This week we read experts from The Seen the Unseen and the Unrealized by Bylund P.L. The chapters that we looked into were The Seen and The Unseen, chapter 5, and Taxation and Regulation, Chapter 7. In this essay, I will try to give an explanation of the contents of these two chapters as well as provide insight into how I perceived the information, as well as some disagreements I had with the overall themes.
Starting with chapter 5, The Seen and the Unseen, Bylund begins to discuss what the difference when it comes to the issues we see, the decisions we make, and then the repercussions for the decisions we did not or were not able to make. In this chapter, Bylund Gives us an example of a father and son duo, where the son ends up smashing a window and the father has to replace it, even though before it was broken he had planned to use the money that it would take on other things.
Bastiat tells the story of a shopkeeper whose son has happened to break a glass pane.[1] Furious, the shopkeeper notes that the window needs to be replaced. His no-good son has, through his careless actions, caused a loss that needs to be covered. The shopkeeper has lost value equal to what it will cost him to replace the window pane, an amount that he likely had intended to not pay the glazier. But now he has to(Bylund,86,2017)
Bylund then goes on to give explanations of what we can see from this story and what is happening that we can not see. His first analysis of this story deals with what can be seen, and he goes on to explain exactly what we could have seen if we were watching the interaction between the father and the window repairman. He goes on to explain how the father is displeased to be paying for something that was prior to his son's clumsiness not even on the list of things to be paid for. And then he pans over to explain how the window repair man is thankful to the son because now he is able to take home a profit. His next exert has to deal with what we can not see in the corporeal world. He goes into detail about all of the other components that might factor into this decision to fix a window. The main takeaway I gathered was that whenever you make a decision you have to think of the economics of what you might have given up, and in this instance, Bylund brings up how the father might have had to give up the opportunity to buy new shoes or something else that would benefit him more. When I read this chapter I was taken back to when I took microeconomics, it definitely was not my favorite class but one thing I did find interesting was the thought process of whenever you make a decision you are giving up something else and I thought that this was the point that Bylund was trying to reach with his examples.
Moving on to chapter seven, in my personal opinion it was a very tough and long read, but that might have more to do with the fact that I am more of a fantasy reader. Anyway, back to chapter seven it had a lot to do with the regulation of how our government taxes. A term that I thought was hilarious was when the author brought up toothless regulation, there was no a definition for this term but I still thoroughly enjoyed it.
In order to give a bit more of my thoughts on what was discussed in the chapters I want to start by saying that I am in no way an expert, but there were a few things that I thought could be better explained. One of them was chapter five I thought the story was interesting, and it was a big focus of the chapter it just somehow felt like it was an afterthought. I would have liked to see it done so that the story was brought to the forefront.
In conclusion, I found this week's articles to be a bit of a slow read, but there were several parts during them that really made me stop and think. It was quite interesting and while I know that I most likely was not able to get everything in this essay that might be needed in order to explain everything that went on in the two chapters that were discussed.
Works Cited
Bylund, P. L. (2016). The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized. Lexington Books.