Too Goddamned Many Ideas (Part I)

No idea exists in isolation. Every idea is part of a network of ideas that refer to each other, and sometimes to themselves (as this one is doing, right now). Expressing one idea is hard to do without having expressed the others on which it depends. And those depend on still others, and so on. Given a narrow context, I can write something. But given the broad landscape that my ideas on economics and politics cover, I have trouble finding where to start.I've tried mind mapping--writing down ideas and connecting them with lines--but my ideas about economics and politics are so interconnected that my mind map becomes a tangle. Everything is connected to nearly everything else. Mind mapping has not helped.Expressing myself is harder because most words in economics and politics are overloaded. When I write about wealth I've got to make sure people understand what I mean by "wealth," because there are many overlapping definitions, and my arguments are based on a particular definition. And because "wealth" is connected to many other concepts I quickly get caught in the tangle.But that way leads to madness and non-production and frustration. So in this post, I'll try to map out some of the territory that I hope to discover by listing the titles and key ideas for a bunch of posts and link to them as and if I write them.It's Wealth, Not GDP That Matters: Continuing the argument that what's important is finding ways to increase wealth, not to create jobs or manage the debt, I'll argue that focusing on GDP and not wealth-creation is a mistake. GDP doesn't grow when wealth is produced if the labor that produces the wealth is unpaid; it grows when labor produces nothing of value (think needless bureaucracy), and it grows when the result is destruction (think the building of bombs.)What Is Wealth*? If growing wealth is what's important in economics, we damned well have to have a good idea of what we mean by that word.Annotating Key Terms: You won't understand my arguments about wealth*, for example, if you don't know what I mean by wealth*, for instance. To make it clear the word that I'm using is so overloaded that many people will define it differently than I am defining it, I'll annotate the word so that it's clear that there's something special about its use. And I'll summarize the definitions for the main terms in this post--or link to their own if that's important.Don't Believe Anyone's Economic (Fore or After)cast: Economic and political arguments often appeal to a forecast: if we do X, then Y will result. Or an aftercast: P has happened because we did, or failed to do Q. Extensive accountability research, comparing forecasters' forecasts with the non-optional reality that results, shows that almost all of them are confident in the accuracy of their forecasts, despite the fact that they are usually wrong. Most do no better than chance and some worse. Given that dismal record, arguments based on their predictions don't count for much.Science And Economics: Economic forecasts are imprecise in part because the full power of the scientific method can't be used to test some of the most important economic hypotheses. We can collect data and form hypotheses, but rigorous experiments are generally impossible. The result is that many economic theories are based on posthoc reasoning or imputing that correlation implies causation. Indeed, recent experiments in psychology have overturned many long-held economic principles.Why Is America's Economy The World's Richest: Marketarians argue that the United States has the world's richest economy and with very few exceptions, the world's highest GDP per capita because it has the world's freest markets. That's untestable, and therefore wholly unscientific hypothesis. Experiments on a smaller scale than an entire national economy show that many of the supporting principles of the free market system are untrue.Wealth Produces Wealth: Growing national wealth is important because, notwithstanding the fact that individuals can go from rags to riches or riches to rags in a generation, the current level of existing national, regional, family, and personal wealth* (as defined in What Is Wealth*) predicts future wealth.You Can Only Optimize One Thing: People don't realize that if they have more than one thing that they find of value--say family and country--that there must inevitably be areas where the two must be in conflict. There will always be situations where what's best for one is not what's best for the other. We sent our kids to private schools, yet we don't complain about paying taxes for public schools or the fact that the government extracts taxes at the point of a gun. I think that even poor quality public education for every child is better for the country than no education for many. But if the government didn't collect taxes for education, I doubt that I would donate to educate other people's children. Nor would most people.There's more in my head, but this is enough for this post.