fare, posts by tag: macroeconomics - LiveJournal

When a country goes bad, this means its statist institutions are destroying the networks that constitute civil society. If women don't want to bear children, it means they think society is not providing a good context for child rearing. Short of raping women into bearing children nonetheless, nothing can make them have children until society improves. Certainly, you can import foreign women to bear children, because they don't care about the evil of said society, because they come from worse countries where an even worse evil reigns, because they either reject the society anyway or embrace its evil as an improvement. But this will only make it worse for the people previously in that society, by disintegrating the society further and spreading more evil. The solution cannot be immigration. The solution needs be removing the oppression that makes people unhappy.

Take Swiss Cheese, the variety that comes with holes (technically known as eyes). There is a clear correlation between holes and cheese: the more cheese there is, the more holes there are. If you purchase twice as much cheese, you'll get a volume of holes twice as big. Since correlations are symmetrical, this also means the more holes there are, the more cheese there is. If you purchase enough cheese to double the volume of holes, then you have purchased twice as much cheese. Thus, a static mind satisfied with correlations may conclude that a good way to increase the total quantity of cheese is to increase the total volume of holes — which may be achieved quite simply by drilling holes in the given supply of cheese. Of course, this means fails, because it changes the proportion of holes to cheese, whereas the measured correlation upon which the reasoning stands crucially depends on this proportion or multiplier being a constant. Yet that's exactly how macroeconomic regulation by government works: find some existing correlation between some kind of wasteful government spending and a measure of general welfare, and then forcefully increase the spending in the hope to increase welfare...