal statement will appear trivial.

I do not mean it would be wrong to believe your verbal message is the final truth. Believing your message is final might be quite alright. Rather, the question is whether your message about suicide, whatever it is, could be better served by smoothing it out into experience, and letting it be absorbed into your usual business, for as long as it takes.

And that usual business is, for some people, music. For instance Gabriel Negru Mafa, drummer and leader of distinguished Romanian black metal band Negură Bunget, died of cardiac arrest this Spring due to exhaustion right after the band's last concert in their European tour, and just before touring in the United State, as it was planned. Negru did not allow himself too much time between concerts. Financial pressures had imposed, it is reported, a hellish rhythm.

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endogenous business cycles as part of an entrepreneurial discovery process

Ray Niles, former classmate at GMU, recently presented his idea that some business cycles are endogenous to capitalism. He is - rightly in my opinion - defending endogenous business cycles as processes which are necessarily part of our best available way to discover economic value.

In his view, the "entrepreneurial discovery capital” process reveals which business projects are profitable and, out of those which prove profitable, just how profitable they are. 

It is easy to see that the process has two stages.

The first stage answers to the question "which projects are good enough to attract further investments?" The way this stage works is through funding of a large set of projects most of which will be failures, but one of which will be the home run". What bounds the portfolio of investment is the budget constraint and some preliminary vetting. After a preliminary check, No one knows how each of those projects will turn out. For each project, everyone uses different heuristics for predicting the feature of profitability each of which points in a different direction. When expectations point to different directions, the errors cancel each other out so there are no clusters of errors. The final output of the first stage is to single out a project with positive returns.

Once the first stage has already singled out a positive return project and expectations now work in the same direction, the second stage answers to the question "how good is the project that turned up to be good enough at the end of the first stage?" This the final output. But the temporary outcome of this process is sometimes overshooting. 

Overshooting occurs when expectations build only on expectations that a project will be good, but not on valuations of the project. This happens because we can't read the motivation behind an investment. The motivation can be valuation or it can be expectation that someone else will value it. Bubbles form when someone interprets someone else's motivation behind an investment to be valuation, when in fact, that motivation is merely expectation that someone else values it.

But here is a question. Why don't just as many people underinvest, misinterpreting the motivation behind other people's investments in the opposite direction? This question is bound to arise from someone who believes markets are always in equilibrium, as Boettke observed. Why don’t errors even out?

Someone might believe that the motivation behind my investment is only my expectation of yet other people's valuation, rather than my valuation. The law of large numbers might work at the level of project set, overshootings or overinvestments being offset by undershootings or underinvestments, thus precluding the formation of bubbles. Underinvestments may balance out overinvestments. But by the same law of large numbers, such errors of interpetation should cancel each other out at the level of each given investment project. Why doesn't it also work at the level of each single project?

To work at the level of one single business project, the law of large numbers has to be applied over the heuristics used to predict how valuable that project is. When the set of heuristics used is uniform across the total set of possible heuristics, then overinvestments will be offset by underinvestments. But the quality of heuristics people actually use to predict the value of a project depends on the way they interpret the set of factors that might affect that project. The ways individuals interpret these factors is not uniformly spread across the space of heuristic possibilities. Why not?

Maybe they all share the same "culture" because they all come from the same cultural place and they are all path dependent on the cluster of conceptual structures. Each uses the same interpretive cluster to predict success. But if that is the case, then how is it possible for an innovator to innovate? The innovator must be able to see something other people don't. But then why don't more people see that project the way the innovator herself sees it? Moreover, why are not all able to see it that way? If they were, estimation errors - overinvestments and underinvestments - would balance out. The answer is that they will eventually, given enough time.

Any innovative action, along with the novelty of interpretation which prompted it, takes place in one cultural spot at a given time. Estimations of will even out once everyone catches up with the new interrpetation. But before then, at any stage, we shall witness imbalances. For each given business project, we shall see either aggregate underestimations (not enough people invest enough in it, given its yet undiscovered value), or overestimation (too much investment, given its yet unseen value). These are the endogenous bubbles. In time, overestimations correct. These are the endogenous business cycles.

