I’ve never been very good at analyzing myself, so I’m sure I couldn’t say precisely how my thoughts have changed over the semester. I suppose what’s best reflected in my blog is my journey through many different ideas towards my final topic of discussion in my expert study. I began with a decidedly outspoken introduction, and I’d like to say that I’ve made the transition from rhetoric to research, but truth be told, I’m really still not so great at that. I can’t even make myself believe that my arguments have reached a particularly wide variety of topics. What I can at least believe is that my rather empty rhetoric has at least become more reasonable and realistic.

Most of my earlier posts (and it does continue as a theme throughout) focus much more on the morality and economic sense behind capitalism, and only briefly touch on its application to the world as a whole. In The Africa Problem, I make an argument that I still wholeheartedly believe in: people can only really be wealthy in the long term by their own merit. An undeserving heir will soon lose his fortune just as the man given a fish will go hungry the next night. Again, not much more than fustian assumptions in relation to Africa, but I’m not sure what I could cite to predict the future. What really counts here is the idea, and the reasons behind it. It’s still something that I truly believe, and I’ve written as persuasively as I can.

In We Pledge Allegiance To Bill Gates, I outline my very first idea for my expert study. I never completely abandoned it- it is more abstractly touched upon in my study- but as interested in this hypothetical scenario as I am, I felt that it was too far-fetched to write any serious paper on, or at least before it’s a fully developed idea. What comes out here, I think, is my own vision of globalization. I discuss the blurring of national boundaries to the point of the extinction of nation-states, which I know is very detached from reality, but it still illustrates how I came to view globalization as empowerment of the individual and undermining the importance of national governments. If nothing else, I’d say that I at least have a somewhat unique vision of it, even if the final result is not entirely realistic. I tend to think a lot in ideals, but that problem is addressed near the end of the blog, which I’ll get to later.

A bit later on in the semester, I realized something very grounding. After reading The Communist Manifesto, I wrote Marx off as being outdated for writing not about capitalism in a free society, but about oppressive and exclusive aristocracies. It didn’t take me long to see that it wasn’t as outdated as it sounded. America has its own, somewhat unintentional aristocracy, created by the lack of opportunity and education for the children of the poor. Yes, I am from a wealthier area, and that is a lot of why I believe what I believe, but not for the reasons you’d instantly think. I’ve known many awful, stupid, almost sub-human children have their way paid for them because their parents were wealthy, and they get all if not more of everything I do, no matter how hard I work. It’s like a communist idea hidden inside a laissez-faire aristocracy. It still makes me absolutely sick to see these people going to great colleges while I have to think of the brilliant people doomed to low-income households and opportunities. One very important distinction I then had to make was that aristocracy is not the capitalist ideal. I’m safe; I’m still just as capitalist as I thought I was, but what’s not capitalist is our own social structure. From this little train of thought sprung a firm belief that people should be judged not by their background, but by their own merit. If this means that someone who was poor takes whatever place I might have had because they’re better than me, so be it. It’s for the best that someone better than me be higher up; I’ll just have to work harder. Of course, that ideal is not entirely realistic, but I argue in that same post that we at least have to take steps to see that it’s closer to reality.

Another idea I touch upon is the philosophy of global egalitarianism, and thus begin my anti-nationalist rants. For the first time I argue the idea which I eventually turn into a pillar of my later arguments: our world is now set up in an aristocracy of wealth by nation, but no American has a birthright to a job. In a truly egalitarian and capitalist world, there are fabulously wealthy in Mongolia and terribly poor in America, but everyone deserves to be where they are. Another ideal, but it’s the thought that counts when building a frame of mind.

From that point, I jump away from my economic defenses of capitalism towards more attacks on nationalism, collectivism, and elitism. I found that there are quite a number of isms that I dislike. There was still not much there but rhetoric, but how does one research culture? I do poorly enough researching numbers and statistics, so how could I research the cultural attitudes of America? The short answer is: I didn’t. What I hope I did at least do is make logical and convincing arguments. As far as American patriotism goes, I think I did a decent job making a sensible and persuasive argument.

What I realized one very early morning in Sleep Is For People Who Don’t Have Enough To Think About is that my original idea for my expert study and the one I’d finally come to were really not terribly different. I wrote about free trade and notions of nationalism, but thought also that this tied in closely with the idea of blurred national boundaries, that is, globalization as the anti-nationalizer. An interesting question that arose in my mind, if not on paper, is: does globalization kill nationalism or does it require anti-nationalism to flourish, or both?

After writing my first draft I came back to the topic of education, following a conversation I’d had earlier that day with Dean Rucker. He had some interesting points about how education is greatly influenced by world events, and this is not a new thing. I was very happy to learn that Mandarin will be offered next year, but also saw the greater implications of this in terms of education. Global trends mixed with traditional education produces students who will not only be effective thinkers at home, but very capable abroad. This is still a part of the cultural aspect, which I clarify more in Substantivist Economics. I felt that my writing in that post was returning to more irrational terms, but I think I generally clarified the concept, at least.

All in all, I’m not terribly pleased with my writing over the semester. I believe every word I’ve said with all of my heart, but I don’t feel as though I presented it very effectively. It reads like “I think this” and “I think that,” but I at least think that I presented everything in a reasonably logical fashion. It turns out that I’m really not as brilliant as I thought, but that only means I’ll have to work harder- and isn’t that really it? No one can coast along without constantly striving to improve, neither in this fifteen person seminar nor in the 6.6 billion person flat world.