Sunday, June 10, 2012

Some Ideas on Economics

  Economics is basically the secret of everyday life and everyday life is very complex. So to master economics is to master complexity. No wonder then that people should want to study it.
  So what ideas can I enunciate about economics? For brevity I would like to list them:

1. Everyone is either has all their needs satisfied, some of their needs satisfied, or none of their needs satisfied.

2. If some people are payed wages before other people, and no one worker in one industry is actually the same  person as another worker in another industry, then it follows that some people are payed after other people and that everyone has different needs indexed to time.

3. If choice does not exist then competition does not exist.

4. If markets are centralized then there is no more division of labor based on region (this one's a little iffy).

5. People don't consume all their wages before everyone else is paid, or else there would be no exchange.

I hope this is a good preliminary to any future thoughts on the subject.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Against Common Sense: Younger People Are Not More Liberal

  Now it is a common notion that the younger a person is, the more he tends to be liberal in his politics. So the corollary is in fact, that older people are more conservative. And seeing as that statement has the logical force of a biconditional, it follows that if one part of the statement is wrong, then so is the other. And I think that the atomic sentence "the younger is the more liberal" is the false one.
  How can this be? Firstly, if the above common notion is true, then one encounters a problem in the case that someone turns 50 -will he be equally liberal and conservative? But secondly, life expectancy was lower in the past, and equivalently the probability of reaching old age was lower than our own. So (all things being equal) there were more young people around in the past. And yet we see that the past was significantly more conservative than today such that anyone is not only conservative but reactionary who wants to turn back social mores to 1500AD.
   Finally, then this is a contradiction and as such it makes it false that younger people are more liberal than older people and false that older people are more conservative than younger ones.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Common Sense Politics

  Although a philosopher or philosophizer should take common sense as his lodestar, sometimes one feels the need to do exactly the opposite and preach against common sense -for common sense is not infallible.
  This is true especially of politics, for instance, in the popular opinion that the majority should rule. It seems that it is a common opinion that the people should rule, that is, that the people should rule just in the case that a majority of them agree to do a set of things. But there is a problem here, which is that a second common notion, namely the notion that the truth is always found in the median (as a midpoint between two extremes), contradicts the other common notion that the people should rule all the time. And I say this chiefly because the reason why the people should rule all the time is that a majority of the populace is somehow more intelligent than the few. And  yet, how could the majority be always more capable of reaching truth than the few, when it is agreed that the truth is always in the median opinion? For a majority of the people has the nature of a mode or (at best) an average. But the median is a separate measure most of the time, in the abstract sense that the normal distribution (where the median is equal to the mode) is only 1 out of 3 possibilities while the median is separate from the mode in the other two distributions.  So therefore, if the truth is found in the median opinion, then how could the truth reside in the majority opinion? Clearly there is an inconsistency here.
  Of course this problem might be solved if one subscribed to the median-voter theorem but I don't think that most people do, and to the extent that they don't, they seem mistaken about a key issue in their political philosophy. Interestingly enough, the inconsistency I discussed now, is even more fatal to the idea that exactly one person should rule (autocracy), so although it seemingly corrupts the idea of democracy it does likewise with monarchy.