Philosophical discourse on axioms, economics, and pop‑culture references

suggests a single species, although the axiom only said population. The ants and the picnickers can compete for the lunch, but they cannot bargain for it. The bar in Star Wars is a great gag because it thumbs its nose at this home truth. We converge in taste for the hilarious. I will add the biological imperative as a separate axiom later, although much of that at least may be implicit in the first one of natural causality. We hate unnecessary axioms, from good Occamite principle, but we hate unsupported inference or question-begging worse. I spell out the axiom of mortality and reproduction because I know I’m heading towards Petty’s insight and next generation theory. Of course we design foundations to support what we want on top. It seems to me that my axioms mention nothing about rationality, whatever that might mean, except in the sense of assumed convergence of predictions to outcomes. And that assumption itself might not be critical. What seems critical that is the predictions should converge to a known function of outcomes. If they converge to something predictably overoptimistic or overpessimistic, we're still in business. Lacking even that, economic science is stillborn. We can’t predict chaos. That’s an example of the principle that axioms need not be strictly true. They must be true enough. We're still in business if God intervenes a little here and there. Much more than that, and the convergent prediction axiom runs into the problem of predicting the mind of God. The two convergence axioms, of tastes and predictions, are implicit in all microeconomics. “Micro”, as economists call it, is about supply meeting demand at price equilibrium. This insight was the main theme of the marginalist revolution. It’s exactly what can’t happen without convergent tastes and predictions. It’s exactly why the bar in Star Wars is a hoot. Ants find price equilibria in ant markets, and people in people markets. Ants and people find no meeting of the minds. Then if Chapter 3: Foundations 1/11/16 6 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_010977