(Disclaimer: not intended as a complaint/disagreement with vinay_ys' comment, more of a rant about how I feel like how humanity as a whole could do a lot more t

(Disclaimer: not intended as a complaint/disagreement with vinay_ys' comment, more of a rant about how I feel like how humanity as a whole could do a lot more to escape from zero-sum game scenarios) > Markets are "efficient" at transferring money from "stupid" to "smart" people. Here "stupid" or "smart" is directly related to lower or higher in that information/power hierarchy. Tangent: while this clearly applies in this context, I generally get really frustrated by this narrow way of modeling markets and by extension the economy, TBH, because it leaves out basically everything that's relevant to solving the really hard problems. Specifically, it ignores that real-life scenarios are not only strict hierarchies but complex networks that feature a ton of intransitive asymmetries (think rock-paper-scissors). Like, Buffet and Gates allegedly know about this[0] so it's not exactly obscure, and when you actually ask people on how they deal with trivial examples of it it becomes obvious that it's everywhere and people somehow try to work with it all the time[1], but whenever I hear people discuss markets it seems to be ignored. I dunno, I hope actual economists are less naive than the armchair kind (to which I certainly belong). It kind of makes the misuse of the model feel like applying an algorithm that only works with DAGs to graphs full of cycles. It's not useless (just like how identifying DAGs is really important and useful), but when used to oversimplify complex scenarios it obscures the potential "good" cycles (virtuous ones) and "bad" ones (vicious cycles, deadlocks). [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-roll-dice-and-get-rock-paper-scissors-20230119/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-roll-dice-and-... [1] https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-be-doomed-to-failure https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-...