That's the view of the Modern monetary theory (MMT) and Chartalism say. — ssu

Very interesting reading! MMT is neo-chartalism. Today I learned! I actually understand MMT a bit now. Maybe they do have a point. Thanks for the links.

I ran across something of great interest. I saw a video of a guy who's figured out why the 2008 bailout didn't crash the dollar and paradoxically led to a strong dollar. In a nutshell the thesis is that even though the Fed was printing like crazy, every other central bank is printing like crazy too. Since the dollar is still the reserve currency, all international debts settle in dollars creating great demand for dollars, the least-weak paper currency. Hence a strong dollar and a strong American stock market. He thinks the same thing will happen with the current bailout, and lead to a stronger dollar and a strong American stock market for another two or three years. After that, when the world finally moves off the dollar ... look out below.

The guy's name is Brent Johnson. Here's the video. I don't know if this is true or not, he's just some guy with an opinion. It seems to explain 2008 though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWVRWUkm54M

Rarely do you see stats like this: — ssu

My little coastal town's a ghost town. It's shocking. I went for a walk yesterday, easy to social distance since hardly anyone was on the street. Normally this time of year they're getting ready for summer and people are walking around buying stuff and eating at the many restaurants. Now everything's closed except for a few restaurants that have takeout, but there are no customers. It's awful. Multiply this by the entire country and this is truly a disaster. My heart goes out to everyone who lost their job because of this. These are all little people, store workers and small business owners. $1200's not going to save these people's lives and businesses. And what happens to state budgets when tax collections are down and welfare and unemployment spike through the roof? How bad is this going to get?

I was too, with the exception that ordinary people with bank accounts up to 200 000$ would have been guaranteed by the Fed printing the money at the last case. I would have been for that horrific -20% deflation and shock and then have. The have bankers (banksters) who broke the existing laws worst to go to jail. That would have sent a message not only to the financial community, but also to the people. The close it came was that the Fed looked at the "Nordic Model" of rearranging the banking system. That they didn't do. — ssu

Yes didn't Iceland or somebody just let the banks fail and now they've come through the crisis in better shape? In the US we just papered it all over, created a huge moral hazard, and now here comes yet another bailout.

Wall Street was in charge, literally. Nobody went to jail except a con-man that simply was fed up of lying to the World. He too would likely have gone as nothing has happened, if only he would have denied it and gotten some of that bailout money. It's real ugly when you think about it.

And they are now trying to do the same thing: keep alive a bursting bubble. — ssu

Well they just did it. We'll see what happens. The media are shrieking every day and reporting the death numbers and everyone's just whipped up into a hysteria and they just snuck in this corporate bailout and I can personally see my entire town shut down except for grocery stores and gas stations. Is this the end? Time to build a bunker, or what?

You made a similar comment early this month referencing an article also written by Michael Goodwin about a speculative Hillary win. — Maw

Thank you for keeping track so assiduously.

So may I ask you: How do you feel about Biden these days? Think he's the Trump slayer?

My understanding is that Boeing turned the money down, because the string attached was a government stake in the company. It's bad enough for them, I guess, to deal with the FAA without having to deal with Treasury Department. Nationalize the SOBs. — Bitter Crank

Oh did they? That's good. I don't think it's a good idea for the government to have a direct stake in companies. Bad enough the Fed's buying corporate debt (as I understand it).

This from a guy who continues to defend a stupid, stupid statement out of embarrassment. Forgive me if I don't care. — Xtrix

Just wanted to keep you abreast of the latest Hillary speculation. Micheal Goodwin of the NY Post notes that Democrats need to recruit Obama to bench Biden, find another candidate. He suggests Cuomo, Pelosi (??) and She Who Must Not Be Indicted herself.

And there is always Hillary Clinton. Insiders say she hasn’t given up despite being a two-time loser, and a rematch of 2016 would galvanize the nation. Her Trump grudge would be the only rationale she would need and might give Dems the turnout they would need.

So you all-in for Biden or what? Taking a poll of my liberal friends.

And to keep this on topic, I noticed that this is a thread about Bernie. He voted for the bailout. How do you Bernie fans feel about that? Talks the talk but he's never to be found when it's time to walk the walk.

So it goes. I bet many historians will smile when telling this story.

Of course, it's going to be marketed only as "socialism for the rich". Remember the half trillion slush fund Trump is going to personally administer? That's the way it's going to be marketed by the opposition. — ssu

I don't think the historians will have too long to wait. This ship's going down.

This bailout is 2008 on steroids. It's truly obscene. Bailouts for the banks. Bailouts for the airlines. A bailout for Boeing, which was undergoing a major corporate crisis due entirely to their own greed and incompetence. It's not just bailing out the rich. It's bailing out the stupid, corrupt, and greedy rich. That's not capitalism. Capitalism would be letting every single one of those companies fail. They should have let the banks fail in 2008. That's how capitalism is supposed to work. Stupid, greedy companies that are poor stewards of resources should be allowed to fail so that those resources can flow to more capable (and, one hopes, more decent) hands.

No wonder the kids are angry. This week I'm with Bernie. Except that he voted for the bill. Some socialist hero. He likes to give speeches with his talking points that haven't changed for 40 years but he's no fighter.

We're doomed. $1200 for all the bartenders and waitstaff and the people who run little jewelry shops and everything else. All the wonderful breakfast places in my little town shut down. What are the owners and workers supposed to do with $1200? But if you're Boeing -- you get bailed out.

I'm starting to get angry about this deal. It's really corrupt.

Trump had to sign it, what could he do? A lot of times he gets captured by the forces he was elected to fight. He looks like a hero though. Everyone loves the bill except AOC and me. I'm with AOC this week, she gave a furious speech against it.

