You know that Simpson's episode where Bart lines up a bunch of megaphones so that the amplified output of each one goes into the input of the next? Obviously in

You know that Simpson's episode where Bart lines up a bunch of megaphones so that the amplified output of each one goes into the input of the next? Obviously in the real world the sound would saturate. Exponential amplification would stop after one or two megaphones as a few tones would "win" and suppress the others. The joke is that in the cartoon world it keeps on going and turns into a sonic tidal wave and we all laugh at the idea of ten megaphones producing a sonic tidal wave. Yet when we design an economic system by the exact same principle, people wonder why we get ten shrieking megaphones instead of a magical tidal wave.