Re: Not always joking, it seems

David Friedman <ddfr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> Willie.Mookie@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
>> I was reflecting on what Skinner said about society being like a big
>> Skinner machine you cannot escape. The whole of society becomes a
>> large reinforcement schedule that promises rich rewards throughout but
>> in reality, takes everything from you that you've got and play ends
>> when you are broke.
>> 
>> The more efficient we become along this path, the bleaker things will
>> be - and in the end, large populations of lucky and unlucky folk alike
>> will have become desensitized to the messages used to fleece them - by
>> and large those messages are the fabric that holds society together.
>> At that point all hell will break loose.
>
>How, on this theory, do you explain that by any objective measure--life 
>expectancy, real income, calorie consumption, health--things have been 
>getting generally better in most of the world for the past several 
>centuries? Murder rates have gone up and down, and historical data on 
>crime rates isn't all that good, but it seems clear that murder is much 
>less common than it was five or six hundred years ago.

Semi-relevant URL (20 minutes long, safe for work in general):

http://roslingsblogger.blogspot.com/2007/06/debunking-myths-about-world.html

Dave
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