Check out this clip. I almost never agree with her but on this deal I do.

https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-takedown-republicans-coronavirus-relief-bill-stimulus-corporate-bailouts-speech-2020-3

Trump is weirdly intuitive about things. Whether it's luck or skill, I'd say skill. Nobody puts up buildings in NYC without some smarts about people and things.
— fishfry
That seems to be what Trump lovers believe. Confirmation bias is a many splendored thing. — Relativist

I find the phrase "Trump lovers" the mark of a TDS sufferer. I would say that people who make an effort to understand Trump's appeal, without being blind to his many flaws, could understand why I made the remark I did. You're wrong. I don't love Trump. I understand why he's popular. And I'm disgusted by what's become of Democrats. Starting with this "Trump lover" crap.

Rather than try to understand why Trump is popular, the Dems would rather go on about Russiagate and Stormy and Cohen and racism and one hysteria after another; as an alternative to trying to understand why they lost such a winnable election against a complete political amateur.

I regard this as a fatal loss of vision and integrity that's led to three futile years of childish hysteria, culminating in the likely nomination of Joe Biden as their presidential candidate. That's your answer to "Trump lovers?" Joe Biden? If you made an effort to understand Trump's popularity you might have found a decent candidate.

So how do you like your chances with Joe? And how about that rape charge? You believe the woman?

↪fishfry Right, I was being sloppy, I must have had in mind computable numbers. Thanks. — SophistiCat

Not at all. You could still be right. At best the Chaitin number shows that there's a normal number among a class of numbers we can define in first-order logic. But we already knew that normal numbers exist. So it would still be fair to say that we don't know a particular one.

That's why his followers love him as he doesn't at all sound like a politician. And he is a great communicator for his followers. And he's a genuine populist. — ssu

Yes. He has a tremendous connection to the common people of this country. He connects with them. Yes he acts like a carnival barker with his rubes, but I think that's just an act. He did reality tv for ten years, he knows what Americans like. He gives it to him. But underneath that he's a very shrewd judge of things. He blasted through the cream of the crop of the Republican party before he beat Hillary. No rube does that.

say that his instincts are against globalization.
— fishfry
That's the basic agenda in modern populism. — ssu

I used to be a globalist. t's only recently that I've started to question it. Globalism was a good idea for a while but now it seems to be just a mechanism for the elite to stripmine the wealth of society for themselves. People are starting to notice. Trump's riding that wave. Brexit's was a precursor. The peasants are breaking out the pitchforks.

A month ago nobody knew that China makes a huge percentage of the pharmaceuticals we use.
— fishfry
That sounds like a Trumpism. — ssu

LOL!! Yes it IS Trumpism! And he's right! He was the first major public figure to call out China's trade practices. I'm on record as believing that Trump's tough talk on trade may have kept the Chinese military out of Hong Kong. Trump got Xi's attention. I believe personally that in this, Trump has been historic. It's the bookend to Nixon going to China. Trump is the first president to stand up to China. To seriously renegotiate our relationship. I don't see anyone on the political landscape who I'd rather have doing this.

Perhaps one could assume that making cheap simple industrial things hasn't been very popular in the US. Manufacturing has left the country for cheaper labor, you know. — ssu

Aha. This is exactly how I used to think. The world's gotten small. We have transportation and communication that couldn't be dreamed of a century ago. Someone sneezes in China and Kleenex stock ticks up in Manhattan. Total connectivity. It's inevitable, so why fight it?

But that is a myth. The wholesale offloading of the US manufacturing sector to China was a plan, not a historical inevitability. Globalists do not care about their own country. That's the definition of a globalist. The heartland was gutted. Not because technology made it inevitable; but rather because powerful interests planned it that way for their own benefit, and to the detriment of the country.

That is how we got Donald Trump. He speaks for the victims of globalism. I've come to understand and agree with this point of view. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the obscene Federal bailout of debt-ridden businesses with literally crumbs for the workers is the proof. Of the reported $2.2T bailout, probably around $360B is going for the peasants and the rest, $1.8T or whatever, goes to big corporations to bail them out of their own mistakes and greed. I swear, I am with AOC when she railed against this awful bill today.

The fat cats slaughtered the sheep again. 2008 on steroids. And Trump signed it. What else could he do? A lot of times the deep state is too big even for him. He gets to be a hero though, the bailout's very popular at the moment. That guy Massie, the only guy in the Senate who stood up and said, "Hey, what the hell are we doing?" was literally branded an enemy of the state.

It's like living in Soviet Russia near the end. Every public act is a charade to hide the evil that can no longer be hidden.

I did. And I've right from the start said this: in 1968/1969 about 100 000 Americans died in the Hong Kong flu pandemic. It's a thing hardly anyone knows. A pandemic in 1968-1969??? Never heard. That's how things have changed. It's simply we don't take as granted that oh well, old people die. — ssu

The hysteria is beyond belief. I take all the recommended precautions, I'm a stay-at-home anyway so my lifestyle's barely affected except that my formerly lively little beach town is now a ghost town. But the hysteria out there frightens me. So WHY has an official national hysteria been planned? One that required the overnight cessation of our entire economy except for the titans of industry lining up for their taxpayer-provided bailouts. You'd almost think someone's using this medical panic to fleece the public. But what kind of person could be that cynical at a time like this?

No. What's really going to get under the American collective skin is if on average more people will die in the US than in other countries. If China gets away with thousands of dead, and in the US it's over hundred thousand (let's hope not), that's going to be a real irritant for Trump. We'll see how it goes in the next two months I guess. — ssu

Yeah, who the heck knows what's going on anyway. Nobody trusts the Chinese numbers. And how many of infections a country has is more a factor of how many people get tested than how many actual infections. We're not even measuring the right thing. Everyone's flying in the dark, people are dying, the media are whipping up hysteria, and the politicians just sold out even more of the country to the rich. What's going to happen is that the elite will prosper with the bailouts but main street will be in a depression. The rich will buy up the cheap assets just like they did after 2008. They are doing it again but on a much bigger scale. This is truly outrageous. I'm upset but what can I do? I stay home and hope I don't get the damn virus, just like everyone else.