Business cycles take place in the smallest systems possible. I buy tickets to an Italian opera performance to surprise my girlfriend, because I believe she likes Italian performance, even though I do not myself like Italian opera. Once she sees the tickets she comes along to please me, only because she believes I like Italian opera. Eventually, she and I learn each others’ true preferences, but that takes time. 

There are such things as endogenous business cycles. This phenomenon has nothing to do with politics or manipulations of the interest rate. Endogenous business cycles are fact of life because life takes place in time.  No matter how knowledge spreads across the system from one place to another, transmission takes time.

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the complex system austrian approach to political business cycles

R. W. Wagner (1998) proposes an Austrian view of political business cycles (cycles of economic boom and bust caused by politicians) based on a critique of the concept of macroeconomic policy defined as a policy in which people are interested only because of its aggregate magnitude over subjects, not because of its relative effects on them. There is no such policy.

“What is a macro policy, as distinct from what might be called a micro policy? The only reasonable answer must be that it is one for which people care about its magnitude and not about its distribution among people. This concept of macroeconomic policy is surely chimerical (428).”

The initial Nordhaus model, which is still the standard political business cycle model, assumes that 

1. the members of the incumbent party have similar utility functions. They all want their party to be reelected. Similarity of members’ utility functions allows the theorist to treat them as one agent - an entity with a consistent utility function - attempting to increase chance of its reelection. 2. Subjects / Voters themselves have a similar utility function. Each of them cares about the welfare of the aggregate, as measured by economic growth and employment rate. Their similar utility function, again, allows the theorist to treat them as one agent. 3. The Politician acts on the Macro variable to please or fool the Voter’s perception. For example, they take advantage of the short run Philips curve to boost employment and growth before an election cycle. By the time the policy backlashes, they will have been reelected. 

But all three assumptions are false. 

1. Politicians do not have similar utility functions. Each have their own interests.  2. Subjects / voters each have their own different interest.  3. No subgroup of politicians acts directly on the macro variable. This would be a waste of private resources from their point of view. They rather invest resources in a targeted manner, to cause particular redistributive outcomes through changes in the microstructure. Macro variables are simply aggregations over individual phenomena. This is a simple system view of macroeconomic phenomena. 

Not only are the assumption false but the model fails to explain why the Subject does not learn to see through the veil of political tricks. The voter should learn what to expect.

The only sense of “macro policy” that is consistent with facts, is one in which macroeconomic variables are byproducts of many policies designed to effect particular programs of redistribution. This is a complex system view of macroeconomic phenomena.

Rather, there are thousands of measures enacted each year, each of which is supported by subsets of the population, subsets that, when joined together, may constitute a winning coalition (ibidem).

This concept of macroeconomic policy shares none of the unrealistic assumptions and is consistent with the observation of continuous injections of shocks in the economy. In a democracy, no coalition is stable. Each coalition, implements its own redistributional program, which injects its own shocks. 

The complex system approach recognizes that business owners know that collectively, they will cause a business cycle. But is able to explain why they acquire it all the same. Business owners know that inflation does not produce growth, but they do not form a coalition of interest to act in concert, as one entity. Each knows that the aggregate player cannot make any profit, but they also know that the first individuals to acquire the cheap credit have a higher chance to make positive profit. Each of them acts on the hope to sell their particular output at the old prices and make profit just before their input prices rise. They know that those who are the first in line to acquire the cheap credit have a high chance of operating in that crucial time interval. 

*Wagner, Richard 1998. "Political Business Cycles.” in The Elgar Companion to Austrian Economics, edited by Peter Boettke. Edward Elgar.

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no program of redistribution is stable under majority rule

Assume a society composed of three groups and a redistributive program which establishes a hierarchy.

