One night during an argument, Jim brought out his big, thick Economics textbooks, directing me to read them before arguing. I read parts of them. There was a section, I recall, on whether the Reagan tax cuts had produced more government revenue. Their conclusion, if I remember correctly, was not really. But that didn't stop them from other positions on the Quantity Theory of Money that were very neo-classical. They asserted a necessary, mathematical connection between the money supply and prices. (Despite the accelerating rate of money supply increase occurring around them, as inflation fell.)
Jim explained his view one time by writing "Prices = Money" and then multiplying Money by 2; Prices must also double to keep the equation true. But his equation does not hold with real data. Typically the money supply increases much faster than inflation.
My brother came to believe, I think, that money cannot be created; there is no such thing as a free lunch; and he should not rely on government handouts because it was living off other people's money. There was also a stigma associated with not having a good job that Jim wanted to avoid. He wanted to be accepted by the wealthy, thus he must espouse their positions on free-market capitalism.
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Repressed by the ubiquitous, libertarian, Friedmanesque, Reaganomics all around him were other philosophies such as Kantian categorical imperative and Sartrean existentialism. (Jim also read and referred to Spinoza and Schopenhauer.) But I remember Jim agreeing with Mick Jagger when I told him I'd heard Jagger quoted as saying "if you don't go for as much money as you can, you're just stupid." The best utility function seeks always to maximize profit. Only the fittest, most profit-seeking utility functions survive. (See Economic "Natural Selection" and the Theory of the Firm.)
In the end I think the hyperrational profit-maximizing utility function failed my brother. He was not getting the monetary rewards he thought he deserved; his bosses had just turned him down for a big promotion. He wanted love and companionship, but his money was not good enough to buy that for him.
I think Reagan led my brother down a path that he ultimately realized was causing him to be unhappy and depressed and suicidal; but I think Jim felt he could not retrace and start off on another path because it was too late. He probably did not want to admit he'd been wrong for so many years (since 1985, at the latest, when his formal indoctrination into Reaganism began).
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Of course, my view of Jim is but one blind man feeling a part of the elephant. Jim contained multitudes; I glimpsed but a few of them.
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If I could argue with Jim again, I would tell him that the economics they taught him is normative, not positive. Milton Friedman wrote a famous paper claiming the contrary, but economics is much less predictive than the physics Friedman claims has assumptions as ridiculous as those of economics. Also, Friedman sidesteps the issue that physics might also be normative; physics tells scientists to toss out data that is not predicted, as Feynman acknowledges in Cargo Cult Science. Feynman describes how experiments subsequent to Millikan's somehow replicated his results, which were erroneous. The oil-drop experiment was famous, thus students would fail if they found a more correct value for the charge on an electron. Thus both physics and economics may be normative rather than positive. Such would I argue with a chatbot simulation of Jim!
I would also argue with Jim that the mathematical proofs that markets discover prices most efficiently, and that a market allocation is Pareto-optimal such that no subsequent allocation can improve on it, unless some agents suffer; I would argue with Jim that those mathematical proofs rest on ridiculous assumptions that, for example, preference relations must be transitive.
Many phenomena have intransitive elements, why can't preference relations?
On the recorder, to play a C scale fast you start with all fingers covering all the holes, and uncover a hole at a time as you go up the scale. But the relation is intransitive at the end because you go from a B to a C by switching from the left index finger, back to the middle finger, which already played a note. So there is a backwards movement at the top of the scale, to reach the high C. The sound is higher, but the hole you cover to get the sound is lower (and the thumb hole is opened). There is a strong sense of intransitivity, when learning the scale. Strict transitivity would make the highest note of the scale also the last hole on the instrument; but it does not work that way. There is a disconnect between the transitivity in the sound and the intransitivity of the fingering on the instrument. I think keeping both transitivity and intransitivity in mind while playing a C scale on the recorder cannot be described by a utility function that will then have the mathematically-convenient properties necessary to prove markets allocate prices most efficiently, or that market allocations are Pareto-optimal. (Should Pareto-optimality even be a goal?)
I don't want to think in terms of prices and incomes, of cost and benefit, when playing the scale on the recorder. I think the recorder models reality better than math, precisely because the fingering is inconsistent.
