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Consumers, in aggregate, are stupid and irrational. Their wants and desires and opinions can be shaped by the entities with the most resources to peddle their

Consumers, in aggregate, are stupid and irrational. Their wants and desires and opinions can be shaped by the entities with the most resources to peddle their influence, or the best, most believable lies. Economics can't really fix such a core design flaw in human nature, it has to be the other way around, IMHO.

ancap 9y ago
I don't agree that consumers are irrational. But I do find it interesting that your implied solution would be to empower someone or some group of people who similarly possess the same negative human trait, so they could then make overarching rules for everyone else. If nothing else you've only narrowed the target for the bad actors from billions of individuals down to a few.
nickik 9y ago
Consumers are stupid and irrational. Your solution is that the same people who you think are too stupid to look out for themselves in a market will form a state and magically do collective action to fix the very problem they were individually to stupid to solve. The problem is just, that for lots of reasons, we know that such collective action is incredibly hard. Collective action is hard in general, but if you take into account that the interest of different people are totally different it becomes close to impossible. This is well known and well researched. The only reason we can actually make collective action happen at level of modern states is because it is coercive. Voluntary collective action would never produce the Iraq war for example. Yes, humans make mistakes in markets. Everybody knows that, but there is no solution for this. Humans always make mistakes in every possible system that can exist, humans don't change. So the reason why we want a market system the waste majority of the time is because people are accountable for their own choices and have to deal with the consequences. In markets we call this profit and lost, this is the mechanism why markets in the face of the same human errors have continued to produce growth in the last 200 years. We need free human agency and allow people to make mistakes while perusing their lives goals and attempt to solve their problems in creative ways. That what we call individual freedom. This will generate prosperity. The idea that you can solve human irrationality with human institutions is a fallacy. Human irrationality is a fact, and the argument needs to be what system of relation produces the best outcome.

ancap 9y ago

I don't agree that consumers are irrational. But I do find it interesting that your implied solution would be to empower someone or some group of people who similarly possess the same negative human trait, so they could then make overarching rules for everyone else. If nothing else you've only narrowed the target for the bad actors from billions of individuals down to a few.

nickik 9y ago

Consumers are stupid and irrational. Your solution is that the same people who you think are too stupid to look out for themselves in a market will form a state and magically do collective action to fix the very problem they were individually to stupid to solve. The problem is just, that for lots of reasons, we know that such collective action is incredibly hard. Collective action is hard in general, but if you take into account that the interest of different people are totally different it becomes close to impossible. This is well known and well researched. The only reason we can actually make collective action happen at level of modern states is because it is coercive. Voluntary collective action would never produce the Iraq war for example. Yes, humans make mistakes in markets. Everybody knows that, but there is no solution for this. Humans always make mistakes in every possible system that can exist, humans don't change. So the reason why we want a market system the waste majority of the time is because people are accountable for their own choices and have to deal with the consequences. In markets we call this profit and lost, this is the mechanism why markets in the face of the same human errors have continued to produce growth in the last 200 years. We need free human agency and allow people to make mistakes while perusing their lives goals and attempt to solve their problems in creative ways. That what we call individual freedom. This will generate prosperity. The idea that you can solve human irrationality with human institutions is a fallacy. Human irrationality is a fact, and the argument needs to be what system of relation produces the best outcome.