Because what Trump does now will have an effect on his re-election. Being even a decent leader would surely make him win the re-election. If the US muddles through this pandemic, it's going to be fine. But if the response is far worse than Katrina, then it's a different story. — ssu

Trump's approval is up. I think the bailouts and Fed liquidity (QE-infinity) will probably goose at least a short term recovery before the election. I think it's Trump in a landslide right now. But if this whole thing goes south, Joe Biden could become president.

How do people think THAT's going to work out? The Hillary/Obama wing of the party back in power with a weak president who will do anything they say?

I regard that as a very frightening and very real possibility.

As far as I know, this has not been proven about any known number, — SophistiCat

I believe I've read that Chaitin's Omega is known to be normal. It's not actually a specific number, just a class of numbers; and you can't write down any particular one, since none of them are computable. So you may or may not take this as a counterexample to the statement that no particular real is known to be normal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/67695/chaitins-constant-is-normal

Uh, impeachment was already finished by that point? And who care about what anyone calls Trump? He certainly doesn't care about what he calls others.

And why are the experts in scare quotes? — Echarmion

Because if there's one thing an observant person learns in a crisis, it's the fecklessness and unreliability of "experts." And have you noticed all the armchair epidemiologists lately? Something to behold. Why bother with a degree in microbiology when you can just parrot the hysterics you see on tv. "Exponential!" "R-zero!" "Flatten the curve!" A nation of morons who think they're smart.

You could save over 400,000 Americans every year if you banned booze and cigarettes. So "how much are you willing to do to save lives?" Maybe you should give that question some thought yourself.
— fishfry

We should totally do that, IMHO. Alkoholism is really bad. — Echarmion

Yes actually I fully agree. Problem is that we tried that in the US and it didn't work. Nobody stopped drinking and it led to the rise of organized crime. When will they learn the same lesson about the war on drugs?

You could see it that way, if you chose to.
— fishfry

Yeah, but why choose to do that? — Echarmion

Some of us independent-minded types call 'em as we see 'em.

It seems much more reasonable to assume that "presidential instincts" have fuck all to do with success or failure. — Echarmion

Trump is weirdly intuitive about things. Whether it's luck or skill, I'd say skill. Nobody puts up buildings in NYC without some smarts about people and things.

Inflation didn't happen after 2007-2008 in the "Great Recession". — ssu

Yes thank you for reminding me. Excellent point. Many people, myself included, believed QE1, 2 and 3 would blow up the dollar and send gold to the moon. Instead, gold peaked in 2011 and has been way down and sideways since then. Somehow the system accommodated all the money printing. And instead of inflating consumer goods, they inflated stocks and real estate and corporate profits. Part of the economy did really well, and other parts, mostly populated by the deplorables, didn't. No wonder Trump got elected.

But your point means that we must consider, what if they get away with it again? What if they inject another six trillion dollars of funny money into the economy and the rich keep getting richer and they still don't blow up the dollar? How long can this go on?

Keynes said: "Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent!" Smart guy.


N

either it happened in economic crash of the 1990's in my country (and other Nordic countries), which was a classic speculative bubble that started from deregulation of banking and ended in a banking crisis. In both cases many thought that inflation would kick next in. Others thought that deflation would happen. Either didn't happen. What simply happened is that the money stayed propping up the banks first stayed in the banks (with the banks sitting on the money as Uncle Scrooge) and then raised the prices stocks and financial instruments, created asset price inflation. That was different from classical inflation. — ssu

Yes, for some reason the ultimate crash just never happens. Maybe they really can borrow and print their way to prosperity. It's been working far longer than you'd think it could.

Now it's interesting what will happen when again trillions are poured into the system. Those money given to people will likely be either saved or with the poorest people spent on necessities. But here's the interesting million dollar question: if and when this pandemic is over, will the economy get going again. Or has the corona-virus shown that there wasn't any recovery and we will just continue having the Japanese-disease in our economy of low to negative growth? — ssu

One theory is that the stock crash isn't about the virus at all. The market was in a huge bubble and if it wasn't the virus it would have been something else. Blowing 10,000 points out of the DOW was a much-needed pressure relief. In which case this might just be the start of the next leg up! Or maybe this is just the start of the great crash and the world economy's gone for good, and all the printing in the world won't help. Nobody knows. Could go either way.

This massive corporate bailout though. I think there will be a lot of unintended consequences. You can't just keep subsidizing bad corporate behavior like this. It's far worse than the 2008 bailout.

Or will this spending with the recession create finally a dollar crisis? — ssu

Paradoxically, at times of crisis everyone flees into dollars. All the other fiat currencies are in even worse shape. How long this insanity can go on, nobody knows. Maybe it really is time to buy Bitcoin.

Ah. Good that you mentioned those stock buybacks. Think about all that money wasted in propping up the stock prices by stock buybacks, so the managers can get money from their options. And now they have disappeared into thin air. — ssu

I opposed the 2008 bailout. I was for actual capitalism. Let the "too big to fail" banks fail. If they managed their affairs in such a way as to not be able to continue to be in business, let them be liquidated and their assets absorbed into more profitable and sound companies. That's exactly how it's supposed to work.

Instead, the system propped up and rescued the worst operators, who learned the lesson that crime pays. They kept on doing what they were doing, and now not only the banks, but every other company overloaded with debt is lining up for a bailout.

I think the consequences of this are not going to be bad. But as you say, I thought the consequences would be bad in 2008 but the powers that be seem to be gliding along on a magic carpet of money printing.

I have a friend who inherited a lot of money and put it all into gold in 2009. He wakes up every day and checks to see if the global economy blew up yet. This time he may be right. Who's to say.

