current social/cultural/political issues - Count Dankula’s sentence, UK banning Lauren Southern, South Africa, James Damore, South Africa’s purging of white farmers
Good morning Benjamin. I have one more topic that I think would be very interesting to add to this list: discussions on the relevance of objective truths and how the left and right distort facts to meet their needs.
This is, in part, due to my agreement with Mr. Peterson’s perspective on living a truthful life, combined with my experience in the business world. Namely, in the business world small businesses get away with many small transgressions, but as business has become market leaders, and their market share indicates that they are in the top three in their category, extremely tight legal rules start to influence how the business communicates to the market. Similarily, it is my hope, and belief, that sometime soon all democracies will implement rules that govern and limit all politicians abilities to tell lies and or confuse the truth in communications to their constituents. In short, our greatest leaders must become the best of us in terms of morals and honesty.
We will rebranding the upcoming week from JBP Community to Philosophy Club, which would make your topic proposal quite suitable.
Details on the migration are here:
As for my own thoughts on what you’ve raised, I think one needs to find a way to not limit or regulate, but to economically incentivise good behaviour, such that good behaviour becomes emergent.
As the weeks unfold with this group and forum, we will be sharing more of our ideas to address such issues.
So it would be nice to have you join us for our study group sessions!
Regarding economic incentives, I appreciate the theory, but I would counter with these points:
I believe it is common knowledge that politicians all operate under the assumption that negative advertising is more effective than positive advertising. I believe the research on this is quite conclusive. This undermines your concept of developing economic incentives for doing good because the research, I believe, shows that negative advertising is several times more effective than positive advertising.
There is also a common belief is that all politicians lie. This confuses and infuriates many citizens and creates the foundation for voter apathy. But in the USA it has become obvious that the abuse of power and the lack of accountability for lying already has a massive economic incentive for the politician who gets into power. Therefore, how would an incentive system provide an adequate incentive? Should politicians be paid more than other positions? Are Canadian politicians less corrupt?
Lastly, economic theory is an excellent endeavor. But I would like to challenge all theorists and students of economic theory to attempt to apply these theories in the real world as a leader in any organization. Furthermore, social engineering is often perceived from a very long perspective. But citizens will lose focus quickly unless there is a strong driving force. So the economist needs to have an excellent theory that can also be applied quickly and proven to have an effect that the average citizen would appreciate and understand. Do you know of anyone that can stand up to that level of scrutiny and performance when developing an economic theory? I do not.