One day, thousands of years ago, when the a chicken was traded for a handful of seashells the nebulous discipline of economics was born. And ever since that day, problems have existed. Surely the original owner of the chicken got an earful when he went home as his wife explained to him how freakin useless a bunch of seashells is. Likewise, the proud new owner of the chicken, while initially receiving praise for his acquisition, proceeded to get reamed by his wife who explained that those seashells were blessed by the Goddess Demeter and were to bring the family prosperity in the coming agricultural season. Money and problems have been intertwined concepts ever since that unfortunate exchange.The linear relationship suggested by The Notorious B.I.G. back in the 1990s was revolutionary for its time. Problems = a (Money), where a = a positive number indicating the relative impact of a change in money with a change in problems. The simplicity of this explanation of global socio-economic realities was unparallelled in explanatory prowess. For over a decade, most of us have accepted this paradigm as truth, but now that I have fallen well below the poverty line, it's totally clear that the relationship between money and problems is much more complex.
What Biggy neglected was his impoverished youth. The days when he had to brave the streets to sling rocks to earn just enough to fill that ginormous belly of his with nutrition. Clearly having no money at all comes with its own set of problems, and that to some extent, these problems will be solved with an increase in money. A threshold, then, must exist indicating when an increase in money rather than solving some of the problems associated with being broke creates an influx of problems associated with daily life. This relationship would look like a U shape. Problems = (Money - a)(Money - a) + b, where a=some positive number indicating the amount of money at which this threshold exists, and b=the fewest amount of problems possible.
Bottom line, if you don't have much money, you've likely got a ton of problems that would be solved with a slight increase in funds. Similarly, if you've got a ton of money, you've got a bunch of problems that would probably be alleviated by having not risen to that income level to begin with. With this new paradigm in mind, let us please start taxing the F out of people that make a ton of money. Please?
2 comments:
Brillian! Your new paradigm suggests that the solution to the equation problems=(money-a)(money-a)+b does not have a real solution. The equation's having any real solution would imply that it is (1) possible to have a negative amount of problems and (2) that these problems would occur at some point during which an individual was earning making some amount of money.
Dude, it's a parabola. I couldn't figure out how to "square" the term without writing it out.
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