PZ Myers maintains his stance that you cannot convince him any God exists.
He's right, you know. Fundamentally, the sentence "God exists" is not literally meaningful, even in the loosest sense. It is a mistake, I think, to so easily concede that the statement "God exists" is literally meaningful. As Myers notes, to make the statement meaningful would entail a definition of God that most modern theists would find more objectionable than atheism, [UTA:] and we know of no such beings that actually exist. Alternatively, most atheists who blithely accept the meaning of this statement conflate "God" with "that which causes unexplained phenomena." But of course we are presently surrounded by unexplained phenomena, hence a vigorous and persistent scientific profession. If we sincerely believe that unexplained phenomena are by definition evidence of a god, we should all be theists.
Either way, I think the proper response to the question, "Do you believe any god exists?" is, "What the fuck do you mean by 'god'?" Furthermore, we should respond to the doubletalk and mumbo-jumbo spouted by theologians, apologists and the occasional philosopher with a similar question: what the fuck do you mean by "the ground of all being"? What the fuck do you mean by "that which we cannot speak positively about"? In general, "I'm entirely unimpressed that you can string a lot of fifty-cent words together in complex sentences; what the fuck are you talking about?"
The statement "God exists" is really a idiom for, "Do what I tell you to do, because you are a miserable, despicable sinner." Because I refuse under all conceivable circumstances to subordinate my own moral conscience to another's — all anyone can do is coerce my compliance, which requires guns, not gods — nothing can therefore convince me that any gods exist; the two statements are identical and I categorically reject both.
[Thanks to Dan for the update.]
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Friday, November 05, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (PZ Myers edition)
Interview [sic*] with atheist PZ Myers: Pure self-parody Myers can’t go three sentences without making a moral claim, but he denies objective morality. His whole worldview is a farce. If he really believed it then he’d “know” that Christians have no choice but to say and act as we do. After all, if the universe is purely materialistic then the molecules in motion would be the cause of everything. Nothing immaterial could exist.
*Even Egnor doesn't claim his article is an interview, which it isn't (but it's pretty fucking stupid too).
The Stupid! It Burns! (banana man edition)
Atheism And It's Problems Ray Comfort [the banana man] was right when he stated, “The irony of the Christian faith is that it seems to be intellectual suicide, but proves to be the ultimate intellectual challenge.” Let’s examine a few of these “challenges” to the atheist view. ...
[The atheist] refuses to look at the created world around him; consequently, he fails to realize that God doesn’t need to be proved or disproved -- He is self-evident. ...
[A]theism and evolution are both faiths. Where atheism states that there is no God, evolution supports it by claiming that millions of years ago there was a Big Bang that came from nowhere out of nothing and slowly formed by random processes into what we have today, thus eliminating the need for a Creator. ...
Many atheists claim, “Because I don’t believe in God, He doesn’t exist.”
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (dead atheist edition)
Godless gaffe This[*] accounts for the ironic spectacle of militant atheists who express outrage if Christians depict atheism on its own terms. That’s “insensitive” (or worse). ...
[W]hen issue at hand happens to be a dead atheist, then you’re not supposed to speak the truth–for the sake of the living. How dare you depict the fate of an atheist in atheistic terms! Even though atheism is true (so we’re told), you should spare the feelings of the living by tactfully acting as if atheism is false.**
*Even in context, I have no idea what the antecedent is.
**Sorry, I have no idea what he's talking about.
**Sorry, I have no idea what he's talking about.
The Stupid! It Burns! (agnostic edition)
It's Tough Being an Agnostic It’s tough being an agnostic. You exist constantly caught between those vast, angry pillars of religious fundamentalism and new atheism. ...
My first port of call was the Reverend Dr. John Hughes of Jesus College. Over twenty minutes, a cup of tea and a packet of minstrels he took me through one of the most potent challenges put to religious believers.[*] The perceived conflict between faith and reason. ... [W]hen it comes to “life and death and morality and reasons for existence” we reach an impasse in which rational proofs are no longer useful. ... [F]aith can be the voice that fills the silence. Where conventional reason finds itself out of depth, the believer turns to other forms of rationality[**] for their answers. So if not logic and reason, what compels a believer to their belief? “A sense of awe and beauty at the universe. The example of someone living a life of purpose and value that we ourselves want to lead.”
