Thursday, August 02, 2007

But if you can do anything, what will you do?

7 comments:

Unknown said...

And that's why I advocate abandoning both economic systems and replacing them with something different.

What exactly? I don't know. But I've got a requirements document.

Anonymous said...

Everyone wants to get to the same place; they're just set on walking their own way.

sirtin said...

It's amazing how many people don't realize this. :) Almost any economic system would work perfectly if you just took out the people.

Anonymous said...

Within political science a grahpic analysis of the ideology of political regimes is sometimes presented.

Along the x-axis the socio-economic distribution; along the y-axis the degree of decentralization of political authority. Four quadrants results.

It possible to make a rudimentary depiction of various extreme political philosofies/ideologies in each of the four quandrants.

The upper left quadrant represent traditional communism with high political centralization coupled with economic equalitarianism (eg. Stalin). This stands opposed to the uppper right quadrant that yields facism.

The two lower quadrants are more interesting with emphasis on the decentralized political authority. Left wing anarchism (eg. Kropotkin) versus right wing anarchism (eg. Rothbard, Ayn Rand).

Much of the current political debate can be juxtaposed into this heuristic scheme. I will only note that presently the Republican Party is much more decentral both in political outlook and in political organization than the Democratic Party.

krishna said...

saw this movie called primer couple of days ago and the tagline in imdb went something similar to this posts' title.

Unknown said...

@MatthewDK -

I think that's still oversimplified. You need a third axis- social regimes. And really, we'd need to start balancing across various social dimensions.

Once we add in those dimensions, we can start marking off certain zones on the graph as "inaccessible" because conflicts occur.

The upshot- we can start formulating a realistic set of requirements for what we want our environment to be like, and start developing from there.

Oleg Semenov said...

As Kevin Spacey's character said in one good movie, "Every being in the universe knows right from wrong". The problem is just too direct and uncompromising understanding of "right"... However, I think that maybe if Uncle Sam and Us, the Commies would not try to find any compromise (which was anyway dictated by those who wanted Trade, not those who wanted the Right Thing)... Well... Maybe we would then both finally turn up at that One Marvelous Spot...

 
(c) 2006, 2007, 2008