Thursday, July 13, 2017

Sailing To Oblivium: July 13, 2017

 Last evening, we watched Rebecca, one of my wife’s favorite films. It has one of the best performances by an off-screen character in movie history.

Life is like that. So many of the people who shape our lives and the future of our country we have never seen, or at least we no longer see them. On the other hand, we see far too much of the people who are currently shaping our futures. We would prefer most of them as off-screen characters, preferably in cartoons.

Back to shaping our future, there is an old economic theory we used to apply to urban economics. We called it ‘location quotient analysis.” In economic terms, location quotient is a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation. It can reveal what makes a particular region “unique” in comparison to the national average. Some used it to estimate potential as well.

What I think about when I drive through the Arkansas Delta is how some thinkers used to apply the location quotient principles to sociological factors, i.e. estimating human potential. It posited how likely a given area was to produce an Abraham Lincoln, an Albert Einstein, a Jonas Salk, a Mozart, or a Robert Johnson.

Of course, the probability of success for any given area depended on a myriad of complex and related characters. It always makes me think, though, as I drive through areas of our country that the modern world continues to neglect. I can’t help but wonder how many people like Harriet Tubman, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Clara Barton, Fredrick Douglass, or Jonas Salk we may squander through our neglect.

Oh well. Let's just build another aircraft carrier.

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have
freed a thousand more if only they knew
they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman



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