*You're at fucking Cambridge, learn how to use a colon.
**There's no such thing as "other" forms of rationality, just as there are no "other" forms of rocks. There is just rationality and things other than rationality.
I usually don't comment on this sort of egregious stupidity, but I do have a few words. I've seen any number of these idiots. Manji is not an agnostic, a person who sincerely doesn't know whether or not god exists (in the same sense I sincerely don't know whether or not there's extraterrestrial intelligence). He is, rather, a theist in search of a theology. He's not a skeptic, he's not looking for a "measured debate", he's just looking for a line of bullshit he can really buy.
**There's no such thing as "other" forms of rationality, just as there are no "other" forms of rocks. There is just rationality and things other than rationality.
Ho hum
Ho hum. The real Republicans have won control of the House of Representatives from the lite Republicans Democrats. I predicted this outcome (more or less) in 2007, and predicted it more accurately in January of this year. If I continue to be accurate, the Republicans will work non-stop for the next two years to discredit Obama, and the they'll take the White House in 2012. If you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention.
Am I scared? Of course. Am I more scared than I would be if the Democrats had won? Not really. Our economic catastrophe has taken on a life of its own, and the Democratic party is utterly incapable of addressing this catastrophe. The Republicans promise to make it worse, but I don't know that they really can make it any worse than it'll be on its own. When the whole block is merrily burning, just as throwing a bucket of water won't help any, throwing a bucket of gasoline on it won't make it that much worse.
I will definitely predict we're heading for a double-dip recession by 2012, with unemployment over 10% and underemployment over 20% (which will be blamed on President Obama and the Democrats), triggered by a collapse in the stock market bubble, the commercial real estate market, a trade war with China and/or some international crisis, probably in Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. If we have a very poor Christmas this year, just that mightcontinue the depression trigger another recession.
Of course, the war in Afghanistan will go poorly, as willthe war in Iraq whatever the fuck it is we're doing in Iraq with 50,000 troops and only god knows how many mercenaries civilian contractors.
In 2012, look for a very militant — in the literal sense — hard-as-nails Republican president, and an assault on civil liberties and basic democratic rights that will make theCheney Bush administration look like a bunch of bleeding-heart card-carrying ACLU liberals.
That's actually the best outcome. The worst outcome is that for some reason the Republican candidate self-destructs, the Democrats win a narrow victory*, and the Christian right — with its militias giving it substantial military power — rises up in open revolt and civil war.
"May you live in interesting times." A curse indeed.
Am I scared? Of course. Am I more scared than I would be if the Democrats had won? Not really. Our economic catastrophe has taken on a life of its own, and the Democratic party is utterly incapable of addressing this catastrophe. The Republicans promise to make it worse, but I don't know that they really can make it any worse than it'll be on its own. When the whole block is merrily burning, just as throwing a bucket of water won't help any, throwing a bucket of gasoline on it won't make it that much worse.
I will definitely predict we're heading for a double-dip recession by 2012, with unemployment over 10% and underemployment over 20% (which will be blamed on President Obama and the Democrats), triggered by a collapse in the stock market bubble, the commercial real estate market, a trade war with China and/or some international crisis, probably in Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. If we have a very poor Christmas this year, just that might
Of course, the war in Afghanistan will go poorly, as will
In 2012, look for a very militant — in the literal sense — hard-as-nails Republican president, and an assault on civil liberties and basic democratic rights that will make the
That's actually the best outcome. The worst outcome is that for some reason the Republican candidate self-destructs, the Democrats win a narrow victory*, and the Christian right — with its militias giving it substantial military power — rises up in open revolt and civil war.
*I suspect that if the Republican presidential candidate were credibly shown to have been a homosexual pedophile, the Democrats might pull out a 5 point victory.
"May you live in interesting times." A curse indeed.
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Lovecraft on Republicans
As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.(via PZ Myers)
— H. P. Lovecraft
The minimum wage and economic intuition
I am, of course, a communist, and I consider the economic and social status of workers, especially in relation to capitalists, to be of primary importance. I'm all for anything that improves the economic status of workers. The minimum wage in a capitalist society, however, fails to do so; even within a capitalist society, the minimum wage is one of the least effective tools for even temporarily and partially improving workers' standard of living.
