Don't Blame the Butterfly

Instead or posting last night, I used up my computer time looking up the Butterfly Effect and some related topics. The math is incomprehensible to me, but I think I've got a better grasp of the general principle than I did before. First of all, it's not about a real butterfly, it's hypothetical like Schrodinger's Cat. It's not just one butterfly either, it's all the butterflies in the world, and birds too, flapping away like there's no tomorrow. Then there's the Jet Stream, the Coriolis Effect, and all the other stuff that affects the weather.

Old Dog's original question was about the economy, and I compared that to the weather, which is not  the same thing except that both of them are affected by a multitude of factors. As I thought about it later, I concluded that I shouldn't have said that the experts who predict the weather are only right half the time. Weather prediction is way more accurate today than it was when we were kids. The only part of it that has a 50% accuracy record is the long range forecasts, maybe a month or more, and that's probably due to way the Butterfly Effect starts out small and increases over time. It's like if the scope on my deer rifle is off an inch at 50 yards, it will be off by more than that at 100 yards, and even more than that at 200 yards. The angle between the line of sight and the bullet's trajectory keeps getting wider the farther out you go.

Getting back to the economy: Although people tend to blame the president for the economy, he doesn't really have all that much to do with it, that's the job of the Federal Reserve Board. When the economy is lagging, they pump more money into it and, if they think the economy is overheating, they pull some money out of it. Some of my ilk believe that we would be better of without a Federal Reserve Board and a national banking system, but I don't think so. Before they went to the present system, circa 1913, the economy used to go up and down like a yo-yo. Every few years there would be a "panic", which is what they used to call a recession. Banks would fold, with the depositors losing all their money, and unemployment would go through the roof. Of course we still have similar events today, but not as often and not as severe. The Great Depression was the exception that proved the rule. Some people still believe they did that on purpose, but it also might be attributed to their lack of experience. A crash of that magnitude had not occurred since the 1890s, which is why they created the Federal Reserve in the first place. While government action certainly can influence the economy, it is only one of many other factors that play into it. If we had no government at all, we would still have an economy, and it still would rise and fall like the ocean tides.

The reason I brought up that tobacco thing was to explain that rituals like that are not magic, they are just tools to help people understand and remember stuff. Some people probably never get it, they think that the ceremony itself somehow purifies them.