Paradocracy

One common characteristic among those who compose emotional appeals in economics, who often cite the divide between the rich and the poor , the haves and the have-nots , is a macro-focus upon the wealth of the so-called financial elites —think about the fast-paced, commerce-driven montages of New York City —and a micro-focus upon the drudgery of individuals who live in that which is popularly accepted as poverty .  However, a micro-focus upon those who have “made it” would unequivocally invoke relatable, emotional responses from the audience, and a more sophisticated calculation of those “have-nots” would reveal that some individuals among them are wealthier than others, in ways beyond mere monetary terms, while some simply prefer the known comforts over the unknowns which are attainable only through risk: this may entail only marginal risk, but a measure of risk nonetheless.  This documentary, entitled Living on One Dollar , claims that these families are living on one ...

The gender pay gap, on the whole, may after all be the consequence of the specific pressures applied to males in their unique respective roles as the anticipated providers of their respective households, an incentive buttressed by the market for courting women.  Meanwhile, women are rewarded for distinctly different traits which are not necessarily inclusive of their respective capacities to generate income for the household. The general market outcome -- that is, those discernible averages based on gender -- may spawn from the ubiquity of academically-repugnant, yet pragmatically-desirable preferences mutually expressed, desired, perpetuated and encouraged by men and women in their social conventions.

The appearance of a repetitive history — or, as Mark Twain might describe it, a rhyming refrain — may strike witnesses this way only because this is the exclusive manner in which they may individually integrate or relate the new material to already-fastened ideas of the world.  Much as it is difficult to read script not printed upon a page or to accurately interpret intentions, witnesses to history may only perceive and translate information through the lenses of prior experience and the limits of language  —  of course far removed from relevant time and circumstances in space  —  which expediently allow them to usefully yet incompletely comprehend, report and personally respond to these events.  Due to the ubiquity of such likeminded, nearly diluted and simplified conceptualizations of the world, we will often thus encounter individuals of similar, incomplete yet thematic dispositions regarding worldly affairs. Our respective incapacities to relate or ...

The brilliance of the current political structure is found in its constructive conning of lower-income individuals into paying for the salaries and benefits of persons who claim to possess the acumen and authoritative leverage to administer such positive change as to avail them overnight of their lot in life, all while perniciously extinguishing those opportunities by systematically monopolizing the funds which might otherwise be available to incentivize their creation. This is all part of the soft despotism which has palatably replaced the more blatant and physical form of slavery which is indelibly etched into the minds and texts of nearly every student of history. Let it be known that this form of slavery, more conspicuous and systematic, will surely become the next subject of great scrutiny in the annals of future texts covering this history. The counter-cycle theory of exchange proposes that the systemic means by which purchasing power, here defined as the relat...

Are People Nice or Are They Playing The Game? Most perceived occasions of niceness or sympathy are rooted in a game strategy by which the participant is aiming to protect, preserve, or advance his proprietary holdings, social reputation or conscience, or his status in law, while observers only recognize the outcomes of his mental calculus without any insight into the underlying mechanical intentions. Why Do We Care What People Think? Why is it that individuals are so conditioned to seek approval, agreement, and any other offshoot of social acclaim? This predisposes calculated individuals to calculus-altering values whose unit-based relevance is surely more precisely classified upon a scale of merit, but which mystically renders itself valuable merely because the recognized source casually shares visible countenances and characteristics with counterparts who claim far greater wisdom and possess far more intimate detail in their subject matter expertise. The Fal...

Decisions are not weighed or executed upon a fixed grid of values; rather, they are honed on an ever-focused set of comparable, relative and recognizable Boolean-style bases generated from the operable, recollected, near-replicable sets of perceptible data presented by ever-developing episodes: whether to strike the F key instead of the D key; whether to check one’s Facebook news feed, to respond to an e-mail, to drift into the kitchen for a quick snack, to hydrate, to go for a run, or to stay the course.  The reader can easily follow the train of thought which has heretofore directed the ever-comparable sets of inductively-relatable options. The controller of this vast grid is always oblivious to a near-infinite array of alternatives which might, under a variety of other circumstances, appear viable and relevant to his position.  For example, Miguel Cabrera is far less likely to consider the value of the shotgun offense while he approaches the plate at Comerica Park, whil...