The minimum wage is good for one and only one purpose: to exclude certain kinds of industry, industry that can be profitable only by paying individuals less than that required for what a society considers a minimally civilized life, i.e. to prevent de facto slavery. A minimum wage, like all direct government price interventions, produces a deadweight loss; a minimum wage fails to offer any additional additional compensation, such as tax revenue. Since a minimum wage can only exclude economic activity, its only proper use is to exclude economic activity we intentionally want to exclude: i.e. that activity insufficiently valuable to support its workers' civilized life.
Furthermore, the benefit of a minimum wage is not that it actually excludes insufficiently valuable activities, but that it conveniently does so. We must implement other macroeconomic policies to ensure that a fraction of the population does not have to choose between slavery and starvation. A minimum wage is not so much an economic policy as it is a political policy: to bring the issue of inefficient production to light, to transform the plight of those workers invisibly and silently employed in inefficient industries into a socially urgent and visible problem of unemployment.
As a political policy, I support a minimum wage. But as an economic policy, a minimum wage — indeed any law that affects only nominal wages — cannot transfer economic demand from the owners of capital to workers, even those workers paid the minimum wage: it is simply ineffective. If a minimum wage were set substantially above the current price levels necessary to support a minimally civilized life, the increased wages would merely cause price inflation necessary to bring the minimum wage down to the minimum standard of civilized life... or even below that standard: a minimum wage in a capitalist society requires continuous adjustment.
While I don't think the minimum wage is a particularly effective tool, many criticisms of the minimum wage reveal a deep misunderstanding of macroeconomics, especially when people attempt to apply their naive* microeconomic intuition to what is essentially a macroeconomic issue. Remember: microeconomics is about relationships between elements within an economy; macroeconomics is about emergent properties of the economy as a whole; an economy as a whole does not (setting aside international economics) have any relationship to anything else. Also, you'll often see economists use the phrase ceteris paribus (literally "with other things the same") especially when they're talking about microeconomics. But when we're** talking about macroeconomics, we usually want to talk about how everything adjusts around various changes; in macro, ceteris is often not paribus.
We can see these naive intuitions and mistaken analysis in Alonzo Fyfe's post, Minimum Wage.
Furthermore, in any economy, we are constantly reallocating labor from less productive to more productive uses. By definition, those businesses that are minimally profitable are precisely those that are ripe for failure, so the labor they're presently using can be allocated to other more productive uses. Even if we set the minimum wage higher than the minimal standard of civilized life, the only businesses that would be affected in the short run would be precisely those businesses least worth preserving.
One common macroeconomic misconceptions is that jobs are externally limited. They are not. There are internal limitations to employment, but a job is not itself a resource that needs to be protected or conserved. Depending on what sort of economist you ask, unemployment is due to either workers themselves choosing not to work or because economic demand, not supply, is somehow poorly allocated. Either way, protecting a job in and of itself is not something we want to worry about... for precisely the same reasons we don't want to put too much economic burden on the minimum wage.
Again, Fyfe is again employing "micro" thinking to a macro issue. In aggregate terms, if companies in general raise their prices to match an increase in factor prices (increased wages and the increased profit on the new wages), the increase in aggregate demand will in the long run exactly offset the increase in prices. This is why a minimum wage is typically ineffective (except to conveniently prohibit insufficiently valuable activities), but it is not actually harmful. Even in the short run (because only those companies presently paying under the minimum wage that could raise their prices), because of the increase in aggregate demand, a change in the minimum wage will cause a reallocation of labor, not a reduction in total employment.
This objection is probably the most serious error that Fyfe makes. All increases to real Gross Domestic Product — the best (but hardly perfect) measure of specifically economic well-being — is a result of labor becoming more efficient, producing more use-value with fewer number of labor hours. In general automation is a Good Thing. One substantial problem with capitalism is that the benefits of automation and labor productivity in general are often poorly distributed (and one argument for socialism and communism is that these systems would more equitably distribute the benefits of increased productivity), but the misallocation of a benefit is not an argument against creating that benefit.
