armchair economics - thinking about the stupid questions

Yes  I am lazy.

I am more interested in philosophising about economic issues than doing the graft e.g. fact checking

A hero of mine Tim Harford represnets what I am not - he says that the corrective to ideology is to regularly check to see if the predicitions you made on the basis of your position turned out to be true(See Good Judhgement Project). This is of course the scientific method where any hypothesis is only valuable if it can be proved wrong. Will shares on the FTSE 100 go down? Too general to be proved one way or the other.Will the FTSE 100 go down before the end of March? Can be confirmed or not.

So... leavig that empirical stuff to the Harfords of this world,  I am interested in asking the stupid questions.
for instance is social mobility such a good thing? Most peolpe proclaim it  as a goal for social democratic systems.But what about the peolpe whose mobility goes down? If social mobility is relative some people must go down for the people to rise upwardsly.Or Is there more room at the top now? How can that be? Maggie thatcher cleverly played this card with the selling off of the utilities n the 80's .We are now she proclaimed a 'sharholder democracy'. thirty years on and we see the rhetoric for what it was as inequality increases and the utilites are owned by entities - socvereign wealth funds, private equity - who have no interest in democracy or even value for money for the consumer.

Another question that bothers me... is it good for a country to have abundant natural resources? Why would it not be? Look at the counties who have the largest deposits of oil - outside of the USA. Saudi Arabia,Iraq,Iran,Venezuela,Nigeria. Would you wnat to live in any of these countries. I don't know what the causal relationship between oil and political instability and corruption but you can see why the term 'the oil curse' was coined.

Any stupid question of your own - let me know.