Big Changes Are Afoot

The end of 2021 was quite busy for me, and so my blog went silent for a while. I traveled from Florida to Ohio for Thanksgiving, then from Florida to California for Christmas. I was in the final interviewing and negotiating phase of changing employment (the new job is the reason for the blog change from "A Random Stranger" to BTMinster). And the changes are nowhere near over, but at least they are far enough along that I can say some definitive things about them.

To begin with, I have accepted new employment in Columbus, OH. I will be moving from Jacksonville, FL, the first weekend in March. The logistics of this are still very undecided, but it appears that my family will stay in Florida for a few weeks after I leave. Some of that is because my wife, Nancy (previously known as "Persephone," "Super Hot 111," and "My Wife" on ARS), will be finishing up her Florida job and won't be ready to go when I have to report for work in Ohio. Some of it is because our daughter, Ella (previously known as "Crazy Jane" on ARS), has received a call to serve as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and begins her service with home-based online training in mid-March and then reports for in-person training at the beginning of April, so it will be a lot easier for everyone if they just stay put in Florida until Ella leaves home. Some of it is because our son, Will (previously known as "Articulate Joe" on ARS), is working on finishing the Eagle Scout rank for Scouts BSA and his 18th birthday is at the end of April, so it will be easier for him to finish things in Florida than to try to figure out how to start them in Ohio. And some of it is because it will be easier to find a good housing solution for our family if I'm there in Columbus to scout and finalize the search. When we were moving to Jacksonville in 2016 many landlords refused to rent to us without us being in town to see the house in person. Should I admire their self-awareness that their properties are disappointing in person, or should I be frustrated with the inconvenience it caused us trying to line things up online from California and Ohio? A little of both.

Like I said, big changes are still coming. I am teaching an online class right now, and in February I will add to that two in-person classes. The weekend after the in-person classes end is when I move to Ohio to begin work on the following Monday. So I'm going to be very busy for the first few months of 2022.

Will My City-Name Model Account for This?

A few years ago, when I was new to Florida, a student approached me after class and started talking. "I have to go to Jupiter this weekend and--" I didn't hear any of the rest of what she said because I was thinking, "People can't go to Jupiter--they can't even go to Mars yet!" Then I realized she was talking about Jupiter, FL (population: 61,047), which is 270 miles away from here, not Jupiter the planet (population: 0), which is 487.53 million miles away from here. I had to ask her to repeat herself.

In my defense, there is a LOT of space stuff here in Florida, and it's all closer than Jupiter (the one in Florida) is.

Same Names for Different Places

A few years ago, I was in a group of people who went from Jacksonville, FL, to Wallace, NC, to help clean up after Hurricane Florence. When people asked where we were from, we said, "Jacksonville," to which they would say something like, "Oh, I go to church in Jacksonville." We were from the twelfth-largest city in America (population: 949,611), but we had traveled over 400 miles, and were now close enough to Jacksonville, NC (population: 72,723), that to the locals "Jacksonville" meant the smaller city that was only 40 miles away. Similar things happen with other identically-named places: in 2013 these students went to the wrong Fayetteville, and of course who could forget brake-parts scion Tommy Callahan mistaking the Columbus in Georgia for the one in Ohio?

I'm working on an idea of pairing places with the same name and developing an equation that would predict the places where the word means something different to the listeners. I figure it needs to include the population of the place (so the larger city like Las Vegas, NV, will be recognized more widely than the smaller city like Las Vegas, NM) and distance from the listener (someone down the road from Jacksonville, NC, assumes the nearby one, not the larger one). I think it will also need to be based on metro area population, not city population. Some "major" cities in the US are now quite small (Pittsburgh, PA, is now the 68th-largest city in the US, smaller than Aurora, CO). When I get this fleshed out, I'll share some maps showing what I find.

One thing I don't yet know how to account for is cultural weight. For instance, almost everywhere in the US if you said, "My cousin lives in Hollywood," your listener would assume the neighborhood of Los Angeles (population: 146,514), not the city in Florida (population: 152,511). I'll try to figure something out.

Different Names for the Same (?) Thing

In my last post, I wrote about "collectivist/communalist/communitarianist" societies. That definitely is NOT an incredibly convenient and easy-to-use name. But my problem is that there isn't really a term for what I want. Here I'll discuss the definitions provided by Google for several related terms and why each doesn't work.

• COLLECTIVISM: prioritizing the group over the individual; the ownership of land and the means of production by the people or the state.

In the type of society mentioned in Acts 4, the group is not prioritized over the individual. Prioritizing the group would mean that something that raised the welfare of the group (however you want to try to measure that) while lowering the welfare of an individual would be good. In the early Christian community, however, welfare was not aggregated. There was no single welfare function that was being maximized, but a separate function for each community member. Also, ownership still exists. (Acts 4 is incredibly brief in its description of the society, so other scriptural sources of other such societies must be used to see some of these points, and later I will introduce those texts and the societies they describe.)

• COMMUNALISM: political organization based on federated communes; allegiance to one's own ethnic group.

The first half of this definition deals more with how two or more instances of such a society would interact, not with the nature of the society itself. The second half is completely unrelated to what I want--ethnicity doesn't even begin to factor into an Acts 4 society.

• COMMUNISM: class warfare and the public ownership of all property.

This term brings with it the most baggage of any of them, but even leaving that aside, this isn't what we want. Early Christians weren't divided by class--alongside destitute followers of Christ are ones who can afford newly-finished private tombs.

• COMMUNITARIANISM: social organization based on small, self-governing communities; stressing the responsibility of the individual to the community and the social importance of the family.