Fyfe is just wrong here, making three different mistakes. First, drawing more people into the labor market is generally a Good Thing: more people means more productivity per capita. Additionally, you cannot simultaneously draw more people into the labor pool and (per his earlier mistaken point) simultaneously reduce the total number of jobs. (Fyfe at least puts his contradiction in separate paragraphs, avoiding a common error of theologians and religious apologists.) Also, drawing specifically high-school students into the labor force is usually caused by a reduction in the minimum wage (or specific exemptions from the minimum wage), since a high-school students have a lower opportunity cost for working (as they do not typically have to support themselves). Third, at any given wage, new workers do not "force out" existing workers at the same wage; new workers are less experienced and less well-trained than existing workers; they represent a poorer value at any specific wage. New workers force out existing workers only when those new workers can or must accept a lower wage.
A high minimum wage — over and above what is necessary to signal a minimally civilized standard of living — isn't a particularly good idea, but objecting to it for reasons that make absolutely no economic sense is as counterproductive and damaging to our "intellectual health" as justifying humanistic principles on an irrational religious basis. Economic illiteracy is a serious enough problem among the general population. Economic illiteracy in a supposedly educated, thoughtful writer is inexcusable.
The minimum wage is good for one and only one purpose: to exclude certain kinds of industry, industry that can be profitable only by paying individuals less than that required for what a society considers a minimally civilized life, i.e. to prevent de facto slavery. A minimum wage, like all direct government price interventions, produces a deadweight loss; a minimum wage fails to offer any additional additional compensation, such as tax revenue. Since a minimum wage can only exclude economic activity, its only proper use is to exclude economic activity we intentionally want to exclude: i.e. that activity insufficiently valuable to support its workers' civilized life.
Furthermore, the benefit of a minimum wage is not that it actually excludes insufficiently valuable activities, but that it conveniently does so. We must implement other macroeconomic policies to ensure that a fraction of the population does not have to choose between slavery and starvation. A minimum wage is not so much an economic policy as it is a political policy: to bring the issue of inefficient production to light, to transform the plight of those workers invisibly and silently employed in inefficient industries into a socially urgent and visible problem of unemployment.
As a political policy, I support a minimum wage. But as an economic policy, a minimum wage — indeed any law that affects only nominal wages — cannot transfer economic demand from the owners of capital to workers, even those workers paid the minimum wage: it is simply ineffective. If a minimum wage were set substantially above the current price levels necessary to support a minimally civilized life, the increased wages would merely cause price inflation necessary to bring the minimum wage down to the minimum standard of civilized life... or even below that standard: a minimum wage in a capitalist society requires continuous adjustment.
While I don't think the minimum wage is a particularly effective tool, many criticisms of the minimum wage reveal a deep misunderstanding of macroeconomics, especially when people attempt to apply their naive* microeconomic intuition to what is essentially a macroeconomic issue. Remember: microeconomics is about relationships between elements within an economy; macroeconomics is about emergent properties of the economy as a whole; an economy as a whole does not (setting aside international economics) have any relationship to anything else. Also, you'll often see economists use the phrase ceteris paribus (literally "with other things the same") especially when they're talking about microeconomics. But when we're** talking about macroeconomics, we usually want to talk about how everything adjusts around various changes; in macro, ceteris is often not paribus.
*I don't mean to disparage naive intuition; by definition everyone has only naive intuition about a field in which they are not experts. But the only way to learn is to be criticized.
**Hey, I'm at least a junior economist... very junior, to be sure.
**Hey, I'm at least a junior economist... very junior, to be sure.
We can see these naive intuitions and mistaken analysis in Alonzo Fyfe's post, Minimum Wage.
First, in any economy there are some businesses that are succeeding, some that will fail, and some that sit near the border barely hanging on. Today, they are making enough to keep the doors open. Tomorrow, with the added burden of a higher minimum wage, they slip below the line and close their doors. Rather than making an extra dollar per hour, these employees lose their livelihood. They have not been made better off as well.First of all, it is only those business that are both minimally profitable and are paying below the proposed minimum wage that would be affected by a change in the minimum wage. Many businesses are barely profitable regardless of (or sometimes because of) their workers' wages above the minimum. So Fyfe overstates whatever case he might initially have. As noted above, an industry that requires its workers to live below what our society considers a minimally civilized existence are precisely those industries we ought to have a moral objection to supporting.