Under majority rule the lowest and the middle group form a coalition to topple the group which is highest in hierarchy. This is in their interest of each of the two member of the majority coalition because each gains one position in the hierarchy.

The hierarchy A > B > C becomes B > C > A which becomes C > A > B which becomes A > B > C and the cycle repeats through.

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interventionism cannot be optimal because the expectation of future discretion frustrates present intervention

1. Effective government intervention in the present needs present discretion. 2. It is difficult for an agency to give up discretionary power once they have it. 3. The subjects of intervention expect that the agency might use its discretion in the future to modify the outcome of those actions which the agency wants them to take in the present in a way that will reduces their value to the subjects. 4. This expectation induces subjects to refrain from performing the actions the agency wants them to perform in the present.

Boettke, Peter. 1993. Why Perestroika Failed. The Politics and Economics of Socialist Transformation. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 96-102

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a logical reconstruction of ludwig von mises’s argument against socialism

This is a logical reconstruction of Ludwig von Mises’s (1962) argument against socialism, known as the "economic calculation" argument. 

The argument proves that under socialism people cannot take the “economic” course of action. In other words, that under socialist rules, people will make deeply wasteful allocations, which in turn leads to poverty. Wasteful allocations are those utilization of resources which leave less to be used for pursuing those projects which individuals want more. 

Here is a logical reconstruction of this argument. Perhaps the most important premises of the argument are 11 and 12.

1. In capitalism, people openly engage in many exchanges of capital goods. 2. Socialism is the large scale socialization, collectivization, or nationalization of the means of production or by their different name, capital goods. (Definition) 3. Capital goods are collectivized, when their ownership or control over how they are used, or the decision as to which capital good should be allocated to which project, belongs to the collective. (Definition) 4. In practice, for large collections of people, that decision or control over allocation, belongs to a central planning board, or to a government agency. 5. In practice socialism is centralized planning, or centralized decision making of capital allocation by a central planning board or a government agency. (from 2, 3, 4) 6. So the people who operate with those capital goods in the territory do not have the legal right to exchange these capital goods for other goods as they please. (from 5, 6) 7. Whenever the people who operate with those capital goods in the territory do not have the legal right to exchange these capital goods for other goods as they please, exchanges of capital goods are very few and hidden from sight (This also what we call black and grey markets). 8. In socialism, exchanges of capital goods are very few and hidden from sight. (from 6,7) 9. No one can observe the rates of exchange of those exchanges which fail to be made. 10. And very few observe the rates of exchange of those few exchanges which are being made on the black market. 11. Rates of exchange, or ratios at which people exchange some good for another, are called prices. (Definition)  12. Observation of prices is much better than any other method at detecting how much people value or prefer something relative to something else. 13. So in socialism, everyone, including the planning board, is much less capable of knowing how much people value something relative to something else than in capitalism. ( from 9, 10, 11, 12) 14. When the central planning board, or anyone else, allocates a capital good to one of the people who may want it for some project they have in mind, the allocator would very likely not allocate the good to the individual who values it the most. (from 13) 15. There is a very large number of people who want a good to various degrees and to whom the allocator can allocate the good. 16. For any capital good, there is a very high chance that an allocator will allocate the capital good to an individual who values that good far less than to the individual who values it the most. 17. So in socialism allocation of capital goods to people who value them far less than the ones who value them the most, is a deep phenomenon. (from 16) 18. And there are many capital goods to be allocated. 19. So allocation of capital goods to people who value them far less than the ones who value them the most, is a widespread phenomenon. (from 16, 18) 20. People who value a capital good more than others, are usually able to use that capital good to produce more goods than other people are, and those who value it less, less.  21. Most capital goods which are used somewhere cannot at the same time be used somewhere else. 22. It is then a deep and widespread phenomenon under socialism that each good is used up in a project where it produces much less than it would produce in capitalism. (from 17, 19, 21) 23. We call the phenomenon described at (22) waste. 24. All the many new goods which in capitalism would be produced, fail to be produced in socialism. (from 22) 25. We call the phenomenon described at (24) poverty.

