The prediction would then be that more urbanised nations would need more government to function well.

You presume that government exists to fulfill a need, rather than existing to take advantage of an opportunity. It would be equally valid to claim that more urbanised nations provide a wider niche for government to occupy.

Singapore and Hong Kong are extremely urbanisation environments with very small goverment…

Do you measure the “size” of government by the number of people employed, or the total financial turnover, or the influence it has on everyday people’s lives? Singapore certainly has a lot of rules and regulations (a “fine” city as they say). If I have to pay tax in return for being left alone, to get on with my life then it’s a pretty good deal all told (when you consider the alternatives).

My ideas are not for your information, you do not know why I believe but you claim to do so. So much for atomistic reductionism par excellence. You must be an economist because only an economist could think that way about economics. Most economists are more grounded and realistic about the limitations of their discipline. I have not been dismissive of economics, it is a vital discipline. You have a lot to learn about being reductionist.

You embraced the no society issue, that you then try and assert this is because people misunderstood Thatcher the problem lies with them is absurd. You made the statement which means you made the same mistake. Or do you just bow before authority figures as if what they say is holy writ?

Thanks for the description of economics, I used it as a joke and it breaks people up.

It is puzzling why people like Ka Ching above are so besotted with this organic notion of society as an underpinning for their preferred policies while being dismissive of economics and its associated individualistic analysis with its ‘reductionism’ when economics provides a far stronger case for government provision of some welfare without all the fascistic-Hegelian baggage associated with a more organic notion of society.

Even if for instance you think there are some perverse impacts on work participation associated with the dole, the intergenerational implications arising from the fact that children can’t choose their parents is a pretty compelling form of market failure. Economics and other individualistic analysis associated with economics (e.g. Rawls’ theory of justice) nails the case for some of the sorts of institutions favoured by lefties far better than any of these mystical question begging notions of society as independent of individuals and individual interaction.

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

Because primarily because of the absurdity of a black man making a racist comment towards another black man. Historically white racism centered on blacks being inferior to whites, so how can a black person be racially inferior to another?

If we don’t believe in Society, then on what basis are the historical interactions between some individuals relevant to the modern interaction between unrelated individuals? Surely each person has the right to make up their own mind about what offends them and why. Using historical context and knowledge of a social norm as the basis for analysis, already implicitly presumes that Society does exist and that the situation cannot be described merely by individual actions.

By the way, the Darfur conflict seems to mainly be about racism, presumably both sides feel that the other is inferior… and both sides look black to me. I would argue that almost all people are capable of racism under the right circumstance (where such circumstance is a social construct, not an individual one).

Why God and free will are yoked together in this context puzzles me a bit but Ill leave that since it doesnt appear to affect the essential argument

Both concepts are ‘throw your hands up in the air and shrug’ resorts based on the strawman that the theories about the mechanisms underlying the basic phenomena cloaked behind these things haven’t yet been fully elaborated and therefore cannot be.

A large part of what people do is influenced by shared meaning systems, values, norms, ideologies and so on, which are subject to their own laws of reinforcement and transformation. Cultural anthropologists study these in the context of self-contained traditional groupings; sociologists do the same thing for much larger and more fluid groupings

Game theory has made attempts to explain the evolution of these norms, etc in models of ultimately individual agents e.g. the difference between one shot games and repeated interaction leading to the resolution of prisoners’ dilemma. While in some contexts these explanations are still underdeveloped in others they do work well (e.g. the evolution of norms in tacit collusion). So my point is it’s lazy thinking to rest on the laurels of just positing norms and saying they can’t be reduced further just because the current state of thinking along these lines hasn’t been fully developed, a bit like claiming there must be an intelligent designer because evolutionary models for everything haven’t been perfected yet. It is another thing of course to take these norms as given if they are not the immediate focus of explanation/prediction e.g. how some norms evolve from other norms but keeping in mind that these norms can ultimately be reduced to some agent interaction. Some of what sociology does is essentially this and I have no problem with it.

When a black man says nigger, it is considered normal, when a white man says the same word, it is considered racist. The individual actions are the same so why are they interpreted differently?

Because primarily because of the absurdity of a black man making a racist comment towards another black man. Historically white racism centered on blacks being inferior to whites, so how can a black person be racially inferior to another?

———————-

I think society is three things when we speak of it. In our case the nation, the state we live in and the neighborhood.

Society is a contextual thing depending on the subject discussed. If the issue is a national issue, society takes on a national character…. and so on down the line.

In reality society is a way of people appealing to a higher authority and it’s usually money is involved.

Could we not say that a society arises when sufficient individuals come to share certain perceptions and attitudes such that they are in turn deeply influenced by them in their subsequent thoughts and actions? Indeed even in their very sense of who they are? From that point, simplistically speaking, the conceptual entity we call a society has become real and a complex adaptive dance unfolds between it and the individuals (and sub-groups) who make it up.

If this shared ground strengthens, even as it continues evolving, so too will the coherence of the society. If it begins to seriously fragment (as alluded to by Ken), that society may well be on the road to dissolution. The end result could then be a number of smaller units (the breakup of Yugoslavia for example), or, on rare occasions, the birth of a new society with a different set of shared assumptions. In all these cases, though, a society is at one and the same time very real as a collective abstraction (whether at a tribal or nation-state level) and yet doesn’t in fact exist outside the individuals who with their shared visions and works make it up.

A similar reasoning can surely be applied to markets. While it is in one sense true to say, as Jason does, that the study of markets is atomistic reductionism par excellence, I don’t think this does justice to the whole complex, adaptive truth. Humans, for all their individualism, are also herd animals and, with relatively rare exceptions, feel most comfortable running with the pack. Shared perceptions can therefore take on an apparent life of their own, whereby individuals become caught up in a collective vision of what the future holds. At its most extreme, of course, this produces manias, as we’ve recently seen.

Fine, name a feature of any society that exists in the physical world that cannot be described as actions of specified individuals. I dont mean show me its hard and complex to describe it so, I mean show me that it is impossible.

How about racism? When a black man says “nigger”, it is considered normal, when a white man says the same word, it is considered racist. The individual actions are the same so why are they interpreted differently?

That must explain the wonderful predictive power of such atomistic reductionism par excellence.

Ken – I have read about the stuff on complex adaptive systems – not only was Hayek aware of these concepts he was one of the earliest to use them but tellingly his point was to use them as illustrations of unintended consequences which can ultimately be explained by how individual units within these systems interact with each other. Markets are of course one example of complex adaptive systems.

I totally agree with your version – it’s just an INversion of what I said.

Step 1 – assert that everything can be reductively explained

Step 2 – find something that cannot

Step 3 – deny the existence of that thing

Get out of jail free!

which strongly suggest that such systems have a collective will that cannot yet be understood properly.

Shorter ken:

Human, ants, plants same difference.

BBB