I am in a swing state. On your behalf, I will vote for Trump. I just have to figure out how to do early voting because I'm not going to stand in line for two hours for anybody. — frank

Well the real question is, in the awful and hopefully unlikely even that this covid insanity is still going strong in November, how the heck are we going to have an election?

Of course if the entire country is sheltering in place that long we'll have worse problems. People will be going insane and there will no longer be an economy. That would be bad.

It's also interesting to speculate as to the election. I've read that if an election isn't held. Trump and Pence cease to be in office on inauguration day. They are not extended, they're gone. So what happens then? Normally Pelosi is next in line but if there is no election then she couldn't still be Speaker because she wouldn't even have been reelected to the House. There would be no House and a lot of the Senators would be gone too. None of this makes any sense. I don't know what the answer is. But people saying Trump would cancel the election to be president forever are wrong. He'd be gone in January. It's just unclear what would happen then.

It is not rationality in general that is problematic, but the distinctly modern dominance of technical rationality, which is now widely treated as if it were the only legitimate form. — aletheist

Good distinction! The technocrats.

If you are interested, I wrote three one-page columns about this for a structural engineering magazine several years ago: "Knowledge, Rationality, and Judgment" (here); "The Rationality of Practice" (here); and "Rationality and Judgment Revisited" (here). They all include suggestions for further reading. — aletheist

I will check those out. Thanks.

His rhetoric afterwards and at present tells quite clearly that he's not seeing ahead. He got lucky with this call, and of course luck is important. — ssu

I can't argue Trump. People have their opinions. He's incredibly divisive. Nixon was that way. Reagan was politically divisive but very personally likable. Trump rubs a lot of people the wrong way. If he got lucky, it's because he's someone who gets lucky a lot, and ... if you put aside your dislike of his personality ... you might see that he "gets lucky" because he's very good at what he does. And he did reality tv for ten years so he knows what the American public likes. A showman and, in his strange nonlinear way, a statesman.

But it's ok if you don't agree. That's why they have elections ... if they have an election.

In this case a travel ban/quarantine of people coming from China was something close to his heart, something fitting his World view and his followers. — ssu

Yes you could say that. Or you could say that his instincts are against globalization. A month ago nobody knew that China makes a huge percentage of the pharmaceuticals we use. Now everyone knows. We know we need to make our own masks and respirators. We need to re-learn to make a lot of the stuff we use on a daily basis. This is the big-picture trend on which Trump ran in 2016. America first. You can decry his rhetoric on immigration -- I do. But his instincts have been prescient. Now the rest of the world is starting to catch up.

You could see it that way, if you chose to.

Well, the question is simply how much are you willing to do to save lives? — ssu

100 Americans a day die in automobile accidents. If you threw the book at drunk drivers, 30 days in the slam first offense no picking up trash on weekends, hard time in the local slam, you'd save 20,000 American lives a year easy. If you banned cars altogether you'd save 36,000 lives a year.

In 2018 the CDC reported 80,000 flu deaths in the US. You probably didn't even know that. There was no hysteria. Social distancing would have saved a lot of lives that year.

You could save over 400,000 Americans every year if you banned booze and cigarettes. So "how much are you willing to do to save lives?" Maybe you should give that question some thought yourself.

SOME crises get the media hysteria treatment and SOME don't. If you don't see that, you lack perspective. Yes covid is serious. But a lot of things are serious. 150,000 humans die every single day worldwide. Every single death a tragedy. But relative to people-killers, by the numbers, covid ain't much yet. You can talk about extrapolations, but it's always a value judgment as to whether your extrapolation of vague and conflicting data justifies putting millions of Americans out of work and blowing up the supply chain leading to a depression.

That's a value judgment. A lot of people lately think their judgment is an objective fact. That's wrong. The other day Cuomo said the usual political bs line, "If we save just one life." Well some young girl just killed herself at the prospect of being quarantined. There's your one life.

There are always tradeoffs and tradeoffs are matters of opinion, not fact.

a ruler bought at walmart is a certain size. — christian2017

Not if the ruler is moving very fast relative to the speed of light. This was actually known before Einstein. It's the Lorentz contraction.

But why do good neighbors need a fence in the first place? The whole notion seems contradictory to me. — Echarmion

If that's been your personal experience I can't tell you otherwise. I have no idea what to say to someone who doesn't believe in fences or boundaries or whatever you're not believing in. This is my side, this is your side. People learn that in nursery school.

Anyway, that is now one of the good decisions that Trump has made. Especially when Trump doing this went against WHO, which at that time was against travel bans. — ssu

So you concede the point. While the Dems were impeaching him and calling him a racist, he was seeing ahead of the "experts."

Yet now Trump is panicking about the prevailing economic depression and wanting to stop this "social distancing" and lock down for economic purposes. — ssu

I don't see that at all. I had the same thought a couple of days earlier. I posted here that there's no rational basis to know whether we should blow up the economy to prevent a worse outcome. It's a valid question. Trump's no panicking. He's expressing the perfectly obvious thought that we don't want the cure to be worse than the disease. We're monitoring the hell out of the situation but we also have an eye on getting small businesses up and operating again. I drove around my little town today, it's a ghost town. Trump gets this country far better than the other politicians do. He's for the workers and the little people. The mainstream GOPs and Dems aren't.

Trump's being an optimist, giving people something to hope for. You're just seeing what you want to see here. I want the shops and restaurants to be able to open, people to be able to go back to work. Don't you? Nobody's going to do that before it's medically safe. But we shouldn't mindlessly shut down our economy without asking the question.

The facts remain: he can't attack Biden right now and the economy looks bad. — frank

My God, haven't you seen the Biden clips the past couple of days? Stumbled through his webcast as he lost track of his thoughts when his teleprompter failed; then doing some cable tv interview and bumbling and stumbling through that, then going on The View and bumbling and stumbling on that.

