[MD] The End of Faith - Spirituality

[Krimel]

[Platt]
Without individuals choosing to write books and publishers choosing 
to print them, there would be no libraries, public or otherwise.

[Krimel]
People have been writing books for about 3,000 year and collecting them for
nearly as long. Books have been written in nearly every kind of economic and
political system. Likewise, paintings have been painted. Games have been
played. Songs have been sung and dancers have twirled. It would seem that
politics and economics are irrelevant to whether books are written or not.

While the US certainly produces a vast quantity of writing, is the quality
of this writing better than literature elsewhere in space or time? Which is
'better' quantity or quality?

[Arlo's question]
Let's go back to the fabled pre-socialist era of the early 20th 
century. Give me some measures you would use to show me how 
the  poor" were better off then? Better income? Better health care? 
Better education? Contrast the workers in the Pullman camps to the 
factory workers at GM today. Tell me in what ways the 
Pullman  laborers were "better off"?

[Platt]
Without individuals choosing to build profit-making businesses and 
drug companies choosing to invent new medicines, there would be no 
improvements in income or health care.

[Krimel]
New medicines and corporations are rarely the product of products of
individual effort. They are the products of collective effort. Free markets
and collectives are simply techniques for facilitating collective effort. 

Each is a system of rules for promoting or punishing various behaviors. The
success or failure of the system can be judged by the frequency of the
target behavior. We see this in bell curves and bar charts.

Arlo's question, "By what measures?" is critical. 

[Platt]
Without individuals choosing to become policemen, there would be no 
police force, public or private.

[Krimel]
So again the politics and economic is irrelevant to individual choice. The
social system is judged by the frequency of individuals choosing to be cops.

[Platt]
The more individuals are free to choose, the more dynamic and wealthy 
the society becomes, as Pirsig suggests and America demonstrates.

[Krimel]
So you would measure a society on the basis of the range of options it
provides its members?

[Platt]
One of the ills of SOM is the bias towards thinking about groups and 
systems while  ignoring the individuals in it. That bias spills over 
into academe and politics, helping to account for the appeal of 
socialism and Arlo's propensity.

[Krimel]
But it is only by seeing how numbers of people respond under different sets
of rules that we can know people actually do and the range of options they
exercise. Individual choice is constrained by politics and economics. They
establish rules to increase or decrease the probability of individual
choice.

Again, what you choose to measure is critical to your evaluation.