Opportunity cost
|
Opportunity cost
/ˌɒpəˈtjuːnɪti kɒst/ (n.)
The potential advantages of taking this path that one forgoes by taking that one.
The principle underlying the proposition that one can’t have one’s cake, and eat it.
The JC is fomenting a theory that somewhere the notion of the opportunity cost has been lost to modern discourse. The idea that you can be this or that, or neither, but taking any of these options and enjoying its fruits means forgoing the alternatives, and their fruits, is one that appears not to have occurred to those under the age of thirty.
Marriage isn’t what it used to be
This article is in grave danger of descending into a grumpy middle-aged tract, but starts with the news, in August 2021, that one in five weddings now involves a prenuptial agreement.
Now the JC has no axe to grind about marriage — by all means, get hitched or don’t; see if I care — but more to the concept of what marriage is meant to be, at the outset: a permanent merger of social and economic interests. It is a commitment. The combination of resources for the expected betterment of both.
Now it may be that, along life’s rocky road, things don’t work out, but if the aspiration to permanence is to mean anything, one must at least put one’s skin in the game. You get the upside by risking the downside. That you may be disproportionately wealthy, or poor, you should deal with in your due dilly — aka “courtship” in the old days — before making the decision to commit. Is this person a gold-digger? If your suspicion is “yes”, or “unproven, but not out of the question”, then don’t get married.
To look at it this way is the regard a prenuptial agreement as a desire to have one’s cake and eat it too. It is to refrain from putting skin in the game, wanting instead the benefits without accepting the costs;[1] to refrain from drilling the holes in your longboats to stop your men running away.[2] It makes your men more liable to run away. If the idea was that, having little alternative, they should stand and fight — and, god willing, prevail — then offering a cost-free alternative seems like asking for trouble.[3]
Analysts at the Vampire Squid
You want to learn how to jam your stent into anything that smells of money on a nine to five?[4] Come, now children. Would you read Faust, if you thought the good doctor would keep possession of his soul?
The enlightenment cancelling the enlightenment
Kicking away the ladder is one thing: proposing to erase all records of its ascension, quite another.[5]
The enlightenment has been a serial victim of erasure. The reductionist certainty that “all explanatory arrows point downward”; that there is a single unifying principle that governs the physical operation of the universe at all points, for all times; that all scientific disciplines are consistent and reduce, ultimately, to physics, is inferred quite without evidence — how could there be any? — and is transparently an inheritance from Judeo-Christian orthodoxy.
Likewise, the liberal pluralistic disposition — also a function of the enlightenment (though, curiously, incommensurate with the reductionism it accompanied) — a product of the towering intellects of the enlightenment: men like Hume, Smith, Mill, Bentham and Darwin — were necessary conditions for growth of continental philosophy, post modernism and the critical theories who would now write this stale colonial tradition from history.
See also
References
- ↑ Rather, in this regard, like appointing a process agent: okay; most metaphors don’t bear close examination.
- ↑ As, allegedly, did William the Conqueror upon making landfall at Pevensey. This knowledge has been with me since I was about five, and my authority for it is the Ladybird book about William the Conqueror, and as a result it might be entirely false. But it is a good metaphor.
- ↑ To the evident disappointment of those who commissioned the survey, it seems there is little evidence that a prenuptial agreement leads to more divorce.
- ↑ Group of junior bankers at Goldman Sachs claim “inhumane” work conditions: The Guardian, 18 March 2021.
- ↑ Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz, doomed climbers of the Eiger, might caution against kicking the ladder away, too. If things get sticky ahead, you might need it to get down.