Tell me something, just between us, and remember I'm an old liberal so this is between friends.

Do you honestly, heart of hearts, no fingers crossed, think that Joe Biden is mentally competent to be the president of the United States? And do you honestly stand up forthrightly and say that you support Joe Biden for president? And that you're not utterly shocked at the fraud the Dems are trying to perpetrate? Or do you just support Biden because he's not Trump even though you have watched his recent performances and are appalled at the utter shamelessness of the DNC?

Rationality's a fraud.
— fishfry
Rationality is a tool, and like all tools it is only well-suited for certain purposes. It can get you from a set of premisses to necessary conclusions, but it cannot stipulate those initial assumptions. That goes for both theoretical and practical rationality--if you want to achieve X, rationality can help you identify means to that end, but it cannot specify X itself; that requires a deliberate choice on your part. — aletheist

It's often been a tool of powerful to suppress the powerless. Lately I'm coming to understand what I take to be this postmodernist point of view. The suspicion of rationality itself. Standards and objectivity as tools of oppression. Too often we see logic and rationality used to justify the worst acts. "We're only following procedures." In a sense rationality is opposed to putting people first. So it's not neutral. It can be judged as sometimes a negative force in the world. Every time a bureaucrat wags his finger at you while picking your pocket, you're being mugged by rationality.

Not really. Notice that my definition requires the set of definitions and axioms to be established, which could be interpreted as consistent with your requirement for intersubjective agreement among practicing mathematicians. The "deepest results" come about when someone works something out that follows from those definitions and axioms, but either has not been noticed or has not been demonstrated previously. — aletheist

I should be careful. You described the point of view of Peirce, and I criticized that viewpoint. But I don't know enough about Peirce to really comment intelligently. I don't have certainty in my own positions. I'm a formalist when it suits me and a Platonist when it suits me. I don't want to let my rhetoric exceed my actual understanding; so I'll just say that Peirce probably knows a lot more about this than I do. And I haven't ever given any thought to mathematical existence. Mathematical existence is perfectly obvious to me from the perspective of math. It wasn't till @Metaphysician Undercover challenged me to define it that I ended up with my current position. But I'm not very wedded to it, nor is getting the right definition important to me. When I do math, mathematical existence is perfectly obvious. The question never comes up.

So rather than try to defend my position, I'll just say that what I've written so far represents the limited extent of my thinking; and that I'm not going to think much about this anymore. It's perfectly obvious to me that $\sqrt 2$ exists; and nothing I say will ever convince @Metaphysician Undercover. I should just quit while I'm behind.

It's a truth about the natural numbers as established by a certain set of definitions and axioms. The latter are the only way we know what anyone means by "natural numbers." — aletheist

Yes, on this you're just wrong. No mathematician thinks that way. Philosophy is not about standing outside a given discipline and telling them they're doing it wrong. Philosophy has to be about explaining what practitioners are actually doing. FLT is a statement about the natural numbers, and everybody knows exactly what they are. You do too; and no invocations of philosophy or nonstandard models will change the fact that you have an intuition of the natural numbers, and that I know you do.

One must account for that in one's philosophy. There, now I'm being a Platonist again.

As I see it, mathematical truth exists independent of whether there are any conscious beings who know about it.
— Daz
I am more in agreement with Daz on this, but would substitute "is" for "exists" since the latter has ontological implications that I wish to avoid. Platonism holds that mathematical objects exist in some ideal realm, while fictionalism holds that all properties of mathematical objects are dependent on what someone thinks about them, just like characters in a novel. I am a mathematical realist, but not a platonist; I hold that mathematical objects are real by virtue of having certain properties regardless of what any individual mind or finite group of minds thinks about them, but they do not exist because they do not react with anything. Fermat's last theorem would be a truth about the natural numbers, as established by a certain set of definitions and axioms, even if Fermat never conceived it and Wiles never proved it. — aletheist

Where does mathematical truth exist? Did it exist before there were humans? Before the solar system? Before the Big Bang? What else lives there? You can't avoid the ontological implications. Mathematical truths are abstract things, so they have abstract existence. But they're based on things outside, like counting pebbles.

I agree with you that FLT was true before Fermat. Mathematical truths are very strange philosophical things. On the one hand they're nothing more than valid inferences from arbitrary axioms; and on the other hand they are obviously eternal truths. Quite the mystery. Beyond my pay grade I think.

If you were in a swing state, would you vote Trump? — frank

I asked myself that in 2016. I hated (and hate) Hillary with a deep and abiding passion; but I do believe that if I'd lived in a swing state I'd have voted for Hillary. I live in California so I cast a protest vote for Trump. In 2012 I cast a protest vote for Gary Johnson; but by 2016 he was just mailing it in and wasn't worth voting for. I like Jill Stein personally but I'm not a new age loon so I couldn't vote for her. That left Trump as my only viable protest vote.

But in 2020? I will vote for Trump and would do that in any state. The Dems started with their Russia lie to avoid having to take responsibility for losing the most winnable election of all time. And they've turned that into over three years of trying to destroy the president at the expense of the country.

I wish Trump would stop tweeting and would choose his words with more care and did not deliberately pour gasoline on every fire. He calls it the China virus just to tweak his haters and personally I wish he were bigger than that.

But it's Trump, and as they said about Reagan, let Trump be Trump. He's fought off everything the Dems can throw at him and Gallup says 60% of the country thinks he's doing a good job in the covid crisis.

He stood up to China and China is a country that needs standing up to. He wants to bring manufacturing back to the US. Suddenly we all see the wisdom of that.

So I support Trump, warts and all. And if you want to categorize me: I'm a non-deplorable Trump supporter. There aren't enough deplorables to elect Trump. Trump won with the support of tens of millions of disaffected liberals like myself. Instead of pumping Russiagate and Stormy and Michael Cohen and Ukrainegate and all the rest of it the Dems had tried to figure out what people like me see in Trump, they'd be far better off.

