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My take is beyond economic activity to enable the biological survival of the species, our economics are historically built on gossip and political whimsy. I sus
by chmsky00 5y ago
My take is beyond economic activity to enable the biological survival of the species, our economics are historically built on gossip and political whimsy. I suspect there are many fewer rules needed than we’ve been lead to believe.
We like to believe it must be complicated because of course society is. But social laws are based on social network effects which are politically manipulated.
So in conclusion, it’s rhetorically a free market but in practical terms it’s gamed by social corruption as usual, requiring ever more Byzantine economic theory to capture the edge cases.
Infinitely big little numbers have allowed economists to iterate on the edge, but socially it’s belly button digging.
- m0zg 5y agoSociety itself is built on gossip and bullshit, if you think about it. Ability to gossip and make up bullshit is the main thing which enables large groups of people to work as a semi-coherent whole. All of the social constructs we participate in are little more than blind faith. Lawyers are basically priests, legalese is the prayer, and the laws are the Bible. Those who sin (go against the law) or reject the society entirely are severely punished. And so on and so forth. This is not a novel idea, there are books written about it. Which is to say that just because it's bullshit doesn't make it any less valid, yet bullshit is typically much harder to model as it lacks the internal logic that a non-bullshit system would have. It's full of contradictions and non-sequiturs. This could explain why economists (and especially Paul Krugman) are so consistently wrong about everything.