What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Admiral Yi]

Black-Scholes presumes the existence of financial markets in a particular configuration.

NPV has broader application but it presumes an ability to measure investment costs in monetary terms, that investments generate a cash flow, and the existence of a discount mechanism.  It is possible to apply such a framework within a central planning economy, but it would look different from the way it is universally taught in any Western academic setting I can think of.

Sure, those are tools that have applicability in certain situations and less in others.  Is learning how electricity works a validation of electricity generation?  Or a validation of increasing electrification?

[PDH]

I was making a joke - Capitalism is "good" in that it has become normalized and made natural, Feminism is "bad" because it scares the old white males.

[viper37]

Back on topic, I think some of the Lincoln's Project's ads are hitting their target as intended

Trump is losing it, more that the usual, I mean:
Link

President Donald Trump on Monday shared a handful of social media posts questioning the expertise of his own public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, and suggesting their scientific counsel was intended to thwart his political standing ahead of November's general election.


In a burst of early morning online activity, Trump retweeted messages from the politically conservative former game show personality Chuck Woolery — who had stints hosting "Wheel of Fortune" and "Love Connection" — which lamented the spread of the "most outrageous lies" regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

"Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it's all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I'm sick of it," Woolery wrote in a tweet shared by the president.

In another post Trump retweeted, Woolery claimed there exists "so much evidence, yes scientific evidence, that schools should open this fall. It's worldwide and it's overwhelming. BUT NO."

Trump also retweeted a message from Mark Young, Woolery's co-host on his "Blunt Force Truth" podcast, which asked: "So based on Dr. Fauci and the Democrats, I will need an ID card to go shopping but not to vote?"

As the United States has posted peak numbers of daily Covid-19 infections in the past few weeks, the president's relationship with Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, plummeted to a new nadir over the weekend.

The White House reportedly told various media outlets Saturday and Sunday that "several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things," and furnished a lengthy list of statements the widely respected immunologist made in the early days of the outbreak.

The type of smear effort launched by the Trump administration against one of its most public-facing, trusted members is traditionally reserved for political rivals, and came after the president expressed public dissatisfaction with Fauci in recent interviews.

Trump similarly targeted Fauci's colleague, CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, in a tweet last week that accused the public health agency's guidelines for reopening schools of being "very tough & expensive."

The president's push to return students to classrooms in the fall represents the latest front in his pressure campaign for a broad-based economic reopening, in spite of surging Covid-19 caseloads.

[The Minsky Moment]

Sure, those are tools that have applicability in certain situations and less in others.  Is learning how electricity works a validation of electricity generation?  Or a validation of increasing electrification?

Well if the only way electricity could work is if you assume that it can be freely tradable and hedged in a frictionless market then the study of electricity could entail implicitly validating that structure.

[The Minsky Moment]

Speaking from a personal perspective, having taken economics classes at left-leaning institutions from predominantly left-leaning teachers, my own experience was that it was broadly validating of capitalist institutions. Maybe not red-blooded Milton Friedman capitalism but capitalism is a pretty broad church.  Even the study of "market failures" - common in such study -  presumes the centrality of the market and its function as a norm and starting point of analysis.  The Walrasian auction, the Arrow-Debreu theories, Ricardian trade theory - all of this is still at the core of undergrad economics nearly everywhere.\

To be clear this is not a bad thing.  We live in capitalist societies and it is important to understand them and be able to analyze their workings.  Capitalist institutions IMO have merit and thus study that implicitly validates them is not IMO a bad thing in itself.

Although perhaps I only say that from being brainwashed by taking too many econ classes?

[DGuller]

I don't think econ classes are a good example of the point being made about left-wing indoctrination.  Even left-wing econ professors are pretty right wing by society standards.  I myself had an economics professor who was openly socialist in his younger days, and his "indoctrination" was more of a moderate libertarian take.  That said, he never missed a chance to go off on a rant about Republicans and Bush, and he clearly had nothing but deep disdain for them.

[Sheilbh]

My development professor was a little out there.  He said Stalin's appropriation from the kulaks was a reasonable response to the Soviet Union's lack of capital.

I suppose it depends how you take reasonable - it could equally be "rational". Appropriating form the kulaks and massive extraction of grain was a reasonable way for that regime to get capital.

