When there was a big surge in people talking about the Dredge Act and the Jones Act last year, I would see conversations in the wild address these three points: unions supporting these bills because they effectively guarantee their member’s jobs; shipbuilders supporting these bills because they immunize them from foreign competition; and the economy as measured in GDP.
Union contracts and business decisions are both at the same level of abstraction: thinking about what another group of people thinks and what they do because of it. The GDP is a towering pile of calculations to reduce every transaction in the country to a percentage. It would need a lot of additional argumentation to build the link between the groups of people making decisions about the thing we are asking about, and the economy as a whole. Even if it didn’t it would still have problems like double-counting the activity of the unions/businesses under consideration, and including lots of irrelevant information like the entertainment sector of the economy, which has nothing to do with intra-US shipping and dredging.
Different levels of abstraction have different relationships to the question we are investigating. It is hard to put these different relationships together well for ourselves, and very hard to communicate them to others, so we should be pretty skeptical about mixing them, in my view.
Interesting point about levels of abstraction, I think I agree, but what is a good example?
When there was a big surge in people talking about the Dredge Act and the Jones Act last year, I would see conversations in the wild address these three points: unions supporting these bills because they effectively guarantee their member’s jobs; shipbuilders supporting these bills because they immunize them from foreign competition; and the economy as measured in GDP.
Union contracts and business decisions are both at the same level of abstraction: thinking about what another group of people thinks and what they do because of it. The GDP is a towering pile of calculations to reduce every transaction in the country to a percentage. It would need a lot of additional argumentation to build the link between the groups of people making decisions about the thing we are asking about, and the economy as a whole. Even if it didn’t it would still have problems like double-counting the activity of the unions/businesses under consideration, and including lots of irrelevant information like the entertainment sector of the economy, which has nothing to do with intra-US shipping and dredging.
Different levels of abstraction have different relationships to the question we are investigating. It is hard to put these different relationships together well for ourselves, and very hard to communicate them to others, so we should be pretty skeptical about mixing them, in my view.