Progressive Turmoil

Progress, like beauty, is pretty subjective. A con-person is making progress if they can increase the number or value of successful scams per week, but that’s anti-progress for the victims.

Commercial progress, which is basically about wealth creation is a bit similar. Some of the most stunning examples create whole new markets and even look victimless at first glance. But commercial progress does usually destroy old business models along the way, and in the process people get hurt and/or disturbed.

So we can’t reasonably advocate commercial progress while also supporting only Pareto optimal change. Put another way, some individuals will almost always suffer as a result of commercial progress.

Does that matter? Well maybe it depends on how you view individual rights relative to commercial progress. My own view is that commercial progress is inevitable, usually beneficial and a major contributor to our standard of living. But there are some ironies in that position, such as it being based on a inter-personal comparisons of welfare (ie being willing to accept the temporary sacrifice of wellbeing by those who depend on the old business models), and basically involving a  random redistribution of income, both things that have a socialist flavour to them.

This probably sounds like a funny name for a blog. It’s based on a line by a long dead economist who lived through epic changes and concluded that economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.

I admit to quite liking a nice bit of turmoil. Who can object to economic progress? And capitalism is like democracy: the worst system immaginable apart from all the others.  Hence the name.

I still have no idea where all my posts and the associated comments went to. I didn’t delete them, but they are gone.

So anyway, here I go again. The plan is to repost my 11 earlier posts, in order over the coming week or so, interspersed with some new stuff.