Furthermore, in any economy, we are constantly reallocating labor from less productive to more productive uses. By definition, those businesses that are minimally profitable are precisely those that are ripe for failure, so the labor they're presently using can be allocated to other more productive uses. Even if we set the minimum wage higher than the minimal standard of civilized life, the only businesses that would be affected in the short run would be precisely those businesses least worth preserving.
One common macroeconomic misconceptions is that jobs are externally limited. They are not. There are internal limitations to employment, but a job is not itself a resource that needs to be protected or conserved. Depending on what sort of economist you ask, unemployment is due to either workers themselves choosing not to work or because economic demand, not supply, is somehow poorly allocated. Either way, protecting a job in and of itself is not something we want to worry about... for precisely the same reasons we don't want to put too much economic burden on the minimum wage.
Second, the employer could try to get the money it needs to pay its minimum-wage employees by raising prices. Of course, if it raises its prices, then it will probably have fewer customers. If the business has fewer customers, then it does not need as many employees. Therefore, it lays some of the employees off, effectively redistributing their paycheck among those employees who get to keep their jobs.
Again, Fyfe is again employing "micro" thinking to a macro issue. In aggregate terms, if companies in general raise their prices to match an increase in factor prices (increased wages and the increased profit on the new wages), the increase in aggregate demand will in the long run exactly offset the increase in prices. This is why a minimum wage is typically ineffective (except to conveniently prohibit insufficiently valuable activities), but it is not actually harmful. Even in the short run (because only those companies presently paying under the minimum wage that could raise their prices), because of the increase in aggregate demand, a change in the minimum wage will cause a reallocation of labor, not a reduction in total employment.
Third, it becomes more profitable for the company to invest in automation. Minimum-wage jobs are typically just the types of jobs that are easy to automate. There are certainly going to be companies for whom automation just is not cost effective at the moment. However, an increase in the minimum wage will tilt the balance in favor of automation. With past increases in the minimum wage, we saw the rise in self-service gas stations. The next increase in the minimum wage will see a boom in self-service (automated) checkout stations in supermarkets.
This objection is probably the most serious error that Fyfe makes. All increases to real Gross Domestic Product — the best (but hardly perfect) measure of specifically economic well-being — is a result of labor becoming more efficient, producing more use-value with fewer number of labor hours. In general automation is a Good Thing. One substantial problem with capitalism is that the benefits of automation and labor productivity in general are often poorly distributed (and one argument for socialism and communism is that these systems would more equitably distribute the benefits of increased productivity), but the misallocation of a benefit is not an argument against creating that benefit.
Fourth, a higher minimum wage draws people into the labor market that would otherwise have stayed out. This means that those with jobs will have to compete against a larger labor pool to keep those jobs. One of the biggest sources of new labor are high-school students. There are always some high-school students who consider working and dropping out of school a better option. The more profitable it becomes to drop out of school, the larger the number of high-school students who will pursue this option. Many of these new workers will force existing minimum-wage employees out of the market. The result of fighting for this increase then is to put high school students in minimum wage jobs, and put the people who already have those jobs on the unemployment line.
Fyfe is just wrong here, making three different mistakes. First, drawing more people into the labor market is generally a Good Thing: more people means more productivity per capita. Additionally, you cannot simultaneously draw more people into the labor pool and (per his earlier mistaken point) simultaneously reduce the total number of jobs. (Fyfe at least puts his contradiction in separate paragraphs, avoiding a common error of theologians and religious apologists.) Also, drawing specifically high-school students into the labor force is usually caused by a reduction in the minimum wage (or specific exemptions from the minimum wage), since a high-school students have a lower opportunity cost for working (as they do not typically have to support themselves). Third, at any given wage, new workers do not "force out" existing workers at the same wage; new workers are less experienced and less well-trained than existing workers; they represent a poorer value at any specific wage. New workers force out existing workers only when those new workers can or must accept a lower wage.
