Matters That Effect Decision = Economic Morals and Precepts

Economic Morals and Precepts
26 February 2019
jp melville

This is a list that I wrote and have stared at since 2011.
Then it dawned on me about a week ago that lists are common, if incomplete.
A famous list is those darn commandments.
Ten of them.
Which, about 2,000 years ago, someone boiled down to two: love God and love your neighbour.
That's a pretty lean list.
I mean, for living life.
Not a grocery list.

My list is not lean.
Probably somewhat redundant between the points.

Nevertheless, here is my list:

Nobody cares about you.  Even if they do, it does not matter if their care is selfless and they do not seek reciprocity.

One day you will be fifty, or older, whichever comes first.

Every day you will get hungry.

Someone will sell you anything you can imagine.

Money cannot be saved, only earned or spent.

Kids know next to nothing until they are sixteen and none of us much more after that.

You are off your guard if you think humans are interesting.

The only satisfying rewards are found in love, compassion, and pleasure.

Never avoid pain and suffering; mitigate the first, learn from the latter.

Be tolerant, understanding, and loving to those who seek safety and security because they pay the price of your selfishness.

Yes, you have to fight for yourself; yes you are nobody without putting everyone else first.

People are like magnets: if you flip them the right way they come together as one.

All seasons come and go; prepare for all of them one year in advance or you will never have that thing called time.

Fear is the constant companion of everyone you will ever meet, so too the devil and angel in your left and right ears.

For the most part, you seek the constant middle and spend the rest of the time avoiding conflict.

Laws against bullies are a travesty because they inflate the value of an individual; such laws are a distraction from the one bully that matters - the state or group that pressures to conform.

Remember that almost every decision you make is arrived at presuppositionally; you avoid spending time thinking, you are typically not rational, your decisions are biased, you are lazy.

Most of what you think you did not learn, it was taught to you.

An individual is a construct; no such thing exists.

How To...

How To...


26 February 2019
originally drafted around June 2011
hard to say... i am such a slow poke
jp melville

I thought of a subtitle:
Don't Let Your Wants Get Ahead of Your Smarts
One of many lessons in basic economic survival.

Somewhere in the background of this blog idea is a minor bit of consciousness.  Always remember that everything that you buy is being sold to you.  The people who try to sell it to you think all the time about how to sell it to you.  That's a lot of thinking.  Important to note that they are not thinking of your best interests, just how to make a  buck.  You might as well play the game and think about how you want to buy.  Most of the time, you are the only one watching out for Numero Uno.

It adds up, because these days almost everything we do is a financial transaction.  What do they say, if you practice just a little bit every day, after 10,000 efforts you are an expert.  You do have to THINK about it, of course, and that does take some sweat.  Why not?  By the time you are 30 you have probably purchased close to 10,000 things.  That leaves you with another 50 years of easy going on the "how to buy stuff" front.  You can worry about other things and quietly know that you are already an expert in at least one field of life.

Here is a little lesson in  <How To>.

How to Shop for Groceries

One of my mantra's: if you have to do it everyday, you might as well do it well. In the minimum, think about it just a wee bit beyond the "I want" impulse.

Here is a picture of shopping.

This is my kitchen counter, about once a week.  Not that I am very good at shopping.  But I take pleasure and always pay attention to the prices.  After all, by the end of my life, I may have shopped some 2000 times.  Very modestly, that would be 50 times a year over 40 years.  Sometimes someone else does the shopping, of course.  If in today's dollars I spent $50 each time, that would be $100,000.  If I pay attention to pricing, very modestly I might reduce the price by 5%, which would be $5,000 in my pocket, to spend on something else, of course.

One way I try to be sure to pay the 5% less is simply to have in a corner of my mind a small closet of <things I need>, which means that though I may not need it today, I can buy it today if I see it for a lower price and use it up tomorrow when I need it.  Does not apply to perishables, except in the reverse.  I may want parsley today, but dill is on sale, so I simply change today's menu.

I know that $5,000 may not sound like much over a lifetime.

And by no means do you have to do your shopping my way.

The trick is to think about it in your way, consciously, in your interests.

An important point is that there is primary impact on you, as a result of being conscious on a regular basis about a little thing:  awareness of context and flows (energy flows, time flows, cultural flows = movement).

You can apply the shopping principle to pretty much all the basic economic activities that we experience in a lifetime.  There are not that many of them, really.  Imagine how many times you will become an expert! In, like, these kinds of ways:

How To Fix Things

How To Cook

How To Sleep

How To Care for a Baby (or anyone else, for that matter)

How To Buy a Car (arrange transportation)

How to Manage Money (this arises from the principles described above and applies to the whole list)

How to Spend (ditto)

How to Invest (ditto)

How to Get a Girl (or your choice of emotional attachment)

How to Clean a House

How to Buy a House (or put a roof over your head)

How to Get Married (or affirm your kinship system)

How to Stay Warm

How to Stay Cool

How to Learn

How to Deal with Your Health

How to Do Laundry

How to Do Dishes

How to Relax

Now, in my opinion this list is mostly exhaustive.  Pretty much anything you do can fit under one of these categories.

However, if you really want to be successful in life, like wealthy, a famous artist, or plain old plum satisfied with pretty much anything and modestly in control of your existence, you need to consider this last skill set:

How to Make Things

Once you think about it, you will be surprised at how few people know how to make much of anything.  Most of us just do stuff.  Some of us fix a few things.  Very few actually make anything.


Suggested Read:

Daniel Kahneman "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
Nobel Prize in Economics