Recent Notes

Just some recent notes.

I think this one is just a submerged memory of something AO Hirschman said, but I do think it's correct.

Can you live in a society without social goals. Is conservatism, partly at least, a distrust of how social goals may interrupt or disrupt private goals. The rhetoric is more about how social goals are impossible. When developing a political program I think this suggests tying social goals to private goals. I think this points towards a more materialist politics.

This one is kind of important I think.

Is there a morally significant difference between very broad based "natural" disasters and other misfortunes. We basically froze everyone's credit because of covid. How is covid different from a plant closure or a more localized disaster like a fire?

Sticking to the idea of the credit report, although I think that it's hard to find a good reason to report the debts of an ininsured person that has unpaid debts do to an illness. Or comparing a town dealing with a plant closure to a whole country dealing with a financial crisis. If we think that reporting should cease during a pandemic or that society ought to take steps to prevent foreclosures in a financial crisis, why not in other areas where people are no longer financially a good bet because of circumstances. A guess; it's that the model is designed to prevent people undergoing hardships from getting credit, but the model can't handle widespread hardship. So the financial interventions are, like most others, to allow the system to continue to operating smoothly--but not to help individuals.

Does the human ability to rationalize mean that games never actually have equal payouts.

I think that I meant, that quantifying payouts is difficult because people believe that they would have, or could have won, if things had been even a bit different. So people don't learn the lessons from games that they should.