*von Mises, Ludwig [1962] 1991. “Private Property and the Government and The Impracticability of Socialism.” in The Market Economy. A Reader., edited by Doti James and Dwight R. Lee.  Roxbury Publishing Company. 

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kaleidics defeats both the liberal idea of a higher law, and the idea that the state is ultimate*

The political must be distinguished from the state. The fabric of the state includes political relationships defined as leadership – followership associations along with other kinds of associations, including commercial and legal associations. The whole machinery of the state may operate during the time of exception but crucial in that operation are leader follower associations, which provide the role of coordination when established routines fail to do so. There are such times of failure. All existing systems of rules, including legal and constitutional systems, have emerged to deal with a set of past events. But the future brings new kinds of events whose nature we cannot predict. Legal and constitutional planning involves the formulation of comprehensive “if then” scenarios which are vulnerable to the exception. During exceptional times, some of us might want fast coordination outside the existing sets of rules (Carl Schmitt). Some might at the time want there to be a way for someone to collect a large amount of resources to confront the exception swiftly and unobstructed. This is the minimal requirement for condoning the state as an institution: to accept the ultimacy of an exception-motivated extralegal action. Condoning the state usually goes further than this. In preparation for the event of exception, some individuals voluntarily contribute during normal times to maintaining an organizational capital which will facilitate that coordination during the expected time of exception. Supporting this mechanism is making it more likely that whoever will step forward to perform sovereign acts during the exception, will be the one occupying a known office.

The political transcends the state. The state includes unforeseen leader – follower relationships but no matter how comprehensive the networks of the state, such relationships will also cross the state. Since the future brings unexpected novelty, windows of exception can be open from unexpected parts of the social system. The nature of a sovereign act during one such time cannot be foreseen, but by the same token neither can all acts intended to break the order installed by the previous sovereign. Those breaks will be somehow motivated in terms which many will understand, because certain abstract values do persist across times of exception. But this is very different from claiming that a higher law, a natural law or a law of reason we are all aware all underlies the political. On the contrary, all laws and systems of rules in the proper sense of the term float in a political entrepreneurial space. Kaleidics defeats not only the idea that the state is ultimate, but also those versions of liberalism based on the idea of a higher law. There is no closure to the political.

*This is a quote from Richard Wagner’s and my paper Autonomy of the Political within Political Economy, recently submitted to the editors.

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simple market anarchy

Start from multitude of overlapping public provision and public consumption units such as municipalities (V. Ostrom and E. Ostrom 1977) each of which operating at various scales according to the public good they address, and under a principle of free entry in the provision of public goods.

Turn them into publicly owned for profit corporations without conditioning stock and share ownership by residence, citizenship, or consumption of the public good (Wagner 2013). 

And let each of them make profits through tied sales or out of spot transactions with consumers of public goods who, instead of paying upon consumption, will have paid for them upon paying for a private variable good like real estate or dinner in a restaurant, whose price would include an appropriate markup. 

*Ostrom Vincent and Elinor Ostrom. 1977. “Public Goods and Public Choices.” in E.S. Savas. (ed). Alternatives for Delivering Public Services. Boulder, CO, Westview Press. Wagner, Richard. 2013. “Public Finance Without Taxation: Free-Riding as Institutional Artifact”. GMU Working Paper in Economics No. 13-05.

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an existentialist solution to the problem of evil

The solution to the problem of evil I am comfortable with relies on an existentialist view of God. This solution is worked out from my understanding of Vladimir Lossky and Peter van Inwagen.

This solution rejects an understanding of God’s actions as determined by his objective essence, where he is objectively good and all powerful. Lossky and Inwagen abandon the essentialist approach accordong to which 'God is god-like, man is man-like, and then there is grace", which Gos bestows to humans. Eastern theology and Inwagen have an existentialist approach.

