A Few Concluding Lessons I've Learned

Being that this is the last of our blog posts for the semester, I thought it would be fitting to discuss a few of the things I've learned throughout the duration of our class. While there are a variety of things that I have learned over the course of the months, one of my particularly favorite areas of study was Hume and his ideas regarding innate human qualities. The reason I enjoyed studying David Hume's work was because not only did I initially disagree with his assertions, but I also felt uncomfortable with them as well. The assertion that I am talking about in particular being that mankind is not programmed with an innate propensity to cooperate and is not naturally predisposed to do good or facilitate the advancement of civilization. My initial disagreement came from my standpoint that I felt it was pessimistic or negative to think of mankind's achievements and propensity to achieve as a result of us being a blank programmable slate—rather than an organism with inherent intelligence that was naturally predisposed to cooperation. There was something about this claim that was unsettling to me primarily because it carried the implication of uncertainty about the future of civilization since its' core message was that we got here by accident rather than design. However, this eventually became a topic that I enjoyed discussing in class very much because it provided me with the opportunity to hear various points of views on the matter. For instance, there were a number of people in our class who thought just the exact opposite of me—that the fleshing out of such an idea actually inspired more optimism than pessimism about mankind and the future of society. If civilization arose out of accident rather than preordained plans, they reasoned, then if anything one should be optimistic about the future since we have already observed mankind's tremendous potential for cooperation and technological advancement. The reason I chose to write about this as one of the things I had learned is because despite my prior inclinations, I eventually came to understand and embrace this exact same point of view and began seeing optimism where I had previously seen doubt.

Another lesson that I took away from our class is that trust, although at first sight a simple concept, is actually an incredibly complex concept—not to mention one that presents the problem of a double-edged sword. The nature of trust one that relaxes our doubts of one another's integrity, and thus innately promotes a lack of verification and fact checking. However, the problem with trust is that it can be easily abused, and more often than not the abuse of trust occurs when the verification or fact checking is stopped. The problem that becomes presented then, is a conundrum like one in which legitimate trust requires an environment free of constant speculation and distrust, but is also commonly violated in such environments as well. Trust, as it would seem, is an erratic idea that has a multitude of self-contradicting ideas.

While these are two of the more prominent issues which I enjoyed learning about throughout the course of the semester, it should not be mistaken as the only ones. There have been a variety of topics I have enjoyed analyzing for the past several months including the ideas of specialization, evolution of trade, one-shot experimental behavior, and price convergence in double-auction experiments just to name a few. All of these issues and all of our other issues explored have helped me develop new insights into the foundational principles of what constitutes economic behavioralism and theory, and have also aided in my ability to rationalize a host of ideas and thought processes I never could before.