Thinking Citizen Blog — November 2024 — The Orion Challenge (Part One) Have You Done Your Economics Homework?
Thinking Citizen Blog — Tuesday is Economics, Finance, and Business Day
Today’s Topic: November 2024 — The Orion Challenge (Part One) Have you done your economics homework?
What are the seven most important things you have learned about economics in your life in order?
This is the economics version of the “Orion Game” — the game of finding in the haystack of the past the needles of wisdom hidden there. It’s the game of sharing what you find with friends and family in the hopes that they will reciprocate, making a real conversation possible — perhaps the first ever in your life or anyone’s.
This is the first in a very timely series. In case you have been asleep, there is an election coming up.
Have you done your homework? I mean, your serious homework. Prove it to yourself and to the rest of us by sharing with us a seven-point distillation of what you have learned about each of the seven most important issues that should influence your decision and why they point to voting for which candidate.
To be honest, I don’t know how I will vote in November because I have not completed my homework yet. I am perhaps the proverbial centrist, swing voter. And my choice may well be influenced by Kamala’s choice of running mate. But it might even be influenced by your homework as shared here. You might rattle some iffy premise of mine or expose some deep fake fact for the fraud that it is. Let’s find out.
But first, a confession of my biases. I love Kamala. I hate Trump. But this is not about feelings.
It’s about premises that lead to policies that either bring us closer to a world where every child born reaches their full potential for joy, productivity, and responsibility — or not.
So on each of the next seven days, starting today, I will address in turn, economics, climate change, health care, education, social justice (freedom, law, and values), and political process reform. This is experimental. This is my first time. Let’s see how it goes.
Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE BIG THREE — Alnilam (the central star of Orion’s belt) and its two neighbors (Mintaka and Alnitak)
1. Alnilam “Capitalism turns luxuries into necessities. Communism turns necessities into luxuries.” This is not an opinion or a theory. This is fact. Historical fact. Repeated again and again and again. In Stalinist Russia. In Mao’s China. In Fidel’s Cuba. In Maduro’s Venezuela. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia.
2. Mintaka: why? Communism is the Deep Fake of Deep Fakes. It is Cain-zian. It is Envy cloaked as justice based on the Big Lie that, as a rule, capitalists get rich by exploiting workers and deceiving consumers. No! That is the exception and not the rule. The rule matters more than the exception. No! Capitalists, as a rule, get rich by creating organizations (ie. herding cats) to make products and services so valued by others that they are willing voluntarily to part with their hard-earned savings to acquire them. It is the paradox of capitalism that the key to epic wealth is to bring more joy to more people over a more extended period of time.
3. Alnitak: the arc of capitalism bends towards smaller, faster, better ways of increasing pleasure and reducing pain. The arc of communism (and its mellower version, socialism) bends toward bureaucracy, tyranny, and scarcity. China embraced capitalism in 1989.
Look where it got them!
THE NEXT TWO: BETELGEUSE AND BELLATRIX
4. Betelgeuse — The demand curve slopes downward and to the right. The demand for labor will fall if the minimum wage is set higher than the value of work to the employer. The minimum wage condemns the low skilled to unemployment. It is racist in its origins and disastrous in in its effects.
5. Bellatrix — the supply curve rises to the right. Biden is talking about national rent control.
Wow! at a time of a national housing crisis! We need more supply not less.
THE NEXT TWO — SAIPH AND RIGEL — below the “Heckman Curve” named after James Heckman, Nobel Prize in economics, 2000, to me the greatest single contribution of any economics Nobel Prize winner ever — by a wide margin. If you know of a better one, please share.
6. Saiph — the engine of economic growth is productivity — we need more investment not less. Higher corporate taxes reduces investment.
7. Rigel — the ultimate engine of productivity is education — we need higher standards and expectations, not lower. The sure way to guarantee a perpetuation of disparities in educational outcomes is to lower standards and expectations for the historically disadvantaged. This is the lesson of all the great heroic teachers of all time (eg. Harriet Ball, Marva Collins, Jaime Escalante, Rafe Esquith). Which is the party of the educational status quo?
CONCLUSION — Economics says vote for the party that has its premises aligned with historical and economic reality.
How will the next six days pan out? What will be the lessons of climate change, health care, education, social justice (freedom, law, values), political process reform, and foreign policy be. Let’s find out together.
Remember — I am a card-carrying Bayesian-Euclidean, meaning all my Orions are provisional, pending more research and deeper reflection (Bayes) and I believe that first premises are all important (Euclid).
My formal party affiliation is as the founder of The Party of We and Yes whose core message is to focus the positive, the shared, and future in order to bring forward the day when every child born reaches their full potential for joy, productivity, and responsibility.
The party, so far, has two members — myself and my wife, Patti.
FOOTNOTE — If you haven’t read Rafe Esquith’s “There are No Shortcuts,” and “Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire,” well buy them, read them, and share them with anyone you love who cares about equality of opportunity.
And, by the way, turn every family dinner conversation into an opportunity to exchange Orions on the joy and civic issue of the day.
Thinking Citizen Blog — The Party of We and Yes (Part II)
The Hobart Shakespeareans — Wikipedia
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, (11/17/20)
NB: Palestine Orion (Decision) — let’s exchange Orions, let’s find Rumi’s field (“Beyond all ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. Meet me there” Rumi, 13 century Persian Sufi mystic)
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY INTO FOURTEEN BOOK-LENGTH PDFs:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
YOUR TURN — Please share:
a.) the coolest thing you learned this week related to business, economics, finance.
b.) the coolest thing you learned in your life related to business, economics, finance.
c.) anything at all related to business, economics, finance.
d.) anything at all