A high minimum wage — over and above what is necessary to signal a minimally civilized standard of living — isn't a particularly good idea, but objecting to it for reasons that make absolutely no economic sense is as counterproductive and damaging to our "intellectual health" as justifying humanistic principles on an irrational religious basis. Economic illiteracy is a serious enough problem among the general population. Economic illiteracy in a supposedly educated, thoughtful writer is inexcusable.
Monday, November 01, 2010
The Stupid! It Burns! (miscellaneous edition)
A few miscellaneous bits of stupidity from around the IntarTubes:What do you think of this dear muslims of r&s? For sure atheism is an act of terrorism!?
While regular terrorists crash into buildings and kill people, atheists literally murder faith + good morals as they spread kaffir behaviors such as homosexuality through people like helen degenerate. ...
How is it that [atheists] are any different than a suicide bomber or hijacker? At least those had faith in allah!
A Glimpse into the Atheistic Mind
God is not “needed” in the world, but the feeling that God is needed in the heart the atheistic scientist cannot escape.
Why is it so popular with Liberals to be atheists and to put down people that have faith? (Basically, the title is all there is.)
Economic intuition
(Keep in mind that while I've studied economics informally for a couple of years, I'm only halfway through my first semester of formal study. However, I'm finding that my amateur intuitions are pretty accurate, at least so far.)
You, gentle reader, probably have some intuitions about economics, built from your ordinary life. You shop around and buy things, you have some sense about the wages you can expect for your labor, and you probably have a reasonable grasp of interest rates, both those you receive (for your savings and 401 (k)) and those you pay (for your loans and credit cards).
These intuitions apply mostly to microeconomics, the study of individual economic behavior within a national economy. In microeconomics no individual typically has the power to arbitrarily affect "global" or large-scale economic variables: your decision to buy or not to buy a television, for example, won't measurably affect the price of televisions.
One very difficult concept for people to grasp is that macroeconomics is almost totally different from microeconomics. Macroeconomics is primarily the study of the aggregate behavior of national economies as a whole. A national economy is an economy under a single more-or-less unified governmental control, usually with its own currency (obviously the EU and the Euro is an exception), which the government can arbitrarily control. (Note that just because a government can arbitrarily control a currency does not mean it can do whatever it likes without any consequences.)
One important difference is that microeconomics is all about relations between individuals (and individual companies), and how all those complicated relationships sort themselves out. A national economy, however, does not have any relations, there's nothing for it to relate to. (Not precisely true: how national economies relate to each other is yet another domain: international economics. But the vast majority of economic behavior for all nations is within the national economy, and the kinds of relations individuals have are very different from the relations that nations have. On the whole, it's easier to think of a national economy as being self-contained.)
One important illustration of the difference is one's conception of money. In microeconomics and individual finance, it's useful and valid to think of money as concrete and physical. I have this much money in the bank, I'm expecting that much money in my next paycheck, and when that money is gone, I can't buy stuff.
But money isn't really concrete. It's a socially constructed method of expressing relative demand. In macroeconomics, there's nothing for the national economy as a whole to be relative to. Hence the first thing I've learned in macroeconomics is to abstract money away, and talk about economic activity in "real" terms. The process of abstracting money away is complicated, uncertain, and provides only estimates. But, on the whole, and in the long run, actual dollars and cents, the actual numbers on the actual bills in your wallet and the numbers on your bank accounts are irrelevant to macroeconomics. I don't know anything if you tell me you have a billion dollars in your pocket: if you're an American, you're probably Bill Gates or Warren Buffet; if you're a Zimbabwean, you're going to come up short at Starbucks.
Which means that economic activities that are only about money, notably debt and finance, have an entirely different meaning in macroeconomics. For example, in macroeconomics, debt does not exist: every debt is one person's liability and another's asset, and on the whole they cancel each other out exactly. I don't mean that debt is meaningless or unimportant in macroeconomic terms, I mean that debt doesn't have the same appearance of concrete reality in macroeconomic that it does to an individual in microeconomic terms.)
The upshot is that most of your microeconomic intuitions about money, debt and finance are meaningless or incorrect when applied to macroeconomics.
