🚀 go-pugleaf

gchand4059@aol.com (Lantern) wrote in message news:<20041007154647.08561.00000098@mb-m22.aol.com>...
> fbonsignore wrotein part:
> 
> >>As many times has
> been pointed out, education is essential, but not in the sense of
> spreading technical knowledge but rather with the goal of changing
> basic social values to make individuals more cooperative and less
> sensitive to people's conditions.>>
> 
> To change basic social values is not education..it is "indoctrination" or
> "orientation" (or "brainwashing" ?). Maybe that is what is needed. In my
> opinion a country-by-country approach is needed because each country is
> different. The IMF is a good source of information on each country. They try to
> productively lend countries money.

Not necessarily indoctrination, but education. In a way you accomplish
this through advertisement and mass communications. Though Say`s Law
is in effect, people do tend to copy fads and engage in conspicuous
consumption. Think of the effects of smoking in TV, moovies and
advertisement, vs. the effects of promoting exericising and jogging.
Tell the people how good is exercising, show people exercising
everywhere and soon people will start spending more money in
exercising gadgets than in cigarrettes. But more important, tell
people to ccoperate and help advance those that can reach higher
instead of blocking them and you`ll experience development, on the
assumption that higher reaching people through their achievements
(assumedly brought about by a natural ability, productivity that
exceeds that of others), will create opportunities for the people who
helped them, more opportunities than would be available if people with
lower capacity or creativity block people with better skills due to
envy. A general model would show that equilibrium in the absence of
envy is reached at a higher level of output than in the presence of
envy.

Mind that this doesn`t retract from the invisible hand mechanism or
autoorganizative properties of the market. On the contrary, by
teaching people to reduce envy the invisible hand acts better. Envy is
a contamination of the mechanism because you don`t act only following
your egoistic desires but you also take into account the utility of
others. The IH works as an autoorganizative mechanism precisely
because *you only take into account your own experience*. You don`t
need, shouldn`t need to take into account others to make decisions,
and the *global* result is achieved by itself without the need to have
a central authority. This property of the IH to generate an (optimum)
global equilibrium is broken by the introduction of envy, and it is to
be expected that the global level of equilibrium is achieved at a
(much) lower level. In a dynamic model it would lead after some
iterations to a level of output much lower than an equivalent model
without envy would achieve given similar initial conditions.

Thus, by teaching people, not indoctrinating, moral values that
diminish envy, eventually bigger levels of output will be generated.

What would happen if instead of envy there is cooperation?