>I'm also taking the view that raising the prosperity for the lowest individuals will in turn increase the prosperity for everyone else.
This is an aside, and I don't particularly want to evaluate it as good or bad, but this statement is striking compared to the neoliberal idea of 'a rising tide lifts all boats' - i.e. increasing general prosperty raises prosperity for the lowest individuals.
Thanks for responding. I never really thought about how that might be a controversial opinion but it does ring true the more I think about it. My self-described "libertarian" friends don't believe in the same social policies I do and don't believe in the same correlations between social policies and economic success.
I'm sure you already knew this but I figured I'd share it anyways: After thinking about it last night I decided I believed in a "trickle up effect" and then went to google it, thinking it a nice take on the "trickle down effect," only to find that "trickle up effect" was the original and "trickle down" was apparently the clever take down... Sigh. Guess I should have paid more attention in Economics.
Anyways, like most economic theories I'm sure there are a myriad of reasons why it might not work or be the most effective (which you graciously decided to not go into.)
Eilenberg & Mac Lane needed a word like 'set', 'group', 'class', etc, except of course those were all taken. They claim to have gotten the word 'category' from Kant, although they didn't intend an actual semantic relation.
At least within mathematics and physics, 'the properties of one defines the properties of the other' is a pretty good explanation of what's meant by 'duality'. Looking at that wiki list it explains all of the dualities I'm familiar with except (maybe?) the wave-particle duality.
Thoreau: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
Another Thoreau quote, also from Walden: "And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea."
It is a relevant quote, but it should be said that infrastructure facilitates commerce and that the New and Old World - despite Thoreau's humbuggary - had much to talk about. He would probably disapprove of the Internet in specific and modernity in general.
