[FRIAM] ill-conceived question

[Frank Wimberly]

Nick,

I suspect that if people only did what they 'need to do' the economy would
collapse.

On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 10:34 AM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
>
>
> I have asked this question before and nobody has responded (for clear and
> good reasons, no doubt) but I thought I would ask it again.  What exactly
> is this economy we are bent on reviving?  What exactly is the difference in
> human activity between our present state and a revived economy.  We can go
> to bars and concerts and football games?  Is that the economy we are
> reviving?  It seems to me that the difference between a “healty” economy
> and our present status consists possibly in nothing more than a lot of
> people frantically rushing about doing things they don’t really need to
> do?
>
>
>
> You recall that I invoked as a model that experiment in which 24 rats were
> put in a quarter acre enclosure in Baltimore and fed and watered and
> protected to see how the population would develop.  They never got above
> two hundred.  Infant mortality, etc., was appalling.  Carnage.  In the same
> space, a competent lab breeding organization could have kept a population
> of tens of thousands.
>
>
>
> Don’t yell at me.  What fundamental proposition about economics do I not
> understand?
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Frank Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
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