Learning and systems
My observation today is that when you learn something new, it’s best to immerse yourself in a subject completely and learn all the “rules.” For me recently, I’ve been learning about economics but in the past this has applied to languages I’ve learned as well.
And everything you learn–every new system, whether it’s a science or a language, has a system and various subsystems. When you learn Spanish, you know that there are several ways to conjugate verbs. For instance, all verbs ending in -ar conjugate the same, as well as all verbs ending in -ir and -er. They all follow their own systems, but in this way we learn the simple rule for conjugating a verb, and then we can easily apply it to the thousands of verbs.
And it’s all very easy, except for when it’s not. Except for the two dozen or so “irregular verbs” that conjugate differently and the nasty but indispensable verbs like ser and estar and ir, without which we would not be able to go or to be.
Pardon the rambling but my original thought was that in economics, you learn lots of laws. Laws about how markets work and economic laws that govern human behavior. They may be harder to prove in laboratories but they govern all the same–things like supply and demand and the fact that when you place an artificial ceiling on price, then you will create a shortage. Yes, even in Iran, they have a gasoline shortage due to a short-sighted choice to ignore economic law.
And so all these laws and ideas about free markets–they really do exist and they really do work, except it’s not as simple as that. There’s a cultural component and “institutions matter.” So you cannot just throw up a society based on capitalism and say voilá and watch it grow. Because people have to believe in the system for it to work. You need more that courts to enforce laws, because courts will not be effective if nobody believes they will.
There is a cultural component underlying all social institutions and this is something I can see but that I understand very little about. In Spanish you can learn the exceptions to rules, but in economics I don’t think that anyone really understands all the answers yet. So I am a libertarian, but I will admit that there are gray areas and that pushing the magical “make everything libertarian” button might have some adverse consequences.
And if culture is so important, then that’s a bit sad too. Because it means bringing prosperity to impoverished places takes deep cultural change and not just checks from the west or military revolutions.