Posts Tagged ‘unity’

Rethinking Economic Assumptions

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

I have recently had the opportunity to participate in a forum wherein the participants have been exploring the foundation of the current global economic system and challenging some of the basic assumptions that may not represent our current understanding of reality.  Though I think virtually everybody on that forum is far more qualified and capable of providing meaningful input to the discussion, I wanted to share some thoughts that I posted on my blog.

My own formal training in economics was only at the undergraduate level, most of the time of which I was fairly intellectually comatose. My interface with our economic system has instead been mainly as an entrepreneur. In doing so I feel and daily taste the fruit of our system but I find that I rarely take the time or energy to think deeply and penetrate the assumptions underlying such a system. As such I feel it is helpful for me to start from the most fundamental assumptions that I believe to be true, state those assumptions explicitly, and work my way from there. I unfortunately don’t have much of a toolkit for this type of thinking, so unless I start from the absolute basic underlying assumptions of what we know to be true I find time and again my thinking gets hijacked by largely unexamined patterns of thinking that, because I have been thinking this way for so long, become my go-to default modus operandi. I hope that the following provides some useful and relevant content for the ongoing discussion surrounding the current global economic situation and that it is not too basic or elementary. If so I hope you bear with my attempt and I very much welcome any assistance in ways that I can improve my approach or thinking on these topics.

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