Because he gives me the most material to read and analyze and reflect upon, my thinking often tracks the thinking of Alex Gugie. Alex has been focusing this month on the human mind, as something more than just the sum of its parts (neurons and such). And my focus has been the same: the human mind, and its role in the real world of economics. The human mind not only determines the value of a good, but it determines whether an object is, in fact, a good at all. So much of society and civilization is dependent on what the human mind can imagine and achieve. No thing is inherently good or bad; it depends on the person’s perspective (and I think that this works for other adjectives, too, like efficiency, maybe?). And advances in technology, or entrepreneurial innovation, are both clearly products of the human mind. This power of mind has a tremendous impact and influence on the subject of my research project, as has been made clear in other journals.
The question arises, now, how I will represent this thinking and these revelations in my Self-Designed Assignment for the month of October. I could do something boring, like an essay, which I am tempted to do because I will need a section on this subjective nature of economics for a law review article that I am writing. However, I was pretty impressed with the creativity in my SDA last month, and I don’t want to regress.
I was playing around with the idea of a poem. But I’ve been telling the kids that the SDA should be bigger and better than the journals, and I don’t know that a poem would be bigger and better than a journal, except that it might take more effort on my part to be poetic. But, also, how much information could I really convey in a poem? It might be appropriate for heady stuff like the human mind, but it also can’t get into details and stuff. Noah suggested that I do a song, with musical accompaniment, and I like that idea because then there will be two elements communicating my lesson, the music, for the heady stuff, and the lyrics for the information. Bott suggested I borrow Duncan Depew for a weekend and write a fictional story that relates to my project. Again, this is a tempting option, because it allows me to be really creative and embellish liberally on the important parts of what I’m trying to convey. And, finally, I was also thinking about a motivational speech, about the world-changing power of human beings.
One poem is too small to be my SDA. Writing a song and the accompanying music, I think, is too much for me to do in the next 10 days, because it’s not something I do regularly. It is something I want to pursue, though, perhaps for next month. I think I’m going to start out with writing a story. Something with pretty language, too. But, I can’t guarantee that the dialogue won’t turn into a monologue, because I haven’t written fiction since high school. Whether I can still turn that monologue into a compelling fiction story is up in the air. I’m gonna try my best, though, and I think I’m gonna enjoy doing so.
Something I’ve been thinking about for the past week is purpose. I’m working on a law review article that’s somewhat related to my topic. However, I think I’m focusing too much on economics in it. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with an article being economics heavy, but the economics has to have purpose. It needs to contribute something important to the legal part of the essay. So as I write my law review article, I’ve been trying to use a purpose litmus-test to decide whether to include certain things or not. I bring this up because I’m not sure if the SDA this month will be really purposeful, at least in so far as it relates to my final product. Poems, songs, fiction stories, motivational speeches… They fit the theme of the month, but do they fit the theme of my project?
However, Bott told me today that he wasn’t sold on my project, on the idea that I’m trying to sell. And that’s a big red flag for me, that it’s nearly the end of October and my “So What?” is still not clear or compelling. I’ve been telling Alex for over a month now that human beings require no-purely-scientific reasons to believe in something, and, in a nod to new Nobel laureate Thaler, sometimes those reasons are rather silly. Perhaps a beautiful song or a captivating story will better communicate the message I’m trying to deliver than my economic analyses. Therefore, I feel comfortable moving forward with this creative experiment in my more serious project because I want to try different ways of showing people why my topic matters.
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