The United States dollar has undergone quite the distortion: let's say you attend a play at the local theatre. You check your coat and receive in return an IOU stub which grants you a claim on your coat upon your departure from the theatre. Government has essentially convinced the audience that the coats are no longer of relevance here; that rather the IOUs are the most important aspect of the transaction. In fact, they become so convicted that they distribute more of these IOU claims to convince the ever-broader audience that they too are coat owners. Of course, upon leaving the theatre you recognize that you are still coatless and the weather has become no more tolerant since the government masquerade began. Remember, the United States dollar is not beneficial in and of itself, but rather in the capacity by which it enables more extensive reach in quantity and quality of goods and services to grant people the greatest pleasure, leisure, and time. The mere expansion of the quantit...

Think gender discrimination (or sexism) is nearing extinction? No way! The mainstream feminist movement will never allow its Sisyphus-size rock to roll off the cliff!  Despite gender’s potentially-indefinite scale of relevance, given the not-so-controversial and even desirable positions assumed by their billions of specific representatives on either side, the controversy generator seems prepared to weather the virtuous storm of those compelling forces whose incidental consequences have long advanced more gender-blind, merit-based dynamics in the general marketplace. These phenomena are evident at both the macro and micro level, across esteemed roles in public and corporate office, shared household duties, and academic and athletic achievement. Of course, there exists plenty of idiosyncratic disparities between specific households, cultures, and interpersonal relationships, whereby gender often serves little more than incidence to complement the slight of hand of the statistici...

Poaching, definitionally distinct from hunting only by the artificial and abstract regulatory provisions of in-vogue parliamentary or congressional councils, strikes a largely-moral chord with its sponsors while piquing a less-prominent ecological interest in others. A cursory investigation into the history of poaching reveals a very sentimental or monopolistic refrain, whereby general assembly routinely ruled in favor of immediate public commercial or fiscal interest or its delusional counterpart of overtly-romanticized political expedience, a human anthology well-documented throughout the Oyster Wars, the Bering Sea Anti-Poaching Operations, the countless modern episodes of counterintuitive, destructive " ivory-crushing " protests, and the contemporary occasions of fines and imprisonment stemming from relatively modest, and might one dare describe it as "human" or "animalistic," demonstrations of innate survival strategy.  The major distinctions across...

The Wikipedia Game is a competition encouraging participants to navigate the online encyclopedia through available URL links to discover a predetermined page. The game inherently demonstrates one of the critical facets of efficient markets, from which often spawn a series of additional frictional events: the information problem.  The information problem is a consequence of scarcity, which takes many forms and faces each person across every episode of human behavior, however momentous or trivial, inclusive of a near-infinite and ever-developing set of unique circumstances. We can therefore never properly assume that there ever exists a very bare minimum of knowledge possessed by any set or persons when confronted with a challenge.  A common folly among persons today is the intense and popular invocation of “common sense” as an embodiment of some Holy standard to be worshipped and embodied by all. Of course, there exist no such empirical or historical parameters to support t...

There’s something remarkably impressive about the notional, theoretical compulsions which drive people to accept that other people’s money, the product of their labor, even a not-so-modest fraction of their own, ought to finance a near-infinite space of institutions, of near-infinite cost, which academically purport to advance select idealistic notions of the famed, mislabeled, and ill-defined public good while pragmatically and historically failing to ever sustainably achieve these ends, only to expend exorbitant sums of wealth in the pursuit of this great masquerade and other interests completely remote from those of the published and implied official mission. It is, of course, easy to accept the costs, as they are collectivized and distributed so as to appear negligible; thus, the costs are largely inapparent and invisible to the layman whose personal interests stretch only so far as his visible profile and reputation , his own pocketbook and his theoretical convictions and disposit...