I have yet to figure out what it is that conservatives want my history classes to say: most of the time, I get the feeling that anything less as an outcome than "the US is the greatest country on earth" is somehow liberal indoctrination. But that's just such a misguided view of what a college course is supposed to be. I am not teaching a monotone litany of facts, nor am I aiming for some feel-good, moral story.

I don't know for history? Great man history?

Studying English my assumption was that what conservatives would want were certain core texts/authors (which my course was based around) and sort of New Criticism style close reading of the text itself as opposed to theory (which 90% of my course revolved around). No doubt it would still be perceived as left-wing Marxist indoctrination because among my tutors were specialists in queer theory or eco-criticism, they just taught other stuff too especially because the tools of New Criticism - formal analysis, close reading etc are the core of everything else.

[Oexmelin]

To be clear this is not a bad thing.  We live in capitalist societies and it is important to understand them and be able to analyze their workings.  Capitalist institutions IMO have merit and thus study that implicitly validates them is not IMO a bad thing in itself.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either. But economists has convinced people that the world they describe is the world "as it is", whereas the same realist presumption is not extended to, say, gender theory. Yet the queer theorist, no less than the economist, presumes they are describing the world as it is. Similarly, both economists and queer theorists peddle in the world that "ought to be", sometimes veering insensibly from the descriptive to the prescriptive, with the caveat that the capitalist world has largely come to be, whereas the equal world hasn't. I have read enough of econ, and sat in enough classes, to recognize that rhetoric slippage when it happens.

It is entirely possible to be critical of whatever approach is being dispensed in gender theory classes, as in economic history. I wish, for instance, that economic anthropology was a mandatory classes for economics major. And I am here for the conservative criticism that institutional history is largely absent from offering in most history department. But the accusations of indoctrination are largely BS, based on some vague dislike of a subject topic that are being denied intellectual value, and the presumption that one's intellectual or political leanings must, by necessity, translate into abuses of power in the classroom. Which sounds like projection to me.

[Oexmelin]

Studying English my assumption was that what conservatives would want were certain core texts/authors (which my course was based around) and sort of New Criticism style close reading of the text itself as opposed to theory (which 90% of my course revolved around). No doubt it would still be perceived as left-wing Marxist indoctrination because among my tutors were specialists in queer theory or eco-criticism, they just taught other stuff too especially because the tools of New Criticism - formal analysis, close reading etc are the core of everything else.

That used to be the conservative critique: study authors who matter, rather than the crap you are interested in. But that argument has had very little to answer to those who have pointed out the historically contingent nature of the canon. In any case, I think the point is now moot: the current conservative critique is simply uninterested in higher education, and has nothing to offer against that which it critiques, apart from derision and outrage. When pushed, they fall back on utilitarian arguments - where they find can at least hope to find allies among the STEM champions and the business school alumni. 

[The Minsky Moment]

To be clear this is not a bad thing.  We live in capitalist societies and it is important to understand them and be able to analyze their workings.  Capitalist institutions IMO have merit and thus study that implicitly validates them is not IMO a bad thing in itself.

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing either. But economists has convinced people that the world they describe is the world "as it is", whereas the same realist presumption is not extended to, say, gender theory.

Here is Robert Lucas on method in development economics:

This is what I mean by the' mechanics' of economic development - the construction
of a mechanical, artificial world, populated by the interacting robots that
economics typically studies, that is capable of exhibiting behavior the gross
features of which resemble those of the actual world that I have just described.
My lectures will be occupied with one such construction, and it will take some
work: . . . there is no doubt that there must be mechanics other than
the ones I will describe that would fit the facts about as well as mine. This is
why I have titled the lectures 'On the Mechanics ... ' rather than simply 'The
Mechanics of Economic Development'.

[Maladict]

Apparently Trump floated the idea of selling Puerto Rico. Of course everyone ignored it, but let's say it was actually put up for sale (and for the sake of argument, Puerto Rico itself and the international community seemed to be fine with that). Who would be most likely to buy it?

[celedhring]

Apparently Trump floated the idea of selling Puerto Rico. Of course everyone ignored it, but let's say it was actually put up for sale (and for the sake of argument, Puerto Rico itself and the international community seemed to be fine with that). Who would be most likely to buy it?

Us, and we'd use EU money for it 

[Eddie Teach]

Jeff Bezos

[Sheilbh]

Global Britain should get involved to add it to our network of sunny places for shady people in the Caribbean

[Maladict]

Us, and we'd use EU money for it