MP,Does money bring you happiness in a linear way?If you think the function H(W,.....,) (happiness as a function of money and other variables ) is increasing big time near W = 0 and sort of flattens (decrease?) for W large enough, what would you do to increase global happiness?

Hey guys !!!In my Harvard senior thesis work modeling the relationship of irrational behaviorto economic activity in a simulated society, I came across two oddpapers, one believe it or not containing a South African productivity equation of at leasttwenty variables including happiness with its many subvariables, the other a Harvardundergraduate paper describing a technology called Anthropotronics basedon Langerian psychology. All of the answers are there. Of course in the firstcase the South Africans did not even come close to following the implicationsof that marvelous model. In the second case, Langerian psychology assumesthat there exists a means to close down the limbic system that effectuatesFreudian psychology's observables. The paradox of happiness on the micro and macro levelsis very similar to the paradox posed in the paradox of the ten pirates posedby the facilitators of this marvelous web site.The US is irrelevant - the USG it is just a TV show on CNN - the people of the US arevery relevant just as the village basketweaver in the Congo is, and no more.Now my boss is paging me and that means I have to do my duty!!!Kisses!!!Yuyu

"In my Harvard senior thesis work modeling the relationship of irrational behavior to economic activity in a simulated society,"You ever see what happens when most people try to draw or paint? Tell them to sketch a picture of their husband's face, their own hand, or a car. Now if, in their mind, that dysfunctional cartoon is what a car looks like, then what must something really delicate, like the stock market, look like? So how will a person whose understanding of the world is even cruder and more flawed than a cartoon behave? Easy, he'll bring together a bunch of politicians, who also can't draw by the way. and ask them to tell him what to do. The point being, that mob idiots will seek to divest themselves of any modelable decision-making responsibility, thus simplifying the dynamics immensely.In reality, the outcome of rational participants is the simplest to describe of all. It's just a network of political strongmen and bureaucrats, allocating favors to a faceless mob of starving constituents. If you can model it, chances are it is a taxis. Whereas, if capitalism causes unconscious or irrational individuals to form into spontaneous patterns, the dynamics of the ecosystem will surely be beyond the human ken. That is a cosmos. So, irrational participants cannot be modeled, and rational participans starve. I'd rather be irrational and fed, like a deer in the forest or a microbe on his belly. You want rational, move to Brasilia, or Niagara Falls, NY.MP

MobPsycho,you sound like you have lived in an individualistic environment for too long.Do you think chance plays a role in people's life?

"Do you think chance plays a role in people's life?"Does co-operation play a role in people's lives?

MP,It seems that for you the world is both simpler and more complex than it needs to be.If I understand you correctly, "Americanization" is the panacea. But how would you explain the success of the ancient Roman empire in this context? Or if Rome is not worth emulating, then why is the United States?

"Problem is, in an attempt to copy the cost-feedback loops that perpetuate in nature, they miss the key ingredient: such loops form spontaneously as a result of Darwinistic selection of survivors. If it hasn't formed naturally, then chances are the supposed costs don't actually exist. You discover which assumptions are valid by which feedback loops arise naturally."You and I are next door neighbours. I'm much stronger than you and I have a big gun. You're weedy and you don't have any gun. Each morning I come and crap on your doorstep.Out of interest, what would you say happens next?

The problem is that the rest of the world cannot handle it itself simply because the US is the country that has the highest energy consumption per head...There is an awful lot of misinformation about the US attitude to Kyoto, let me clear something up. The primary objection of the US Congress to Kyoto was simply that it placed a much larger burden on the US than almost anywhere else, but not for the reason that you state, svunt. The problem with Kyoto, that almost everyone (well, at least the policy wonks with some grounding in reality, which must preclude Al Gore, since he was our 'representative') in the US immediately noticed is that, though it was crafted in 1996, it set pollution targets based on 1990 emissions. Look at economic growth around the world from 1990 to 1996. Compare US growth to Euro growth or Japanese growth. IIRC, the US racked up an average growth rate of ~3-4% in those years. The rest of the industrialized world had negligible growth. Since energy consumption is almost a linear function of growth--guess whose energy consumption grew the most from 1990 to 1996? This is irrespective of the size of the intital level of energy consumption. Had Kyoto been based upon 1996 baselines, then the rest of the world might have some grounds for criticism. But it isn't. And they don't As for America and unilateralism (which is not a newly coined word--its been around since before anyone on this board was born...) and isolationism--America has a long history of isolationism. Look at how long it took for the US to become involved in WWI, or WWII, for that matter. Just because we have troops based in 30+ countries around the world doesn't mean that we are not isolationist. The US is relatively isolationist, and is mostly a 'realist' i.e. our foreign policy is dominated by national self-interest, not ideology. This is not always congruent with American rhetoric, but it is by and large consistent through the years, with a few (usually disastrous) deviations.Someone just came into my office & broke my train of thought. So maybe more later....

Ah, yes.And on the topic of US interventionism, as long as I am writing, the reason that we tend to be interventionist, is because nobody else does anything until situations spin out of control--and then they all turn to the US and say "Well, aren't you going to do something?" Case in point: Yugoslavia. I lived in Vienna from late '93 to mid '96 during some of the brutal fighting in Croatia & then Bosnia. My wife worked for a daughter magazine of the Economist, and we had many friends in the UN, so we were more than exposed to the European chattering classes. They all bemoaned America's lack of involvement. Why can't the US do something? It went on and on and on. Even after I pointed out that, lo and behold, we are not the only military in the world. Other countries have 'em to. Like France. Like Italy. Like the UK (although I don't mean any ill-will toward the UK, I think that they pretty much have their heads screwed on straight.) And, quite frankly, the EU countries could have mustered most of the firepower that was used in the bombing campaign on their own.The reason that the US likes to intervene early is because we will be the ones cleaning up the mess later, anyway.Matt.

You and I are next door neighbours. I'm much stronger than you and I have a big gun. You're weedy and you don't have any gun.Out of interest, what would you say happens next? I'd say the duck offers you toilet paper.

I think US voters tend to be isolationist which allows policy makers to be interventionist as long as it doesn't cost too much in lives or money. If there are domestic screw-ups, the President loses the next election. If there are foreign screw-ups, voters rally around the President.But there is much more to life than politics and war. Most of the US influence on the world is cultural. Newspapers, magazines, movies, music, television, Internet; all exert profound influence from the US to the ROTW. Educated classes in most countries have many US educated or US oriented people. Worldwide businesses look the the US for capital, technology, management and markets. Worldwide investors look to the US for capital markets.I'm not saying they're aren't important worldwide influences outside the United States. But if you could somehow collect all the cultural transmissions that affect more 20 countries at once, I think more than half would come from the US. A lot of that originated elsewhere, but they received their final packaging in the US.With respect to Kyoto and Iraq, I think the bigger problem is there is no good global decision making process. Getting 100 countries to give diplomatic seal to something means you have to make it acceptable to a lot of kleptocrats. Getting G-7 or other major-country agreement is much easier, but that disenfranchises 80 percent of the world. The UN is somewhere in between, maybe half the world population has some arguable representation, and it manages to take effective action about ten percent of the time, and it has considerable legitimacy when it does act.Without an effective, representitive and legitimate global body, there are no good answers. It's hard to criticize unilateralism, at least it gets the job done. It's hard to criticize isolationism, at least it doesn't trample on anyone's rights.