Category: Economics, Finance, and Political Economy

If you don’t understand operational economics, meaning opportunities, incentives and the equilibration of those opportunities as we act on them, then you are no different in your deficiencies from a late medieval rationalist ignorant of empiricism. Economics is counter-intuitive, in large part because it exposes the fallacies of ethical, moral, and ‘good’ pretenses and creates a measurable means testing ethical and moral thoughts, words, and actions. We are, and we act, as extensions of the physical universe, and we do so by exactly the same laws, and language just is a polite means of negotiating with others. The advantage intelligence, of memory, of the ability to cooperate, and of the ability to live for three weeks without food, is that we can use fairly long periods to plan short medium and long term means of expending small amounts of energy as individuals, and together as groups, to capture calories necessary to support that fairly expensive neurological system. We are simply a better means of capturing, converting, and concentrating energy in a universe of perpetual entropy, because our memories allow us to predict the future, and act to seize the opportunity or alter it and create it or seize the risk and alter ir. At some point humans must stop seeking discounts (cunning in the short term ) and produce returns ( productivity through invention). And we seem to covet a steady state, yet never wish to pay for the long investments that make the great leaps in wealth possible. Because they are only possible when an elite minority possesses both technological advantage AND an internal demand to create markets that produce returns, rather than predations that prevent them in exchange for current and near term signal and consumption.