Another way our ordinary intuition fails is in our treatment of government. In economic terms, government is really different. Governments act (or should act) not just differently but opposite from how individuals act. When times are good, the government should spend less; when times are tough, the government should spend more. And governments should spend on precisely those projects that are not individually profitable.
Government debt is also completely different from private debt. Governments do not have to forego consumption to pay back debt. Since governments do not labor or produce, a government cannot allocate some of its production to repayment of debt. Instead, government debt affects the economy as a whole. When an individual is "doing well" economically, it makes economic sense to borrow money (for suitable purposes), because she can expect the value of her labor to cover the cost of the debt; when she is doing poorly, it makes economic sense to save money and pay down debt. Governments, though, operate in the opposite manner: when on the whole times are tough the government should borrow money; when times are good the government should save.
We do this because when times are good overall, if one individual is doing well, they can "trade" with others who are doing poorly: the individual who is doing well borrows and buys from the individual who is doing poorly, enriching them both. When the economy as a whole is doing poorly, there are too few individuals who are doing well to absorb the savings from too many who are doing poorly. Everyone wants to save, but savings is relative: it is a transfer of demand from one person to another. If there's no one to borrow other people's savings, saving just depresses the economy as a whole. So the government must step in and borrow everyone's savings.
Another intuition that doesn't transfer well from microeconomics to macroeconomics is the idea of dynamic equilibrium. In microeconomics, pretty much everything progresses to the more-or-less optimal equilibrium "by default", without any need for global or high-level intentional action. Microeconomics is dynamically stable: small variations from the optimal equilibrium statistically "pressure" circumstances to return to the optimal equilibrium. Indeed the pressure is so strong that (with some exceptions) it is difficult to deliberately affect microeconomic behavior at a global level, and usually counterproductive to do so.
I'm pretty sure the dynamic stability of microeconomics is a part of standard economic theory. I strongly suspect (but do not actually know) that macroeconomics is dynamically unstable: a small change to the economy as a whole statistically "pressures" the economy as a whole not to return to an optimal equilibrium but rather continue to move in the same direction as the small change. A growing economy tends to cause the economy to grow faster; a slowing economy tends to cause the economy slow more. Inflation causes more inflation; unemployment causes more unemployment. Managing a macroeconomy is like balancing a pencil on its point.
Overall, I think it's useful to keep in mind a model of the village: a small, self-contained community of individuals who exclusively trade with each other. Microeconomics will tell you about the relative activity of individuals within the village, macroeconomics will tell you about the activity of the village as a whole. What does it mean, for example, for the village as a whole to borrow from its own members? Clearly it means something very different from one individual borrowing from another individual. Test any economic concept in your mind against this model: what would it mean for an individual to do something? What would it mean for the village as a whole to do something? If the concept makes sense in one context but not another, you've hit on a micro vs. macro difference.
You, gentle reader, probably have some intuitions about economics, built from your ordinary life. You shop around and buy things, you have some sense about the wages you can expect for your labor, and you probably have a reasonable grasp of interest rates, both those you receive (for your savings and 401 (k)) and those you pay (for your loans and credit cards).
These intuitions apply mostly to microeconomics, the study of individual economic behavior within a national economy. In microeconomics no individual typically has the power to arbitrarily affect "global" or large-scale economic variables: your decision to buy or not to buy a television, for example, won't measurably affect the price of televisions.
One very difficult concept for people to grasp is that macroeconomics is almost totally different from microeconomics. Macroeconomics is primarily the study of the aggregate behavior of national economies as a whole. A national economy is an economy under a single more-or-less unified governmental control, usually with its own currency (obviously the EU and the Euro is an exception), which the government can arbitrarily control. (Note that just because a government can arbitrarily control a currency does not mean it can do whatever it likes without any consequences.)
One important difference is that microeconomics is all about relations between individuals (and individual companies), and how all those complicated relationships sort themselves out. A national economy, however, does not have any relations, there's nothing for it to relate to. (Not precisely true: how national economies relate to each other is yet another domain: international economics. But the vast majority of economic behavior for all nations is within the national economy, and the kinds of relations individuals have are very different from the relations that nations have. On the whole, it's easier to think of a national economy as being self-contained.)
