Social calculus

This page may just represent physics envy, but I don't really care; when ideas seem expressible in some rigorous fashion, it seems worth making a note of this.

For now, the only ideas I've had are:

• power = responsibility + authority
  • ...that is, all (social/political) power is made up of some mixture of (rational) justification and (received) authority.
  • ...where "responsibility" is somewhat synonymous with "justification" and "accountability"

• Ideally, there would be equal portions of each: there should be no authority without responsibility and no responsibility without authority
  • authority - responsibility = despotism (someone has freedom to act without regard to consequence)
  • responsibility - authority = scapegoatism (someone takes the blame or pays the price, but was/is powerless to solve the problem for which they are being penalized)

This suggests that one could plot any individual's place in society on a two-dimensional axis, with one dimension being responsibility and the other being authority (if you can figure out how to quantify them). Plotting a large random sample of individuals on the same graph might display distinctive patterns for any given society.