Someone I met at a DonorsChoose fundraiser when they were up for the Amazon award recently began blogging. She's a 3rd grade teacher in an East Oakland (read: extremely challenging environment) elementary school. She was raised a white suburbanite.
I posted the existence to a blog where someone with whom I've butted heads about "market forces" and their use in the educational context before. He responded positively about the use of technology to facilitate transparency - definitely a point of agreement for us. How else do you help people who have managed to create a relatively safe and positive life for themselves and their families to gainfully -- because it affects us all -- immerse themselves in the often unsafe and traumatic lives of East Oakland 8 year olds?
But it got me thinking: clearly there's a human need when the problems are bigger than I, as a single person, can manage, to look to a higher power, whether that's God, market forces, individualism, communism, equity, or something else. Looking for a -- hopefully single -- overriding force that, once restrictions are removed, will realign the world and make things somehow solve whatever the problem is.
I think that's now the project at hand, the New Economics, if you will: what are the forces that act on the world. How do they interact; what are their components? And how to we parameterize, measure, track, and experiment with them?
It took years for physicists to realize that electricity was related to magnetism, and that vision was related to both; or to understand that classical mechanics was only relevant at a particular scale (much bigger than an atom) and rate (much slower than the speed of light). Now long past that, physics has become math, and the intention is to unify the conceptualization of fundmental forces.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, other than to note that a force is something that was originally observed, and then in the physical world what became relevant was how the force was mediated. Is economics mediated by money? Is value creation mediated by man-hours of labor? Is knowledge mediated by hours in the classroom?
To the extent that physical forces are "potential wells," (think of a ball rolling downhill to the bottom of a depression), are people potential wells in need-space? Needspace would of course be comprised of physical, emotional, social, intellectual and possibly other needs. What mediates those needs (well, money certainly; but obviously less concrete things as well)? Then the next question is what acts on needspace (i.e. cultural expectations, historical need-fulfillment, etc.)
Is this analogy useful? Does it break down too quickly?