As it is the Dems are going the way of the Whigs. Joe Biden. Please!

Or then the loonies of Modern Monetary Theory are correct and I and you are wrong. — ssu

Yes. Some Very Smart People think that the wealth of a nation comes from its ability to print currency. If I think that's insane and Paul Krugman thinks it's perfectly correct; then what razor can decide who's sane and who's insane? He has a Nobel prize in economics, right? Which tells you more about the Nobel prize in economics (which is not actually a Nobel prize) than it does about the estimable Paul Krugman.

What has to be understood that in the end this con game the end, a monetary crisis, is about the credibility of the currency and about inflation. Now if inflation would start picking up...that would be a sinister sign.

But I think it won't. — ssu

Gold crashed the first day of the DOW crash but it's up sharply. I think people are going to bet on big inflation as the Fed and Congress flood the country with what Ben Bernanke called Helicopter money.

You see, the money goes only to the rich and connected. It goes to prop up corporations. That's the secret. But this can indeed change if or when those trillions start flooding the real economy. But that can take time as otherwise things are quite deflationary now. — ssu

Yes. This is the continuation of the fraud perpetrated on the public in the 2008 bailout. The moral hazard was created and now every big company in America is "too big to fail." You know airlines have always failed. TWA, Pan Am, Pacific Southwest. But now the airlines plow a decade's worth of profits into stock buybacks and now demand a public rescue for their greed and incompetence. It's obscene. If the people understood this they'd march on Washington with pitchforks. Or, as I fear, they DO understand this and are resigned to it, as the citizens of the Soviet Union became resigned to their fate until the regime collapsed of its own weight.

The price of gas is down and we can celebrate! There's no sports, we need to celebrate something. In this case we're all winners and we can all celebrate together. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok that is a good point. There's deflation in most commodities; but gold is going up. As a striking contrast, silver went way down and the gold/silver ratio as I understand it is at record levels. I should mention I'm not a gold bug or gold nut, but I do keep an eye on what's going on.

Silver, and oil, and most other commodities, reflect the expected state of the economy. Industrial stuff, the stuff you use to run the world, is falling in price. There's no demand. Everyone's hunkering down. In fact even dropping helicopter money on businesses won't help because there's nobody to buy their products. There's a demand crash. So everything useful is going down.

But gold is going up. Because while there's some amount of industrial use for gold, the main use is to serve as a collective measure of confidence in paper money. Even though the dollar is up against all the other currencies, it's down against gold. Short term, the US dollar is always the safest asset in a crisis. Long term. all this printing is going to crash the dollar sooner or later.

That's what I think's going on.

I drove around downtown in my little town today on the southern California coast. It's a ghost town. Restaurants and shops. All those small business people and their workers out in the cold, no income, no answers, no help. Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi is jamming abortion and DACA and green new deal and every other line items of the social justice agenda. Of course the GOPs are a little too pro-business.

Personally I'm steamed that the airlines, to pick one industry, all plowed their profits into stock buybacks the last ten years; and now they want a bailout. We should have let the incompetent greedy banks fail in 2008 and we should let the incompetent greedy airlines fail today. Because when we don't, we create a moral hazard. The bank bailout of 2008 now turns into the everything bailout of 2020. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

No wonder the kids are angry.

Just as only Nixon could go to China, only Trump could bring socialism to the US. Historians will note the irony.

So now we have the chance perhaps for that monetary crisis afterwards... — ssu

Price of gold is shooting up. That reflects the fact that the dollar is being destroyed. Mnuchin said the total bailouts are adding up to $6 trillion. There's no corresponding increase in productivity or actual wealth. The dollars in your pocket are simply worth less ... soon to be worthless.

. Trump has been putting his ineptitude on display. He looks bad. — frank

Some think he's doing quite well. His poll numbers are up. While he was restricting Chinese immigration in January, the Dems were calling him a racist and impeaching him. Now everyone in the world, even Doctor Fauci, say he did exactly the right thing.

People rally to the president in times of crisis. The Dems' constant carping comes off as childish to many.

I hope that even if you don't personally subscribe to these ideas, you are at least aware that many people of good will share them. The Dems reflexively attack everything Trump says and it's quite counterproductive. Today he said that we have to balance the virus with the economy. I personally agree. I don't think blowing up our economy is necessary and that it's possible to take a dispassionate look at things. The flu killed 80,000 Americans in 2018 and there was no panic and we didn't deliberately crash our economy. Trump was right today to simply say that we'll take another look in a couple of weeks. I agreed with what he said. If you disagree, ok. But you should realize, and the polls confirm, that many Americans do think that on balance he's doing a good job of leading the country right now. And yeah I get you don't like his style.

The virus favors Biden (unless he has it) — frank

Have you seen Biden's latest webcast on coronavirus? He looks terrible. Robotically reading a teleprompter with zero charisma or leadership. #presidentCuomo is trending.

What the Dems and the people close to Biden are doing to him is cruel. He hasn't the capacity to be president. Which is just fine, because if we wins the Hillary/Obama wing of the party gets into power and runs things. Joe just has to show up and talk about Corn Pop or whatever. That's the Dems' cynical plan. And if Biden loses? At least they beat down the Bernie wing of the party. That was the main goal.

It's a long way to November. I for one don't think the American people are going to go along with the Biden sham.

Certainly mathematics is a social enterprise. And what constitutes a proof is a kind of consensus among those who practice mathematics. However, when I discovered last night a fact about attracting fixed points in polynomials that minor discovery immediately assumed mathematical existence, regardless of whether it is publicized. And it is possible someone else had arrived at this trivial conclusion, so it might have had mathematical existence already. But, in the larger social scheme there is a kind of mathematical existence based upon an agreement that a revelation is important. — jgill

Ok, good point. When someone first makes a discovery, that's when the existence happens. Social acceptance decides the importance.

