We’ve had opposite extremes — capitalists & communists, Adam Smithians & Karl Marxists — completely miss the obvious. Humans are not rational, deterministic “utility functions” optimizing for individual or collective “good”.
Free markets’ invisible hand will correct? Sure, for tobacco and antidepressants, loneliness and mass shootings.
The central planning will correct? Sure, for Pravda sheets as toilet paper, alcoholism, mass-paranoia and the nomenklatura.
It’s like being a programmer and dismissing the bugs of your RISC instruction set run on an x86 platform. Too much abstraction, maybe? Not enough “real life experience”?
Not really. Take Guillaume Verdon AKA Beff Jezos… An undeniably smart quantum physicist enamored with the ideals of e/acc, who — very concretely — had to sell his flat and car, move back to his parents with a bunch of GPUs to end up publicly deanonymized by other humans… “because markets”?
We might excuse Hegel, Marx, Freud and Keynes failing in their attempts at socio-economic reductionism because they had no access to fMRIs, gene sequencing or evolutionary psychology. But Hayek, Gilder and now Silicon Valley “Tech Bros”?
The 8 billion wetware “consumers” don’t compute with Bayes in mind.
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