Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMICS (COOPERATION) = TIME

The opportunities in a market are limited by the requirement that we not impose costs by externality upon the investments of others causing the loss of capital in territorial, physical, institutional, cultural, normative, informational, familial, and genetic assets.

Markets allow us to create opportunity through proximity – decreasing opportunity costs of time, and thru informational, informal, and formal institutions, and physical infrastructure as a common good – each decreasing opportunity costs of time.These market opportunities are produced as a common good. We can then serve the common good by converting opportunity into exchanges, each of which creates more than it consumes by the service of the coincidence of wants. (time savings).

We create opportunities for temporal compression through the division of perception, cognition, knowledge, labor, and advocacy, and seize them through the identification of a coincidence of wants, thereby converting the potential for temporal compression into the existential compression of time. And it is through this temporal compression that we, collectively, in increasing scales, constantly reduce the cost of existence, and defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, and scarcity.

If you understand this you will understand all of human civilization, consists of time saving – and the reason we have achieved what no other creatures have achieved.

We must defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, distance, and scarcity, and we do so through cooperation, and we cooperate through the incremental suppression of the imposition of costs on one another upon life, body, kin, possessions, and interests, in the form of violence, theft, fraud, falsehood, conspiracy, rents and free-riding.

We accomplish this incremental suppression by the demand for a warranty of due diligence for our products(materials), services(actions), and information(speech) and the prosecution, restitution, punishment, ostracization, or execution, of those who circumvent that Warranty of Reciprocity by production, action, or speech.

This leaves us with no option but to participate in voluntary markets under which we limit our productions, actions, and speech to that which consists of productive, fully informed (truthful), warrantied, voluntary transfer, free of imposition of cost upon the life, kin, possessions, and interests of others by externality.

This explains why time is the principle asset from which all of human existence emerges through the continuous discounting of time costs through an ever expanding division of labor, with ever expanding suppressions of parasitism.