Thoughts & Notes on Economics
Started 14 February 2016
Thoughts gobbled together, badly surely in places, from assorted reading of political and economic thought from each side of the aisle.
Basic Income is the most direct and logical expression that the very fabric of a society depends on each member being able to subsist. Well-balanced it could replace a number of other economic dignity protection measures such as social security, medicare and even worker's rights such as unionization.
Sustainability criterion similar to the profitability criterion, which sets the minimum and atomic benchmark for the success of any free-market enterprise, sustainability is the keystone criterion of success in the public sphere. Sadly, sustainability, over the long run, is hard to measure and we can easily led astray by optimistic assumption even in the average case. Hence, sustainability ought to be measured, until proven otherwise, is the most conservative terms shy of being out-right fatalistic.
Economic freedom and economic well-being (of the median, if not the least, never the average) cannot be separated. Freedom has no value (and is unsustainable, or sustainable only by barbarous means) if it is not accompanied by well-being in the short term. Even well-being promised in the medium term cannot always suffice as the span of life allotted to humans, especially those on the lowest rungs, is not so ample as to warrant years of wait for a better future that may still be a chimera.
Empiricism is the only credible philosophy of politics and economics, if not any human endeavor. Not liberalims, communism, conversativsm can hold on its own because the theoretical ramifications have repeatedly, demonstrably failed in practice as society reacts and shifts in response to the theories. Outside of the realm of axiomatic mathematics, it is practice and practice alone that provides the ultimate accolade to any theory. Moreover, empiricism, for the better of man, be best combined with a humility that prefers the small, controlled experiment, repeated several times and gradually scaled before the large scale tinkering with social order.
Self-organisation over central planning: in many (but maybe not all spheres). While the building of a bridge, is usually not a self-organised but a prescribed and minutely planned process, the larger the objective, the more human the subject the more the principle of self-organisation rules supreme, be it in the competive capitalist organisation of economic activities or the building of complex artificial intelligence.
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