But still, where was the discovery before it was discovered? As much as it's problematic to claim it had no existence beforehand, it's just as problematic to say it did. If it existed before you discovered it, did it exist at the moment of the Big Bang? How did that happen?

Platonism's harder to defend than fictionalism.

Better to say it didn't exist before you thought of it, just as Captain Ahab didn't exist before Melville thought of him. If we can figure out where Captain Ahab lived before Melville created him, then we can talk about whether $\aleph_{47}$ existed before the Big Bang.

From our past discussions about this, I understand the underlying sensibility here, but I think that it goes too far toward the subjective. — aletheist

Not subjective, social. My own hallucinations don't exist. But if I can convince enough people to believe in them, they do. But as @jgill pointed out, a mathematical discovery comes into being at the moment of discovery.

But what if the moment of discovery turns out to be a mathematical error? Then the community corrects it. There's a huge brouhaha in the math world going on right now in the [url=https://www.quantamagazine.org/titans-of-mathematics-clash-over-epic-proof-of-abc-conjecture-20180920/[/url] Mochizuki's claimed proof of the abc conjecture. One group of mathematicians firmly believes a certain result has been proven; others firmly disagree. We have to wait to see how this is ultimately decided, perhaps a long time.

Again, I endorse Charles Peirce's definition, which he adopted from his father Benjamin: "Mathematics is the study of what is true of hypothetical states of things." For me, mathematical existence is shorthand for logical possibility in accordance with an established set of definitions and axioms. — aletheist

I think that's limiting. It puts trivial conclusions derived from meaningless axioms on the same level as the deepest results. Math isn't just cranking out theorems from axioms. It's cranking out theorems about mathematical objects. No number theorist believes that Fermat's last theorem is merely a theorem that falls out of the axioms of set theory. Wiles proved that FLT is true. True in a way that transcends axioms. It's a truth about the natural numbers; not merely a truth about proofs in a formal system. That's the Platonist in me speaking.

Mathematicians may not yet recognize something as following necessarily from them, so it is not a matter of whether they do say that it has mathematical existence, but whether they would say that it has mathematical existence upon discovering a proof. — aletheist

Yes ok. Mathematicians tend to believe they're studying mathematical objects, though; and not just searching for proofs. I think that when you do math, you tend to be a Platonist; but when you try to defend the activity rationally, you have to fall back on being a fictionlist.

What gives you that idea? I can still travel from the Netherlands to other EU countries without problems provided that I meet the requirements of a lock down in any receiving State. — Benkei

I am weak on the details. I read that Germany closed its borders.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51905129

Also I found this:

BREAKING: EU Decides to Close All Schengen Borders For 30 Days.

Have I got this wrong?

A thing has mathematical existence when a preponderance of working professional mathematicians say it does.
— fishfry

So are you saying that when Georg Cantor first defined infinite sets ca. 1871 and there was great resistance among the world's mathematicians, infinity didn't exist yet? — Daz

Yes that's what I'm saying. Because the opposite of that proposition is the claim that transfinite set theory was "out there" somewhere waiting to be discovered. But if that's true, where was it? When Ogg the caveperson first made marks in the dirt to count the mastodons killed by the tribe, did all of modern transfinite set theory already exist? Where, exactly? What else exists there? God? The Baby Jesus? The Flying Spaghetti monsters? Platonism is just as hard to defend.

Did Captain Ahab exist before Melville wrote him into existence? Perhaps you can answer me that.

Of course I understand your point, that mathematical objects often seem inevitable after we discover them. But math is a social process. When the preponderance or consensus of working mathematicians accepts a new idea, that social process is what brings that idea into existence. Or at best, when it's first published.

You could ask if the sculpture is there in the stone before the sculptor gets to work.

I understand that we could never get to the bottom of these questions. I'm trying to cut through the existence arguments that are being made here. I don't think you can point to mathematical objects and say that there is an ultimate or absolutely true answer to whether they exist. People argue about whether certain mathematical objects exist or not. Your question is a good one. Where were the transfinite numbers before Cantor discovered them? I have no idea. If you don't think Cantor brought them into existence in an act of human creation; then where exactly do you think they lived? Were they created as part of the Big Bang? That idea is not tenable.

People will come to respect the importance of cooperation among sovereign nations. Global cooperation, not globalism. This could become a movement.
— fishfry

A movement for global cooperation you say? Like the UN? Or the Paris accord? Or the ICC? — Echarmion

I'm all for global cooperation. And borders. Good neighbors make good fences, that's one way to look at it. Of course that doesn't mean we can't be against particular international agreements. The UN and the Paris accords are problematic from a certain point of view. The ICC doesn't ring a bell. All I'm saying is that after the pandemic, people will have a new perspective on borders, national sovereignty, and being able to manufacture the stuff we need to survive. It's a boost to the anti-globalization theme sweeping the planet. I'm not advocating for or against by the way, just noting that the postwar order is coming to an end and a new era of nationalism is arising everywhere. Whether that's good or bad I don't know.

One of the reasons Clinton fought hard to get China to be a part of the WTO was that he wanted them to be more like us, liberalized, on the path to freedom, democracy and human rights. As it turns out, such an arraignment is a two-way street. As statism, the suppression of the internet, and censorship become the norm, the arraignment seems to have also made us more like them.

So I think you're right. This pandemic has made apparent our reliance on Chinese manufacturing, even for the most basic of products, and hopefully altering the supply-chain to a better deal will begin shortly after. — NOS4A2

Yes that was the original idea. Nixon's idea, when he historically opened relations between the US and China. Everyone thought they'd just become another westernized social democracy. Didn't work out quite as planned. Now they have the Uyghur concentration camps and the social credit system and total cybersurveiillance and I for one have some concerns.

