Keith Weiner: Big mouth spinless living in lala land

Keith Weiner is the US president of the Gold Standard Institute. He is an objectivist in the mold of Ayn Rand, and like most of the people of the Gold Standard Institute, he likes the Austrian School of Economics, a fringe group within the economic research field.

Kieth has a facebook page. You can subscribe to it, but my interactions with him showed that he has no interest in pursuing the truth, the reason he has that page is to have an echo chamber for his rants against Obama and the current administration. Many dutifully oblige and sprout their own ignorant rants against him. So, why did I come to that conclusion. It started with a post about how the economy was not recovering. I saw a mutual friend post something, and I decided to read the tread. I think the economy is recovering as we are not loosing 700,000 jobs a month, but instead are adding modest number of jobs each month. Is the number of jobs added enough, no, but it is an improvement.

The reply that I got from him was that there are still many people added to the food stamp program. So I checked. It is true, but here again, the number of people added to the food-stamp program was seriously reduced.

So, what we see is that in 2009,l about 550,000 people a month were added to the food-stamp roles, while now, that is less than 50,000, and the total number has been hovering between 46 and 47 million since last 2011.

So, now that we have the back ground, what happened when I pointed this out to our Gold Standard Institute president for the USA. Sounds impressive, and he just had tried to persuade me that he was obviously right with a statement about me having a PhD. he then continued with:

That was the last graph I shows above. Really? So, I responded:

 the 2011 and 2012 data are under the more, but you get the picture that I explained the data oif the graph that you can see above.

Kieth responded with:

Yes, I have a PhD in biology, and statistics is one of those things I am actually REALLY good with. So, I know the difference of total number and rate changes. Remember, we were having a discussion on his claim that the economy was not yet improving, and that is basically a discussion about rate changes, not absolutes. We were not having a discussion whether the economy was already good enough. So, I posted the following response (I snapped the screenshot in the middle of him deleting the comment, see below):

This made me think, are the rates really changing, because I had eyeballed the previous graph, but what is the variation realtive to the total? This graph shows that there is pretty much no change lately:

This data shows the same thing as the link to the website I gave above, we have some fluctuations going on but the total number is pretty much stable between 46 and 47 million. So, I posted a follow up response:

50,000 on 46,000,000 is about a 0.1% change. So, in absolute sense, yes, people are till added. But that was not the point, the point was whether or not the economy was improving. And the 10 fold reduction in number of people added is definitively a sign that the economy is recovering.

Kieth didn't like this. he had already said several times that I should leave because he though I had an ax to grind and shit like that, while in reality, I was following where the data was leading me.

So, next thing what happens is that he start deleting the last two responses, resulting in me posting a question about it (I include the previous post of him so you can see he deleted the posts in between):

 
The next thing I know is that he blocks me:

So, what do we have here. I think we have a guy with a big ego (he claims he has already a PhD at the Gold Standard Institute Website ("He is an Objectivist who has earned his PhD New Austrian School of Economics, with a focus on monetary science."), but at his own blog he writes that the professor has not yet signed off on it:

 I have read the thesis, or at least the abstract and introduction. It reads like a love letter to Ayn Rand. Over the years, I have seen a few PhD theses, including ones outside my field, and this one does not have the substance of a rigorous work, but instead read more like a opinion piece of his personal thoughts. I expect that for term papers discussing things, not of a thesis. My feeling was confirmed when I saw the very very short reference list, in which many of the Ayn Rand works took up considerable space. But enough about the lack of scientific rigor in the PhD, I think that point is clear.

So, what we have here is a guy with a big ego, who likes echo chambers, and stifles people who do not walk the party line. This same guy has the impressive title of "President of the Institute - USA" (screenshot in case it is deleted):

Yes, despite his 'prestigious' position, he cannot handle that he was proven wrong in a claim. I think that is pathetic, and quite frankly, I think the Gold Standard Institute has invited a problem, not an asset into their organization. I think the booting of Sandeep Jaitly is just more of the same.

And oh, never ask Keith whether we should make bankruptcies impossible for people with medical debts that saved their lives. Because he has enough morals to see you do have to help someone who ends up in the ER with a life-threatening emergency, but he does not want to pay for it with tax dollars. So, he wants to get the money from the patient, no matter what. I never came to asking him how to pluck a naked chicken, or how to get money from someone who did not survive the ER and racked up loads of cost anyway. Maybe he wants to make debt inheritable and pluck the offspring. I will never know, but I do know that I think that he is spineless guy with a big ego who cannot function outside his own echo chambers. I wish him good luck with living in lala land where he can be the supreme dictator. In the meanwhile, I am going to give a damn about the people around me.