Tag: economics

Classical Economic Theory Works So Beautifully if You Fail To Account For People Being People

Markets might sorta work if we were rational actors, but we’re not.  We just aren’t, the invisible hand of the market is guided by mass human irrationality which is why it keeps smearing shit all over the walls and putting tiny chefs hats on geese.  And like the thing is the system is so irrational that even if *you* are rational it forces you to act irrationally to survive within it.  

Like what we’ll pay for something or agree to be paid for shit has SO much more to do with prior experience, the lighting and a bunch of other bizarro factors than it does with laws of “supply and demand” and shit.

This is why behavioral economics is a crucially important field.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely covers this really well but his conclusions are really liberal (and wrong) but he lays out a bunch of studies that point out some interesting shit.

Okay so I’m not even particularly well read in terms of theory

But I’ve found that I’ve done more theory reading than most leftist women I know, like a lot of them are very well read and can talk deeply about feminist theory, but in terms of broad economic and political theory, they’ve usually read much less.

Why is this?

Why do we restrict ourselves to reading and writing about gender? Surely our class position must also affect our lives, and yet we have internalized the idea that we should leave that one to the men?  Why do we not write on the topic of organization like Malatesta or even Lenin (who was wrong and a dick, but he did write about how to create political organization)?  Why do we not write on the economic order of society like Marx?  Or the possible order of society like Kropotkin?

So I’m reading Capital

and money form is frickin’ weird.

Like when it was gold the labor it contained was clear, but like the labor in the modern weird abstract money form is… IDK, because like it’s not the printing, or the metal and like a penny contains more than 1 cent’s worth of copper… what does this distortion mean?  Also paper money clearly contains less value in materials than it is worth.

Is the worth of paper money derived in part from the collective labor of convincing everyone to keep believing in its value?

WHAT IS GOING ON?