if people were rational advertising would be useless

thanks contrapoints

> what's wrong with capitalism (part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJW4-cOZt8A

i don't have links on hand but over the years i've encountered a lot of articles from prominent economists asking questions like, "if the markets are doing so well then why are we all so miserable"

their training tells them that metrics like GDP reflect something like human welfare, but the reality is often that it measures our immiseration: rising food costs show up as profit but starvation doesn't factor at all, while crisis services that save lives look like a drag on wealth.

how can a market improve while poverty expands, unless the market doesn't measure welfare?

economics is classically a logistical science for examining how much of what needs to get where, or how much of what is being used by who, and how to make material choices based on this data.

but there's a religious aspect to it, about individual rationality and The Market as a form of indelible divinity, whose basis in research is rife with bias and contrived conclusions.

there's a lot of research on the Prisoners Dilemma and other econ games that shows what game theorists assume is "rational" isn't at all how humans behave. if markets reward rational action, then it inherently punishes people for their deviance. such a system cannot optimize for human welfare.

it doesn't have to be this way. we have the tools and the methods to do so much better. i believe we have the courage too ✊

classical econ treats price as a proxy for supply and demand, which it treats as unknowable. but they are knowable, and groups like amazon and kroger and walmart rely on that knowledge to stock stores and negotiate with suppliers. price then is strictly a form of rent for extracting surplus value. we could organize material logistics outside of price, just cut it out entirely, and kroger would still use largely the same methodology to plan its inventories.