Economic is Everything

I wish that I had studied economics.

For the past year or two I have been thinking that economics is the root cause of all decisions. Not economics in the normal sense of transactions involving money, but rather economics as always trying to obtain increase. Now this increase could be in prestige, influence, knowledge, faith, or anything which an individual values.

The theory is that for every type of situation (with kids, with spouse, family, work, school, church, bar, whatever) a person has a hierarchy of values; for example when I am at school my values, are getting information, socializing, grades, and networking in that order. However, when at home my values shift to making wife happy, making kids happy, sleeping in that order.

I think that whenever a decision needs to be made there is a mental process of comparing the foreseeable results of a decision in the view of how you will gain with respect to the values of the situation. So at home I am faced with a decision of helping a child play a game or helping my wife cook dinner, this one is easy because I can help the child increasing the child's happiness which in turn increases my wife's happiness and I acted in accordance with my top two values generating good feeling for me. When I am at work however, and a child needs help I ignore it, or spend little time or effort on the problem because my values are different and a child's happiness is much farther down on the list than production. 

The interesting part of this theory comes when two different value sets that are in opposition come into contact. The hypothetical would be in a business setting where the top value is acquisition of wealth and an opportunity comes along to greatly increase wealth but is illegal. This then effects not only the work value system but also potentially social values (increased prestige if it works, or shunning if it fails), religious/moral values (right versus wrong) and possibly others. Before a decision can be made a person must determine which values have the highest priority and which value set will generate the greatest return on the decision made.

I thought that with this system a researcher could figure out the values of individuals in a way that you could begin to determine how a person will act in any given situation. The problem is that the whole premise rests on circular logic;

A person acts in a certain way because of the value set in play during certain situations.

How do you know what they value?

Because of how they acted. 

Why did the person act that way? 

Because of their values......

but it is still fun to think about.

Us vs. Them

Here is another question that I have been wondering about for a year or two; how do groups form and maintain a common identity, or distinguish between "us" and "them".

I read a book for school dealing with the termination phase of U.S. Indian relations. In the book the govt. wanted to terminate the special status of American Indians by paying off outstanding debts. The legislative leader was a senator from Utah, and he wanted to show how well the system worked on the Utah Indians. The Ute reservation in Utah had three different Ute tribes, two from Colorado, and one from Utah. As the Utes saw the writing on the wall they made a strategic move in deciding who was "us". They decided that anyone of the tribe with 50% Ute blood or less would be considered them, or other. This decision affected the Utah Utes the most as they had interbred more than the other Ute tribes. When the termination order came around the Ute leadership struck a deal that only those "other" Utes would be terminated and the rest would maintain their Indian status.

To me this seems like a logical and deliberate step in the definition of "us" for economic and political reasons, and I'm OK with that. I wonder if there is ever a time when those are not the reasons why we define groups the way we do.

During the Cold War the us/them mentality was a common propagandistic tool, just as it was in WWII, WWI, and anytime a group of people feel the need to be mobilized against another.

I think that part of this might come out of the western religious traditions which are all dualistic in nature, and this spills over into all other thought processes.

Maybe that is false, because even in non-dualistic traditions the us/them issue arises. I have also heard that when ever there are more than three or four people in close proximity an us/them situation will develop. I listened to a thing on the bio-dome experiment and although all the people in there were scientists and friends groups formed that were antagonist towards each other. 

This is not to say that the groups aren't fluid, change in who is in or out can happen quite rapidly and also depends on the circumstances. If you look at the typical family model there are levels of us/them: 

1. my wife and children 
   
2. my parents and siblings 
   
3. parents and siblings in-law 
   
4. grandparent, aunts, uncles and cousins
   
5. grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in-law
   

Really I think that it all has to do with economics, not just economics of money, but economics writ large, of trading or working in someway for something be it money, status, information, but that is another post.

Is reality consensus driven

Over the past couple of years my Grandfather has gone crazy. At least that is what I say when the subject comes up, but there is much more to it than that.

The real issue is that my Grandfather now perceives certain aspects of his current situation in a different light then the majority of people around him.

Now there are many things that people perceive differently every day, from words spoken, to the precise hue of a color. So what is the "problem" with my grandfather?

As I see it the problem is that his view is just different enough to cause problems with the rest of society, and has far ranging effects on those around him.

The idea of perception influencing reality has been around for a long time and has its own brach of philosophy called metaphysics which studies the nature of reality.

Doctors know about the phenomena and refer to it as the placebo effect.

This difference in perception is also one of the ways you can tell that a person is very well encultureated, because they can not perceive the world in anyway other then how they have been taught.

That being said, it seems that reality is really consensus driven; as long as the majority of people perceive things in mostly similar ways then there is no problem. However, when the is a perception that falls outside of the culturally appropriate boundaries the person is called crazy and in our society often institutionalized. 

This may seems as unfair, because who is to say that one perception is more valid than another? But if there was no unifying thread the only reality I can see would be chaos, but that is just my own perception.