Exchange Is Irrational

Also like an exchange based system is just releasing humans to spray their irrational concepts of value all over eachother. I mean I know I am an incredibly irrational actor. I buy prestige brand cosmetic items I KNOW don’t work any better and own SO many different eyeshadow palettes with essentially the same colors.

I also keep buying tide laundry detergent even though I know it’s not functionally any different but I *feel* like it works better and I would stop refusing to buy better glass tupperware because I saw a really good price for it once and am waiting for a price on a par with that to crop up again.

I would stop buying expensive clothes on sale in weird colors that go with nothing I own because I feel like I’m getting a bargain and pay someone to repaint my bedroom instead of refusing to admit I’ll never do it myself.

Like we’re irrational. Rationality is something we have to rationally consider and decide to do and is almost never an emergent phenomenon resulting from us just kinda… all making choices.

Also like exchange is us coming up with a terrible, disastrously bad system for distributing goods and services to where they need and attempting to compare the value of things not easily compared while ignoring all sorts of factors and UGH no exchange is terrible and we can come up with a better distribution system than that.

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.

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?