Freitag, Februar 25, 2005

Where have all the .. gone

Initially, I started this blog to sort my thought on some econometric problems I wanted to sort out in written form and build sort of a reference work for future usage. Now, there has nothing been metric in the last entries (actually in none of them).
Instead here is a general though on economics and social behavior.
Physists, Chemists, and even most economists will tell you that contrary to common believe there is no such thing as the legendary free lunch! In physics you can't invent matter, no energy appears from out of nowhere, it has to be released. Same in chemistry, atoms of oxygen cannot be created. They have to be harvested or released. And in economics, a free lunch might be free for you, but I am sure there is someone, somewhere that has to pay for it at some point. (With exception of money that can just be created in form of the monetary multiplier and interest rates). Basic principle and necessarry assumption, however, is the existance of a) property rights and b) prices. But even those can be neglected and people will still not get away with a free lunch without paying somehow for it.
Now, but how is it with the human behavior or mood? Have you ever been in the situation where you feel pretty negative and whereever you look there is dark matter? You sure are not easy as company for others. So think of the positive feeling as something that is like energy or economic potential. You are more productive if you have positive attitude! I believe you can't just sit there and invent positive feelings. You can fool yourself in feeling positive with drugs or other addictions, i.e. shopping sprees, but those are usually only temporary fixes.
So maybe increments of success as transfer payments of positive feelings will bring the mood account back into balance. Yet, not without debiting someone elses account with negative feeling. See it as a constant resource of "happiness", in order to become happy someone else has to become unhappy. Now, if there is a balancing act of happyiness withdrawal and receiving happiness.
Hope is therefore a necessarry to price of people's happiness. The amount of hope one has correlates to the amount of happiness withdrawn over time. People that have lost much happiness, can either have high hopes, value happiness a lot, if they expect to receive in the future happiness back (optimist) or very little hope if the prediction of past negative experiences leads to the assumption it will continue to be this way (pessimist).
Similar assertions can be made for the one person having more happiness than average. Opistimism will lead to high hopes to continues to receive happiness and low hope in form of pessimism.
But IMHO it is impossible to create happiness, just like oxygen can't be created out of nothing. You need to harvest happiness or receive it exogenously.

Though it might help closer analysing the own account of happiness and looking for the receipts rather than the outflow, thus re-evaluating the price of happiness or hope!

Don't laugh, this may sound rather abstract and foolish as analysis but writting things like this down can lead maybe to a better understanding of how to become happy and thus make the whole think more predictable. Who wouldn't like that?