However, I am pretty skeptical about the communist interpretation of human nature... and equally as skeptical of the supreme power of the individual, as interpreted by anarcho-capitalists.
Now, there are consistent libertarians, people like Murray Rothbard—and if you just read the world that they describe, it's a world so full of hate that no human being would want to live in it. This is a world where you don't have roads because you don't see any reason why you should cooperate in building a road that you're not going to use: if you want a road, you get together with a bunch of other people who are going to use that road and you build it, then you charge people to ride on it. If you don't like the pollution from somebody's automobile, you take them to court and you litigate it. Who would want to live in a world like that? It's a world built on hatred.
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power
Murray Rothbard does scare me, though. In Power and Market, his proposed arguments that restrictions upon market such as child labour and minimum wage laws create 'compulsory unemployment' and deadweight loss as a result of outrageously preventing children and certain workers from entering the labour market are the perfect example of homo economicus on crack.
This leads onto the second thing, which concerns the handful of models I've encountered in my studies of first year economics. From the very onset of supply-demand, we were told that assumptions always underly every neat mathematical or graphical representation of what are, at essence, rather complicated decisions made upon facts that are scarce and sometimes subject to bias. The assumptions are made so as not to cloud the general principles with unnecessary detail, but they can give us greater insight into how the world actually works than the models themselves. For most of my cohort, these assumptions were just a pain in the ass that you had to remember for assignments and exam questions, lest they take off marks, preventing you from completing a compulsory first commerce subject and moving onto bigger, better accounting and finance-related pursuits where keywords 'internships', 'grad positions', 'vac work', 'big 4' and for the more ambitious, 'IB' are thrown around. Was that tangent just a chance to throw in a casual bashing of my morally-bankrupt peers? Perhaps, but in harking back to my original point, all I mean is that introductory micro and macro are just subjects to be passed, so trust the arts kid to read more into things. I'm pretty pleased to see how the implications of what we learn are so interconnected with politics, philosophy, geography and society itself... John Nash, father of game theory and that famous equilibrium of his, was a mathematician. Keynes, who essentially gave rise to modern macroeconomics as we know it, studied philosophy at university, only dropping in on economics lectures every now and then. The problematic circumstances of currency pegging to West Germany that partially formed the basis for the creation of the EU were due to the social and political implications of East and West Germany forming one nation, one state.
Seeing how everything relates makes life so much more interesting, and dabbling in a bit of this and that all the more tempting. In order to keep my focus, I'll need to maintain the attitude of think broad, work small. Maybe stop procrastinating by writing this and get back to studying, too.
This leads onto the second thing, which concerns the handful of models I've encountered in my studies of first year economics. From the very onset of supply-demand, we were told that assumptions always underly every neat mathematical or graphical representation of what are, at essence, rather complicated decisions made upon facts that are scarce and sometimes subject to bias. The assumptions are made so as not to cloud the general principles with unnecessary detail, but they can give us greater insight into how the world actually works than the models themselves. For most of my cohort, these assumptions were just a pain in the ass that you had to remember for assignments and exam questions, lest they take off marks, preventing you from completing a compulsory first commerce subject and moving onto bigger, better accounting and finance-related pursuits where keywords 'internships', 'grad positions', 'vac work', 'big 4' and for the more ambitious, 'IB' are thrown around. Was that tangent just a chance to throw in a casual bashing of my morally-bankrupt peers? Perhaps, but in harking back to my original point, all I mean is that introductory micro and macro are just subjects to be passed, so trust the arts kid to read more into things. I'm pretty pleased to see how the implications of what we learn are so interconnected with politics, philosophy, geography and society itself... John Nash, father of game theory and that famous equilibrium of his, was a mathematician. Keynes, who essentially gave rise to modern macroeconomics as we know it, studied philosophy at university, only dropping in on economics lectures every now and then. The problematic circumstances of currency pegging to West Germany that partially formed the basis for the creation of the EU were due to the social and political implications of East and West Germany forming one nation, one state.
Seeing how everything relates makes life so much more interesting, and dabbling in a bit of this and that all the more tempting. In order to keep my focus, I'll need to maintain the attitude of think broad, work small. Maybe stop procrastinating by writing this and get back to studying, too.
