More or Less is Better

As an undergraduate student, I studied Economics (and History — I actually have two Bachelor’s degrees, a sort of “multitasking” achievement of mine 😉 ). One economics professor of mine had a rather profound impact on a lot of my thinking about economic theory. One of his phrases about the philosophical attitude of a lot of economic thought was “more is better” (which I now sometimes wonder about — insofar as: was he completely serious?). My hunch is that he was actually poking fun at how simplistic this attitude is, but it is indeed very much front and center — for example, in the formulation of a “Pareto optimum” (I’m now also wondering whether and to what degree this idea suffers from merely identifying local-optimal cases, and thereby perhaps failing to search for more optimal cases).

It was only a few days ago that I began to consider this quirky quote of my professor’s and Pareto’s guiltiness in coming up with such a fallacious statistic (and in particular being astounded about this fallacy, insofar as Pareto was apparently quite a mathematician — how could he have been so naive?).

My gut feeling is that it took me several decades of very deep thinking about language (and its central role in scientific research) until the coin finally dropped a few days ago — or rather: began to roll, as I cannot say yet whether anything “worthwhile” is actually going to drop.

This puzzling has also motivated me to look up a text which I have never actually read before, but which has nonetheless been quite influential on my own work: George Kingsley Zipf’s “Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort”. A significant portion of my own work is very much based on “Zipf’s Law”, and this law was apparently only an example of Zipf’s central interest — namely, the “Principle of Least Effort”.

I reminded myself of this title not only because I was familiar with it, but because I was pondering: how could we humans organize a world in which we simply make enough, rather than always seeking growth? If the goal were something like reaching a sufficient level (of happiness or whatever), then I concluded that the most reasonable constraint seemed to be the minimization of cost, expenses, … or as Zipf put it: effort.

I don’t expect this to be a simple and straightforward matter. It hardly seems likely that the laziest workers ought to be the most sought after candidates for any job. My hunch is that this perspective will require much more attention to be paid to the quality of goods and services produced rather than simply focusing on the quantity output of standardized whatever.