God is everlasting but temporal. He exists in time. He is free. It is impossible for any being to perfectly ‘foresee’ or ‘know’ in advance what a free being would freely choose to do tomorrow. Therefore God cannot “know” his own future actions either. 

This means humans and God alike have to bear the existential dread that comes with responsibility. There are no objective anchors. As long as they are free, humans’ acts are not determined within an order established by God or by nature, but live in the void and with their own void.

The only possible anchor for beings with free will is subjective, and that is faith, their capacity to project their own being in the future. God Himself constantly struggles with and constantly overcomes His own existential void. He is able to plan by His faith. His nature cannot be objectively determined to be good if he is free. If God is constantly good, then he, by faith, must be constantly choosing to be so.

Therefore what makes God god, and raises him to his divine status is his faith, not any risk-free, immutable nature. If so, then God cannot give you that kind of nature either if you are to remain free. 

God is constantly “saving” himself by faith, as it were. You too can save yourself by your faith. But you have to do what he is doing. Salvation is through deification. You come to be what God is, by doing what God does. At the least, you have something to learn from him and you have something to gain by cooperating with him.

What God does is to love us. So, to do what he does, we must love God back.

To love God back we need to be free to choose to not love. This creates the possibility that I actually choose evil, and enact evil in the world I live in. It entails I should live in an indeterminate world made 'for me’ to experience and understand.

But why do other people have to suffer the evil I enact, the consequences of my wrong choice? Why can’t I choose evil in a tube, so to say? Why doesn’t God protect individual righteous persons from the consequences of my wrong choices? Why am I not protected, isolated from other people’s wrong choices?

This is because God’s nature is Trinitarian. The three persons love each ther. That is God’s nature. This is what God does. What God does is to love, to give himself. This is what we should imitate for our salvation because this is what works for God too. The godly persons love one another.

For humans to love one another humans, to actually manifest love towards each other and not just live in isolated experience machines where they experience love without actually loving anyone, we must live together. Therefore it takes a world ‘with all of us in it’ for us to live together. 

Moreover, if each of us have to live in an indeterminate world, and that world has to be unique for all of us, it takes an indeterminate world with all of us in it, for us to live together free to choose evil. Hence, we must live in an indeterminate world, a world where each of us can choose evil and each of us can suffer each other’s evil. 

*Peter van Inwagen 2005. “The Problem of Evil.” In William J. Wainwright, The Oxford handbook of philosophy of religion. Oxford University Press.

*Lossky, Vladimir 1978. Orthodox Theology. An introduction. tr by Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Press.

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what matters is what you do, not what you are, because what makes god god, is what he does not what he is

Scriptures say Christ suffers death in his nature as human and as god; both natures suffer death. Death separates soul from body. His soul goes in hell, body in the grave. They also say death does not annihilate Christ (something one would normally expect from death) because his divinity is present in both his soul and his body (V. Lossky, 1978, 116*). Question: what makes Christ's divinity subsist? 

Possible answer: there must be something about his essence which makes it indestructible. Difficulty: but then he does not really die; moreover, he cannot incur any risk anyway. 

Another possible answer: perhaps God in his hypostasis as Father sustains him. Difficulty: then Christ rises not because there is something special about him, but because God happened to sustain him and not others. This answer also shares the same problem with the first, but at the level of the Father. It’s just in the nature of the Father to not die and to resurrect the Son. There is no risk, and no real despair. But we know Christ suffers the despair of death (Matt 27:46).

Lossky’s answer: Christ does not die because death is only the unfolding of sin, and Christ had not sinned. The body dies, but the soul comes back to it, hence resurrection. 

Lossky’s solution is attractive. What keeps Christ divine is what he has done and not done, not what he is or is not. It doesn't matter what you are, and what you start with, but what you do. What matters is deed by faith, not the essence you're starting with. "I tell you the truth, anyone who believes in me will do the same works I have done, and even greater works. (John 14:12). It doesn't matter if you start as God or you start as man.

