the flip side of the coin

I read somewhere--I believe in Sophie's World by Josten Gaardner--a description of the dialectical constitution of good and evil being like a coin with good on one side and evil on the other. The larger one side of the coin becomes, the larger the other. And thus we can only know great good if we know great evil. The policy implications may be staggering. All we need to do is to find an evil that causes less disutility than the corresponding good. "So," as I said to my college roommate on the phone, "Do we kill more babies to increase the good?" Killing babies, in retrospect, is probably not the best evil to use. In fact, it is not clear from that it is possible at all to increase net utility if we accept this framework--or perhaps, I should say, utility must be equal (and therefore, "maximum," though in the case of equality it becomes trivial) no matter what the size of the coin--if, that is, we define good as what increases utility and evil (or bad, if you'd prefer) as what decreases it.

Of course, like all similes, the good/evil coin may be totally misleading.

a little background

After returning from a hellish summer spent as a hired hitman for the Penn State College of Medicine--namely, decapitating rats in a biomedical laboratory--I decided that this particular line of research was not for me and promptly abandoned the biology major intended to prepare me for it. Thus at the beginning of my third year in college I began my subsequent search for a new major, which manifested itself in my mind as something on the scale of the quest for the Holy Grail, led me eventually (that is, after a harried and anxious week of, as my roommate put it, "trying to decide on a career before the add-drop period ends") to psychology.

I was drawn to the discipline because it would eventually, I hoped, enable me to save the world in a way that didn't involve killing rodents--that is, by learning how the human mind worked, I could somehow intervene (exactly what method I would use--government policy, marketing, curriculum design, etc.--as yet unclear) to, essentially, "make people (life, the world) better." Because I had taken a few neuroscience classes (and was still hedging my bets on the switch of majors), I thought I would take a more neuroscientific approach to psychology. Thanks to my background in the "hard" sciences, I was convinced as well that this, more than Jung or Freud, was the Path to Truth about human behavior.

And yet almost immediately a nagging anxiety formed to deflate the euphoria of having made a decision about my Purpose in Life. I was afraid that whatever they would teach me would "deconstruct" subjective human experience. What would love become for me once I knew the story in the vocabulary of pheromones, neurotransmitters, and hormones?

Psychology lasted for about as long as it took for me to realize that everyone's first response when I told them my new major was something like, "Oh, yeah, you should be able to relax through the rest of your time here." In my brief tenure, nothing I learned did major damage to my general conceptions of humanity; Psychology 101 was too general, with mind-blowing textbook chapter headings like "Sometimes Humans are Inconsistant," while my neuroscience course was still dealing with the anatomy of a sheep's brain.

The next spinning of the "what's-my-major" roulette wheel landed me, in accordance with the laws of probability, on the large wedge of economics.

purpose of the blog (in lower case, for style)

The title of this blog comes from the old adage, which your mother may or may not have used but almost certainly comes out of the mouth of a management consultant at least once a day somewhere in the US, "But what's it got to do with the price of eggs?" Meaning that whatever is being discussed is not obviously related to practical considerations.

The topics I will address will generally not appear in the least pragmatic, and sometimes even Pinky* might be hard pressed to relate them to something that is, so I'm sorry to mislead with this initial post. But really this is a forum for me to discuss with myself (and any readers who may appear) the hidden dimensions of things we take for granted: the philosophy inherent in economic thought, for instance (really where the inspiration of the title came from). Deal.

*From Pinky and the Brain, known to those who watched the show for making apparently illogical leaps from one concept to another, i.e. "Sure Brain, but how are we going to get the hippopotamous out of the refrigerator?"