Research Questions

If I had the time, I would study these questions:

• Why do liberal democracies tend to self-destruct? I admit that this somewhat begs the question. But there seems to be a growing wave of discontent, a failure of faith, in the free society and its democratic institutions, and it seems mostly to have emerged in the twentieth century. Why is this so?
• Is there a Latter-day Saint economics? Famed Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley supposedly argues for a form of socialism or communitarianism in his books. Is he right? What do the doctrines of Mormonism have to say about economic theory?
• Is there really a conflict between religion and science? For that matter, what is religion? What is science? Are the two irreconcilably opposed?
• Are democratic governments public goods? That is, are they “collective goods” that are subject to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action? Are democratic governments, therefore, doomed to failure as soon as a sufficient number of their citizens cease cooperating?
• What is the psychology of murder-suicide? What is the cause of such behavior? Is it even useful to speak of human behavior being “causal?” If we speak of human behavior as being causal, are we conceding that human behavior is also deterministic?
• Is “psychohistory” possible? Is it possible and useful to mathematically formalize human behavior on large scales sufficient to predict the future?