What makes God our god, what makes god a god, and what makes god god, is what he does, not “what he is no matter what he does”. This applies to God as Son, to God as Father, and to God as Spirit.

*Lossky, Vladimir 1978. Orthodox Theology. An introduction. tr by Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Press.

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theology not about the essence of god, but about what god does, to himself and to us, by living

Theology cannot proceed as a conceptual analysis of the nature of the individual God (Rowan 2005, 579 on Vladimir Lossky).

A particular individuality is a configuration of repeatable features. But theology’s central revelatory event is God’s kenosis (the renunciation of the divine in the incarnation), God's renunciation of his repeatable features.

That renunciation is itself not natural. Kenosis cannot be in the nature of God. It is a free act. "God forgets himself, to overcome the boundaries of mutual exclusion that define individuals against each other" (Rowan 2005, 579). Therefore the question what is the nature of the divine individual is irrelevant. The theologically relevant questions are questions about God's acts of spiritual creativity. What emerges from these acts of spiritual creativity is the person. The theologically relevant questions are questions about the person God.

The relevant distinction is between natural and personal, not between essence and persons, because what we care about is not the essence underlying the living God (ibidem), but about what the living God does to himself and to us by living the way he does.

Theology is about the person of God, not the nature of God.

*Williams Rowan “Eastern Orthodox Theology”. in David Ford ed., Modern Theologians, Blackwell 2005.

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scorn publicly, privately mourn

“Even the men who were crucified with Jesus ridiculed him (Mark 15:32).” 

But some of those who are publicly ridiculing are mourning privately.

“Your heads will remain covered, and your sandals will not be taken off. You will not mourn or weep, but you will waste away because of your sins. You will mourn privately (Ezekiel 24:23)”.

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recapitulation theory of atonement. does the individual summarize the species?

A scheme of thought in traditional Christian theology is that ontogeny recapitulates (or summarizes) phylogeny. For example, Orthodox theology accepts Irenaeus’s recapitulaiton theory of atonement. But this relies on a Platonic essentialist philosophy of the species. 

If we adopt a Darwinian view, each individual is a random mutation selectively retained, like other members of the same species, by a similar environment. Similarities between specimens only arise from constraints. If so, then what happens with one individual (say, Jesus) cannot directly affect what happens with others, because there is no shared substratum to leverage. 

And yet, in accordance with Darwinism, there is something shared. What is shared is a macro pattern arisen from micro processes of selection. That macro pattern can be mental. (A functionalist theory of mind is quite plausible.) In that sense, one human, Jesus, can summarize or recapitulate the existential, subjective condition of other humans. Salvation comes then by a mental concordance between a human’s faith, and God’s faith. That concordance or unity is the result of a voluntary cooperation between man and God, by faith on both sides. 

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personal post. our building site*

i dug a hole in our souls

as in a ground and i put our holes together.

we built a foundation of a skyscraper that with time came to reach up to the other side of the globe.

and the ground fell under the weight.

and when you broke out you broke out through the walls, and as I watched you leave i lay and took the ceilings’ fall

and for a while kept falling in the hole underneath opening wider

but i sealed the depth, enclosed the hole, and overcast a blanket made of sealed hole

and waited

for you to ram it with your horns, and with your worker’s cap.

*This Escherian composition reflects the disorganized attachment style of an abandoned lover. Paradoxes lie in the construction material, in the form, position and dimension of the construction, and in the orientation of the construction site. I believe I wrote this shortly after the 2013 New Year's, when R. left the first time.

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personal post. severed man*

*The elements in this collection are indestructible but incapable of association. They are disjointed, as is the man with severed limbs, the first element in the hieroglyphic series. The man with severed limbs is also severed from the rest of the elements. This fractured, minimalist drawing is dated summer 2014, a personal time of isolation.