Reflection

What was it that Newton did in discovering gravity? We knew that apples fall, but he explained the cause of falling. Newton reflected that gravity is much more than the fall of apples. It is the fall of apples and the like. What he did was to connect apples in an orchard with stars in heaven, a mammoth in a pitfall with waves high on the beach. Till he spoke we had no word connecting every incident in nature by thin lines of likeness, thin as the lines of force but stronger than steel. Unlike one who uses a pattern ready made for him Newton had to cut out a pattern in order to show the connections in a whole which no one had ever apprehended as a whole. We now are given the conceptions of gravity and of energy.





On Ethics

In utilitarianism one encounters a clear example to the point of caricature of the approach to ethics which refuses altogether to take personal existence seriously. This is seen in the insistence that the notion of happiness is fundamentally simple. It is insisted that in human satisfaction there is nothing mysterious.



Meta ethical questions

Surprisingly, whereas economics is notorious for having little to say on ethical questions, on meta-ethical questions it has quite a lot to say about different decision-making systems. Coase’s Theorem, for example, tells us that if we can define unambiguously the initial distribution of rights and if we can minimise transaction costs, then the final distribution will be efficient (in the sense that it will approximate a pareto-optimal outcome) irrespective of how the rights were distributed initially.

Direct democracy reduces the transaction costs of monitoring political agents. In classic representative government, the agents (professional politicians) may have interests at odds with the people they supposedly represent. If both parties in a two party system are in agreement on some issue and do not reflect the wishes of the people, the cost of monitoring them is altogether prohibitive. Typically it would involve the near-impossible task of setting up a new political party and winning government.

Comment, Guardian