That decision can never be the output of any rational process.
— fishfry
Exactly. I have been saying for years that science is an especially systematic way of knowing, while engineering is an especially systematic way of willing. There is no one "right" or even "optimized" solution to any given real-world problem, because tradeoffs are unavoidable and require the exercise of practical judgment, not a strict application of technical rationality. — aletheist

Yes. Past rationality, there is only the will of certain individuals. The will to power. One begins to see why postmodernists distrust rationality. Rationality is so often used through history as a weapon of the uppers against the lowers.

We can't logic our way out of the coronavirus crisis. Prevent the spread and crash the economy? Or perhaps crashing the economy is the point, to undermine Trump. After all 80,000 Americans died of flu in 2018, that's the CDC's official number. Most people never even heard about it. No panic, no hysterical media. Or (a theory I favor) everyone in the know understands that the crash of 2008 never ended. We literally papered it over with the ex nihilo creation of trillions of dollars of funny money in the form of quantitative easing. Everyone knew it would blow up at some point. If if blew up of its own fraudulence the people would burn down the banks when they realized the nature of the swindle. So if it's about to blow up anyway, why not blame a virus? And what's the solution? More Fed printing.

But that's just idle speculation. The main point being that rationality can't answer the big questions; and it's more often a tool used by the powerful against the powerless. Contemporary history makes me suddenly see what the postmodernists are about. Rationality's a fraud.

If anything we out to become more science oriented and focused on issues that can be dealt with by science. — Shawn

Science can't tell you whether to deliberately crash your economy in the expectation that not doing so would be even worse. That decision can never be the output of any rational process.

I know we have a corona virus thread generally - but in this thread I would like to consider the uncomfortable questions that no one seems to be asking at the moment as we try to, on a global scale, weather the storm. My question is once we get past this pandemic, or some countries have managed to eradicate it anyway, what will the shape of society to come look like? — Dogar

There will be a far greater understanding of the importance of borders. Globalization will never be the same. There will be a lot of support for moving drug manufacturing back to the US. When China owns your drug supply that's not a good thing.

One event that struck me was how fast the Schengen agreement was effectively abandoned in Europe. Suddenly all the countries remembered that they have borders. Merkel's liberal Germany closed down its borders You think people will forget once the virus passes? On the contrary. Everyone will understand that the moment there's a crisis, it's nations and borders that matter and not lip-service to free movement. That lesson will not be forgotten.

This is not isolationism, though it will be called that by the globalists. People will come to respect the importance of cooperation among sovereign nations. Global cooperation, not globalism. This could become a movement.

I think he means numbers don't exist and all objects up to and including the universe are forever finite — Gregory

I haven't followed the discussion but all questions as to the existence of mathematical objects come down to the question as what you regard as mathematical existence. Most people accept that the are "abstract objects," a phrase with a SEP page, and that abstractions live somewhere other than in the physical world. Of course then you have to explain where exactly they live. It turns out to be the same as how you judge the existence of Captain Ahab. In fact if you just regard math as pure fiction no different than a character ina novel; you save yourself a lot of trouble, philosophically. This idea is called mathematical fictionalism.

So whether the number 3 exists or whether $\aleph_{47}$ exists are the same question. They either both do or neither do; because their existence is demonstrable in standard set theory and agreed to by the world's mathematicians. Everything after that is somebody's value judgment.

I have recently come to a definition of mathematical existence. A thing has mathematical existence when a preponderance of working professional mathematicians say it does. In other words the meaning of the word existence is in the way we use it.

There was once a lot of opposition to $\aleph_{47}$ but people got over it and today we teach it to the undergrads and explain it on Wiki pages. The number went from mathematical nonexistence to existence by virtue of people getting used to Cantor's brilliant revolutionary ideas. A revolution that brought a new class of things into mathematical existence: the rigorous theory of the transfinite ordinals and cardinals. Their eventual mainstream acceptance brought them into existence.

Of course @Metaphysician Undercover would (and already has) pointed out that I have said nothing at all since whatever mathematical existence is, it can not possibly be something that is historically contingent. But it is. What we call numbers today, like negative numbers and complex numbers were regarded with horror and opposition from the mathematical establishments of their day.

So: If mathematicians say something has mathematical existence, then it does. There is surely no objective standard. It's a mistake to believe that there is.

Do you think it's the case that in the limit the corner points become dense in the straight line, despite remaining countable? — fdrake

Aren't the corner points just the dyadic rationals of the form $\frac{a}{2^n}$? In which case they're dense.

Maybe you SHOULD be excluded from adult conversations after all. — Xtrix

I wonder where I got the idea it was a waste of time to interact with you.

Lots of stupid things are discussed somewhere in the media. The fact that they appear in the media doesn't make them any less stupid. Clear enough? — Xtrix

Oh, political speculation is verboten? I didn't read that in the forum rules. I'll make a note of it.

So your money is on Joe Biden making it to the election in November? That's the betting favorite. I'd gladly take the other side were money at stake. He's an extremely weak candidate. If someone else gets the nomination one way or the other, it won't be one of the former candidates. It will be someone from the outside. She Who Must Not Be Indicted is certainly in that conversation if not necessarily in the lead. This is perfectly sensible political speculation. You seem to only know what you read in the papers, and you clearly don't read much.

Of course there will be involvement with private hospitals and private insurance, to a degree.
— Xtrix

Those involvements are exactly what makes Medicare so popular;
— fishfry

So you've asserted, without any evidence whatsoever. — Xtrix

So fucking what? Look it up. Medicare Advantage, Medicare Supplemental. I can't sit here and teach you Medicare. It's a very complicated system. Go do your homework.

You can say 9 is the same as 2 in my mind. — Gregory

It just occurred to me that 2 = 9 in the integers mod 7. This is perfectly ok in standard math. They study things like this in number theory and abstract algebra. Your idea's fine. Math accommodates a lot of different possibilitles.