Personality Characteristics Economics and Politics

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Download PDF Version                                                                         January 7, 2019

One of the forgotten goals of economics or political science is to predict ahead of time what leaders and others are likely to do given certain situations. An important question always, is what type of person is likely to become a president or congressman? Debate continues as to how much of a personality characteristic is inborn and how much of it is learned. My personal view is that people are born with strong propensities to behave one way or another. What is most important is that however a person acquires various personality characteristics, he is not likely to change.

Personality characteristics, each one of them, is distributed in a bell curve type manner. Odds are, any person you meet on the street, is likely to be about average in terms of honesty, sense of entitlement, empathy and all other social qualities. A person with as super strong sense of entitlement as in what you own is just as much his as it is yours, would actually possess a very unlikely personality characteristic.

A small percentage of people have a whole set of unlikely personality characteristics. Certain lifestyles and avocations are open only to the few who have the types of personalities that would make them successful in a select  chosen area.

Assuming the right physical attributes, a super competitive person has a chance to compete i17n the NFL. That same person may have too much compassion for others to become a career criminal. Saint Mother Teresa, probably wasn’t all that competitive. She had other personality characteristics that guided her towards helping people and doing saintly things.

So, what personality characteristics does it take to become president of the United States? What kind of personality does it take to become a senator of congressman? These types of avocations require a complete collection of highly unlikely personality characteristics. How, competitive must a successful candidate be? In terms of competitiveness Donald Trump is way off the charts. These kinds of political races are the world’s most competitive events. The winners must all have political personalities. Political personality is a euphemism for sociopath.

So, when others talk about their favorite candidates like they are their fairy god mothers, just know they are completely delusional. It is as close to impossible, as it is possible to be close to impossible, without actually being impossible, for a non sociopath to get elected to a high political office.

It is hard to say which fantasies are most destructive. The notion that elected leaders are just like the rest of us only better because they are working tirelessly in our best interest is somewhere close to the top.

The truth is a hard sell. Fantasy Free Economics gains readers one at a time. Major search engines simply do not list blogs which disagree with their political agenda. As long as folks share the link to this blog and others speaking out against the grain, the truth will at least trickle into the public consciousness.

 

 

Fantasy Free Economics recommends the following blogs.

Woodpiler Report
Of Two Minds
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Mises Institute
Straight Line Logic
Paul Craig Roberts

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About Fantasy Free Economics

James Quillian independent scholar,free market economist,and teacher of natural law. Who is James Quillian? Certainly I am nobody special, Just a tireless academic and deep thinker. Besides that, I have broken the code with respect to economics and political science. Credentials? Nothing you would be impressed with. I am not a household name. It is hard to become famous writing that virtually no one in the country is genuinely not in touch with reality. But, if I did not do that, there would be no point in my broking the broken the code. If you read the blog, it is easy to see that there are just a few charts, no math and no quantitative analysis. That is not by accident. Given what I know, those items are completely useless. I do turn out to be highly adept at applying natural law. Natural law has predominance over any principles the social science comes up. By virtue of understanding natural law, I can debunk, in just a few sentences , any theory that calls for intervention by a government. My taking the time to understand the ins and outs of Keynes General Theory is about like expecting a chemistry student to completely grasp all that the alchemists of the middle ages thought they understood in efforts to turn base metals into goal. Keynesian theory clearly calls for complete objectivity. Government can only make political decisions. Keynesian techniques call for economic decisions. So, why go any further with that? Fantasy Free Economics is in a sense a lot like technical analysis. Technical analysis began with the premise that it was impossible to gain enough information studying fundamentals to gain a trading advantage. Study the behavior of investors instead. Unlike technical analysis, I don't use technical charts. What I understand are the incentives of different people and entities active in the economics arena. For example, there is no such thing as an incentive to serve with life in the aggregate. In the aggregate, only self interest applies. It is routinely assumed otherwise. That is highly unappealing. But, I am sorry. That is the way it is. I can accept that because I am genuinely in touch with reality. Step one in using Fantasy Free Economics is for me to understand just how little I really know. A highly credentialed economist may know 100 times what I do based on the standard dogma. Compare the knowledge each of us has compared to all there is to know and we both look like we know nothing at all. There is always more than we don't know than what we do know. I am humble enough to present myself on that basis. Why? That is the way it is. I am not bad at math. I have taught math. What I understand is when to use it and when to rely on something else. Math is useless in natural law so I don't use it. While others look at numbers, I am busy understanding the forces in nature that makes their numbers what they are. That gives me a clear advantage.

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