This isn't so off-base, but it also leaves a lot unmentioned. While Christians in Acts 4 definitely have a responsibility to their community, and probably are organized around family units, there's a lot more involved in being of "one heart and soul" and having "everything in common."

• SOCIALISM: the means of production and exchange are regulated by the community; a stage between capitalism and communism.

The means of production aren't the concern, but the products produced. One person can control all the resources in an Acts 4 society, if they only distribute the income the resources produce.

• ZIONISM: the establishment and development of the Jewish nation.

To someone outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, this term probably appears to be the least apt. Within the Church, though, an Acts 4 society is often called Zion, and so it would be tempting to call the system that creates such a society Zionism. However, like "communism," this word already has a long-established use and trying to co-opt it for something else would create more confusion than it could solve.

From a Latter-day Saint tradition, talking of "building Zion" describes the creation of an Acts 4 society, but from an economic perspective the available terms that approximate having "everything in common" all have major flaws.

What I Want to Do

We visited my parents for Thanksgiving last week. On my dad's whiteboard he had written "IKIGAI" and underneath it was "the reason you get up in the morning." I spent a long time trying to figure out what the acronym meant. The best I could come up with was "I Know I Got An..." but I didn't know what the end would be. I asked my dad and he said, "You're overthinking this. It's a Japanese word: 'ikigai'" (Wikipedia, "Ikigai").I asked, "What does it mean?" He said, "It says it right there." So what I took to be some cryptic message was in fact as clear as could be.

Others call this idea a "massive transformative purpose." I get an e-mail newsletter from Peter Diamandis and he had something a couple weeks ago about finding others with similar passions (Wikipedia, "Peter Diamandis"). So what is it that I want to do? What is my ikigai?

In the fourth chapter of the Book of the Acts we read "And the whole gathering of believers was of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of his belongings were his own, but they had everything in common" (Wayment, p. 216). Other scripture tells us of other such societies, but scripture doesn't meet the modern historian's standard for sources, and they are quite reticent regarding how these societies came to be. What's more, modern economic theory tells us that such societies are not stable equilibria. People are motivated by self-interest, not altruism.

I want to understand what assumptions and motivations are necessary to create voluntary collectivist/communalist/communitarianist societies. That is my ikigai, my massive transformative purpose. That's why I became an economist and that's what I think about when I don't have to think about anything. I want to discover the economic principles that will allow such a society to exist, grow, and thrive.

Wayment, Thomas A. The New Testament: A Translation for Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City, Deseret Book: 2019.

An Introduction

As comedian James Acaster says, "All of you would kill for a fresh start in life." And so after more than 15 years of blogging quasi-anonymously, I am transitioning to this new blog where I will be non-anonymous, or "nonymous," if you will. (And you will.)

My name is Brandon Minster. I'm 43 years old (for a few more weeks). I have been married for nearly 21 years. We have four children, ages 19 to nine. I have a BS and an MA in economics. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I currently live in Jacksonville, Florida.

I will be blogging primarily about religious economics, with a fuller explanation coming tomorrow of what I mean by that. But there will also be a fair amount of miscellanea mixed in. Forewarned is forearmed.

The Dangers of Homeschooling

Our youngest kid, Screamapilar, spends days at a time in his pajamas. Often he will get dressed twice in a week: Mondays at 3:15 for his online science group sponsored by our library, and Wednesdays at 3:15 for the library's online art group. Some Wednesdays he can't immediately change back into pajamas because he has a Zoom call Primary Activity at 6:30. Those days are trying for him.

One of the unfortunate side effects of allowing him to dress every day like it's Saturday is that he's come to believe it actually IS Saturday on days when it is not. Or whatever day of the week he wants. A few weeks ago he woke up on a Thursday and declared it was Friday. We could not convince him otherwise. Since it was "Friday," he refused to do his Thursday school courses. I told him, "Mom finishes work at 1 on Thursdays and at 2 on Fridays, so when Mom walks in at 1:30, you'll know it's Thursday." But then my wife made some stops on her way home and didn't get here until after 2, which he declared proof that he was right all along. He said, "I know it's Friday because when I woke up I said to myself, 'Tomorrow is Saturday.'"

Today there was a minor disturbance in the dining room. Crazy Jane kicked open my door, carrying a hysterical Screamapilar. She dumped him on my bed and said, "He won't do school because he thinks it's Saturday." Now, just yesterday I had read a Twitter thread from a guy who advocated betting against his children. (I'd link to that but searching Twitter is a fool's errand. If you didn't note the tweet's URL at the moment you saw it, you'll never find it again.) Anyway, the guy's point was that he was using wagering to teach his daughter about knowledge and certainty. So I said to Screamapilar, "I will bet you that it's Thursday, and if I win you owe me a dollar, but--"

"I don't have a dollar!" he said.

"How much do you have?"

"Fourteen cents."

"Fine. If I win you owe me 14 cents, and if you win, I owe you $1,000."

"No, because then I won't have any money."

"So you acknowledge that you will lose this bet?"

"No."

"If you are correct and I am wrong, you should turn your specialized knowledge into money. You will be performing a service by educating me of the error of my ways."

"I don't even know if you have a thousand dollars."

"What, I've got to login to my banking app and show you the balance? Fine." I got my phone and showed him my current bank account balance. "So now you'll take the bet?"

"No."

"Listen, [Screamapilar], you need to do one of two things right now: either take my bet, or stop saying it's Saturday."

He burried his head in some pillows and made angry noises for a while. But when he came out from under the pillows, he stopped saying it was Saturday, and now he's doing school.