Back to Basics...

After hours of looking at my microeconomics course material and graphs, something suddenly struck me. Most events in nature has a curve similar to bell curve. Things progress from 0 all the way to a maximum and then come back to zero and then it goes through the negative to a negative maxima and then returns to 0. For example, if you reduce price of a quantity, you sell more. If proportion of revenue increase is greater than cost reduction, you increase profit. But then, there is a limit after which reduction in price does not lead to increased profit and hence the profit reduces. I thought about some examples. Look at Sun, the light intensity slowly increases and reaches the maximum intensity and then wades off and reaches perfect darkness and comes back on. Look at humans, we start out without any clue. We learn and reach a point of maximum capacity and knowledge (or lack thereof) and then, we go back again to being like kids, needing help from others for our existence during old age. Think of a lot of things that way, you will see that this seems to be a commonality. If you replicate this curve back to back, you will get a sinusoidal curve...(suresh, engeyo poyitteda..) May be, this is the reason why most of the seemingly non-deterministic waveforms can be converted to sinusoidal equivalents*. I hope the above mentioned facts convince us that in a macroscopic view of things, behaviour of events are periodic and follow a definite pattern and usually, they dont tend to go in one direction or the other, but cycle along.

Now, let us look at human evolution in terms of what we as humans have learnt and how we advanced, at a higher level of abstraction. Darwin's theory about natural selection states that complex organisms derived their incremental intelligence through its ancestors and such intelligence passing happens for every generation. It would mean that intelligence of humans will grow over time. Intelligence adds value to a community, as we all know. But, can intelligence, when added more and more cause the value of the community as a whole to go up adinfinitum OR in other words, does the intelligence necessarily translate into a huge value proposition over time. I think that it is not true.

I think, humanity as a whole is undergoing law of diminishing returns by added intelligence and smartness. I get curious about questions like, are we better off than our ancestors. Another way to look at it is, what are our current goals, more from a lifestyle perspective than our ancestors. We all want to stay healthy (running, going to gym etc.,), eat good food (organic is better..:)), we dont want a lot of stress in our lives, we want to be peaceful. When I thought about it, I was wondering about the life of a farmer. One can do their daily workouts in the field, eat pure and organic food (garden fresh), can be peaceful, and hopefully, not a lot of stress inducing factors as well. One would think that Health care might be an issue. Yes, it definitely is. But, if there was no pollution and if everyone ate good food and exercised well enough, I would assume that natural remedies should take care of most problems than the humanly fabricated problems. Should we, as a community go back to the basics and slip ourselves from the maximization curve and stabilise ourselves with the better practices that we have inherited over time ? It makes me feel that people living in country side knowingly/unknowingly are probably better off without technological interventions. I dont know if it is politicians or just the inherited intelligence factor, but from a very high level, all I see is that nature's wealth getting increasingly consumed without anything being put back. In the process, we weave more and more strands which only complicates things than making it simpler. Look at all other living things than humans, it seems to me that they all serve some purpose to the ecological balance. But, I think humans dont serve any purpose other than just consume and deprive nature of all its resources and create a global imbalance, may be even destroy earth. Something to think about...or not ?...


* Fourier Series and Fourier Transforms just do that