It’s a perilous (and time consuming) odyssey one undertakes to publish a book as I am learning. I enter this arena because I wrote a book on economics. The latest result of the mental therapy instigated by my daughter to keep me from turning into a mental vegetable. The book is called Dominance Economic Principles and I’m including a preview here as well as a brief account of my current status chronicling this journey. First off here is the PREVIEW:

Reference:
EAN-13: 9781452802183.
ISBN: 1452802181

Preface 4
Chapter 1 Foundations of Dominance 7
Chapter 2 Value Systems 13
Chapter 3 Use and Misuse of Utility Functions 28
Chapter 4 The Road to Dominance 32
Chapter 5 Dominance at last 47
Chapter 6 Economic Markets 81
Chapter 7 More Market Examples 108
Chapter 8 Market Character 128
Chapter 9 Psychology and Money 139
Chapter 10 Final Thoughts 174
 
References 179
List of Figures 182
ALPHABETICAL INDEX 184

Some 30 years ago in a fit of either insight or insanity (my wife and I differ as to which) I stumbled upon the principle of dominance and I found that it forms a coherent framework for analyzing the world’s economy. I suppose formally you’d call this theory dominance economics. I call this theory dominance economics but not economic dominance (the choice of noun and verb is important) and like many useful ideas this one is essentially simple. Yet its ramifications and variations are almost endless. While I discovered this principle in an economic context the principle of dominance applies to most areas of life from personal to political. Indeed all of history can be considered as simply one giant laboratory that allows us to discover the various possibilities of dominance.

Traditional economic theory generally consists of the two main components of macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macroeconomics relies heavily on the concept of a “closed economic system” supplemented by general principles such as “comparative advantage” to explain external influences. Microeconomics tries to explain the gory details of an economic system. Unfortunately in this era of increasing globalization closed system analysis is simply inadequate while, at the same time, microeconomics is incomplete as the traditional microeconomic analysis clearly gives not just wrong but nonsensical results in some specific situations.

Correcting these deficiencies is what led me to discovering the principle of dominance. Mostly I apply the principle to uncoerced trades (i.e., trades entered into freely with no threats of violence involved) but the principle can easily be applied more generally to account for the effects of crime (organized or not – e.g., your money or your life), regionalism, cultural bias, fraud, and a host of other effects such as a “black market” or barter economy.

Once the principle is understood it is easily applied to understanding not just “closed system” economic effects but also to global economic effects such as national economic competition (e.g., why doesn’t comparative advantage always work?), the effects of global free trade, international corporate or institutional influences, and international banking effects to name just a few.

The principle provides a sound basis for understanding such diverse topics as Gresham’s law of money to the effects of free trade agreements such as NAFTA. However interesting as these topics are they are mostly beyond the scope of this book. Here I limit myself to just introducing and (hopefully) explaining the principle of dominance.

As an aside, one interesting and unexpected aspect of this investigation was that the dominance principle carried to its logical conclusion provides analytic support for many (but not all) of the tenets of the Austrian school of economics as basically laid out by Hayek and Von Mises (Human Action: A Treatise on Economics reference 10) and summarized at www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AustrianSchoolofEconomics.html. This appears true even though Austrian economists generally deny that their analysis can be expressed analytically (i.e., mathematically). This seems to be true because we both start with the assumption that “things” are valued subjectively. While it isn’t possible to actually solve the analytic expressions except by adopting the simplest assumptions they do provide some insight into market dynamics and provide a convenient way to express the situation.

Hopefully you’ll find this analysis useful. The principle of dominance has almost universal application to such diverse areas as investing, government policy, labor relations, religion, even war or terrorism.

In closing I’d like to thank my family, especially my wife, for tolerating my eccentric visions leading to the present book. Without them none of this would be possible!

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Tags: books, Economics

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