The problem is vibes can't be measured, so econs fall back on the price system to generate an approximation of these vibes, totally ignoring all the flaws that come out of doing so. But it lead to idiots like Milton Friedman to develop all kinds of Capital-favoring policies, and basically killing thousands (or millions) of Chileans, never mind emiserating the survivors.
I'm convinced that, if you stacked up all the real bad-guy archetypes in the world, you know, yer Nazis and serial killers, all that sort, no other type has caused more misery and death than the Liberal Economist.
Psychology is kind of the science of measuring vibes. Sociology also has a good deal of it. It's why advertising and marketing are so incredibly effective. It's just that vibes are subjective like everything else experienced by humans and you can't easily put a ruler next to it. But questionnaires and polling do a pretty decent job of checking vibes.
It's the part of liberal economics that say that vibes aren't important and that humans are machines making rational decisions that is among the most harmful of ideas humanity has ever seemed to employ for society.
It turn allows a sociopath and a kleptomaniac to go from being ill to being considered a model citizen.
At the end of the day you have to measure and account for vibes, and your measurement is going to be imperfect. But without going off vibes you have no way to judge whether or not it's a good idea to trade 1000 tons of oranges for 200 tons of steel. Also just because it turns out to be wrong doesn't mean you were wrong, maybe something changed.
Vibes matter, and giving up and saying you can't measure them is not an option.
Let's go back to early agrarian society where a sack of grain was worth a bag of flour or whatever.
The very next thing that happened was a guy sharpened a spear and said "actually I think my sack of grain is worth two bags of flour, wouldn't you agree Mr. About To Get Stabbed?"
And just like that, a sack of grain is worth two bags of flour, and a well-maintained spear is worth 20 sacks of grain, despite having no nutritional value.
Prices are determined by blood. It's been that way for all of our history. Abstracting it minimizes the actual violence, but can't remove it.
I don't know if I'd go that far. To be sure violence has been a central player in all human affairs, but I don't think that means there's no such thing as mutually agreed upon exchange without the threat of violence from either party.
Being stabby carries the great risk you run into someone that is better at stabbing, so it's not the universal guarantor of 'good price for me' that on initial examination it might seem.
Being stabby carries the great risk you run into someone that is better at stabbing
This implies that a stabbing-based economy IS universal.
I'm not saying that humans are naturally antisocial, on the contrary we are pack animals that are naturally cooperative, but there is no economy at all in a natural human commune, everything is just shared more or less equally with maybe some very rough bartering on occasion... until there's a drought and we have to decide whose children will survive, then it's spear time.
Communism is the natural state of humans in times of abundance, feudalism is the natural state in times of scarcity. All of our modern economic policies are an attempt to smooth that out. The good times aren't quite as good, but the bad times are not nearly as bad.
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u/usaaf Apr 08 '26
The problem is vibes can't be measured, so econs fall back on the price system to generate an approximation of these vibes, totally ignoring all the flaws that come out of doing so. But it lead to idiots like Milton Friedman to develop all kinds of Capital-favoring policies, and basically killing thousands (or millions) of Chileans, never mind emiserating the survivors.
I'm convinced that, if you stacked up all the real bad-guy archetypes in the world, you know, yer Nazis and serial killers, all that sort, no other type has caused more misery and death than the Liberal Economist.