One important illustration of the difference is one's conception of money. In microeconomics and individual finance, it's useful and valid to think of money as concrete and physical. I have this much money in the bank, I'm expecting that much money in my next paycheck, and when that money is gone, I can't buy stuff.
But money isn't really concrete. It's a socially constructed method of expressing relative demand. In macroeconomics, there's nothing for the national economy as a whole to be relative to. Hence the first thing I've learned in macroeconomics is to abstract money away, and talk about economic activity in "real" terms. The process of abstracting money away is complicated, uncertain, and provides only estimates. But, on the whole, and in the long run, actual dollars and cents, the actual numbers on the actual bills in your wallet and the numbers on your bank accounts are irrelevant to macroeconomics. I don't know anything if you tell me you have a billion dollars in your pocket: if you're an American, you're probably Bill Gates or Warren Buffet; if you're a Zimbabwean, you're going to come up short at Starbucks.
Which means that economic activities that are only about money, notably debt and finance, have an entirely different meaning in macroeconomics. For example, in macroeconomics, debt does not exist: every debt is one person's liability and another's asset, and on the whole they cancel each other out exactly. I don't mean that debt is meaningless or unimportant in macroeconomic terms, I mean that debt doesn't have the same appearance of concrete reality in macroeconomic that it does to an individual in microeconomic terms.)
The upshot is that most of your microeconomic intuitions about money, debt and finance are meaningless or incorrect when applied to macroeconomics.
Another way our ordinary intuition fails is in our treatment of government. In economic terms, government is really different. Governments act (or should act) not just differently but opposite from how individuals act. When times are good, the government should spend less; when times are tough, the government should spend more. And governments should spend on precisely those projects that are not individually profitable.
Government debt is also completely different from private debt. Governments do not have to forego consumption to pay back debt. Since governments do not labor or produce, a government cannot allocate some of its production to repayment of debt. Instead, government debt affects the economy as a whole. When an individual is "doing well" economically, it makes economic sense to borrow money (for suitable purposes), because she can expect the value of her labor to cover the cost of the debt; when she is doing poorly, it makes economic sense to save money and pay down debt. Governments, though, operate in the opposite manner: when on the whole times are tough the government should borrow money; when times are good the government should save.
We do this because when times are good overall, if one individual is doing well, they can "trade" with others who are doing poorly: the individual who is doing well borrows and buys from the individual who is doing poorly, enriching them both. When the economy as a whole is doing poorly, there are too few individuals who are doing well to absorb the savings from too many who are doing poorly. Everyone wants to save, but savings is relative: it is a transfer of demand from one person to another. If there's no one to borrow other people's savings, saving just depresses the economy as a whole. So the government must step in and borrow everyone's savings.
Another intuition that doesn't transfer well from microeconomics to macroeconomics is the idea of dynamic equilibrium. In microeconomics, pretty much everything progresses to the more-or-less optimal equilibrium "by default", without any need for global or high-level intentional action. Microeconomics is dynamically stable: small variations from the optimal equilibrium statistically "pressure" circumstances to return to the optimal equilibrium. Indeed the pressure is so strong that (with some exceptions) it is difficult to deliberately affect microeconomic behavior at a global level, and usually counterproductive to do so.
I'm pretty sure the dynamic stability of microeconomics is a part of standard economic theory. I strongly suspect (but do not actually know) that macroeconomics is dynamically unstable: a small change to the economy as a whole statistically "pressures" the economy as a whole not to return to an optimal equilibrium but rather continue to move in the same direction as the small change. A growing economy tends to cause the economy to grow faster; a slowing economy tends to cause the economy slow more. Inflation causes more inflation; unemployment causes more unemployment. Managing a macroeconomy is like balancing a pencil on its point.
Overall, I think it's useful to keep in mind a model of the village: a small, self-contained community of individuals who exclusively trade with each other. Microeconomics will tell you about the relative activity of individuals within the village, macroeconomics will tell you about the activity of the village as a whole. What does it mean, for example, for the village as a whole to borrow from its own members? Clearly it means something very different from one individual borrowing from another individual. Test any economic concept in your mind against this model: what would it mean for an individual to do something? What would it mean for the village as a whole to do something? If the concept makes sense in one context but not another, you've hit on a micro vs. macro difference.
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